YouSaid · the spoken record

Nikhil Arora

lines on the record: 114
first: 2021-11-08
most recent: 2021-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Guy, we presented to Costco's lawn and garden department seven years in a row and got turned down every single year. They've just announced they're launching us this coming spring, spring 2022. Seven years later, same exact merchant as well. And then Walmart presented for four or so years. And then within two years We are the fastest growing garden brand in their entire department. That took four years to even get in the door. Nickel, you're spot on, too, man. We just not given up and then staying long enough to wear luck catches up to you.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My grandpa was very close to. He told me all the time, this is the harder you work, the luckier you get. So, you know, every one of those moments you can look at, you know, I guess it was lucky that one out of 10 grew, but I'm glad we said let's not just plan one bucket, let's take the time and collect enough for 10 buckets. And I do believe it's both. But I think half of it, so much of it is staying in the game, staying in the arena for opportunities to present themselves and then being prepared to walk through them.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about this journey and the fact that it really began with a professor saying, hey, grow mushrooms on coffee grounds, and then here you are, twelve years plus later, you know, with a business, I think that's doing. In the tens of millions of dollars in revenue a year, how much of that do you guys attribute to luck and how much do you attribute to how hard you worked?”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's an eight year old or a 68 year old can both enjoy the brand and maybe have a smile on their faces for different reasons. But how do we be a spark of curiosity for a new generation? We're not telling people like grow all your own food. We don't want to solve, come here and say we're going to solve all the world's food shortages. We just want to be that spark of curiosity. And I think in so many ways, like that was just how we started this company. It was just we were curious, but you kind of distill that all down. And we do this sometimes just as a team. I don't know that the words that come out of it are just joy and connection.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's about $20 billion. And by the way, Scott's miracle grobe being the category captain. They're about a $12 billion market cap company. So you've got a lot, a lot, a lot. It's a big market, a lot of, America's number one hobby is gardening. It's traditionally been to the older generation, the average gardener today is 59 years old. Our average gardener is 29 years old. So you do have this pretty massive gap from what the average gardener is in America to back to the Rutzo's average gardener.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, that was a game changer, right? When you get into Home Depot. And today, I mean, you sell seeds and you sell grow kits, and you still have the water gardens and raised beds and planters and window supplanters. I have to imagine this is a growing market. From what I gather, this is like a How big is the home, the edible gardening market?”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Home Depot, the gardeners are, yeah, that's where they're going. Why are we spending all this energy and time? Trying to find them elsewhere. Let's go fish in where the fish are. So the difference is the Home Depot has 2,000 stores unlike Whole Foods has maybe 400 stores. So, I mean, this is an order of magnitude also of scale.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, we were going from Petco. Yeah, we were selling into Petco. We were selling into Whole Foods. We were selling into Nordstrom, you know, online. We were selling to local grocery stores through distributors, UNFI Keyhe. Like we just had, and it's a small team. I think once we just realized, like, Gardeners are shopping.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that ability to focus, and this is something actually Serge Annie I've said to us, he said the number one lesson I learned from Steve Jobs was focus. And his definition, Steve's definition was focus is the ability to say no to the things you really want to do. And I feel like that just singular focus on like our consumer as a gardener, they're going into home centers on the weekend to pick up their gardening stuff. That's where we need to be. There's probably two years guy in our business that we just completely exploded from doing a lot less things.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, being able to focus just on the lawn and garden piece of our business was like so energizing. And I think we ourselves, we're so focused on growing within Whole Foods that we it almost crippled our ability to take a step back and say, where are our consumers actually shopping? We realized, wow, our consumer gardeners, they're going to the Home Depot. They're going to Lowe's. They're going to Walmart. They're going to Target. They're not necessarily”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had great revenue growth, really great revenue growth, but we were just not able to be profitable on the cereal and snack side at the moment. And there was no clear path unless we went and purchased our own equipment and fully vertically integrated, which would have been significant risk to the business. And on the other side, the lawn and garden business was already profitable. And what's interesting is I think”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my question is, when did you decide that you were a gardening company? Because you started as a mushroom guys, and then the fish tank guys and the cereal guys, when did it become clear that actually you are a gardening company? Because that's how you describe yourself now. So when did that kind of all gel?”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And on top of that, we were working with schools nonstop with all our kids. So many teachers, our consumers. So it was natural for us to. Basically so. Well, let's go out to the biggest, most impactful school district in the entire country. So we went out to New York Public School District and said, hey, as we launch and expand immediately nationwide with Whole Foods Market, let's This is in the communities that needed the most through purchase orders that they would place. And we did that. We launched a New York Public Schools, which was 2,000 schools that started serving an organic and biodynamic cereal. It had one-fifth of the sugar with three ingredients.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what we started realizing guy with this vision of ultimately what we were doing was trying to reconnect families and kids to food and where it comes from. It was all a continuum, whether you're from seed and the farmer and growing it yourself, or if you're going to go and buy a prepackaged item that someone grew and cooked and packaged for you, you should still know where it's coming from. And I think being and selling at Whole Foods as well. Starting to kind of envision that coming life through both a ready to grow line with our kits and a ready-to-eat line with cereal and we launch snacks as well. So in our cereal, actually, it was the first identity preserve like 100% stone ground, biodynamic cereal. Actually put the ingredients, first brand put the ingredients on the front of the box. And so we're like, whether you're growing yourself or if you're going to buy food from us, you're going to know exactly kind of where it's coming from. And yeah”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beyond Whole Foods. We're selling in the home department. We're selling in grocery, and now we're selling in the pet department also at this time, Amazon was really starting to explode. So we put this item on Amazon and it became the number one selling aquarium and stayed that way for quite some time.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the water garden, that was a really big boost for the company. And I think it first took us from just being the mushroom guys to, hey, there's something really interesting in this company called Back to the Roots.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I look back and maybe the rational thing would be like, hey, not worth the risk. And I keep on going back to just this partnership and the two of us doing it together kind of got us through all these moments. When we finally had our own apartments and were getting some salary, you know, we still carpool in and out every day. You pick me up at 6 a.m. dropped me off at 8 p.m., every day kind of reset in the morning and night and just refreshing each other each other's energies and kind of worked our way through it.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, I'll say I love that you called to the Aqua Farm. We actually got sued for calling to the Aqua Farm, and we had to go and beg for forgiveness. And they said, okay, fine, we won't make you. Discard all your packaging inventory, just sell it out, but you need to change your name to the water garden. So during that crazy messiness, we also got the season desist letter at the same time.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, all right, eventually you get this aquafarm back, or like you get it, you get it in working order. How long did that take you before you were able to say, okay, we got this under control? Was it like weeks, months?”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I would say the economics of it changed, we had to pump. Significantly more expensive than we thought, and the price point then became off. And we then didn't have a proposition that the company could actually make money sustainably. So we almost went out of business for the entire order, both Kickstarter led to us still on the nationwide launch. Was a disaster. We had high return rates. So, yeah, that was a really, that was a tough time During that time in isolation really improve the product and launched a 2.0 version.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We caught most of them on the Kickstarter. That was the blessing of the Kickstarter. I think we caught that with those early users, the first five, six thousand people that got it and we realized that. And so we had to send them all replacements and do the whole. But luckily, we were able to before the whole foods and the retail orders went out, make some changes to it last minute. But if that pump had, for instance, taken two months to die and not four weeks, and so we had already produced this stuff for the retailers, oof.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we ended up, I think, looking back. I wish we had just been transparent and confident that, hey, we're not going to hit that timeline. Like, please support us through this and be patient. But we rushed it and we put out a product, our first one, that we didn't test it enough. And our first pump was overheating in the unit because of the design constraints. And, you know, almost was like 80% of the pumps Alex died within the first 30 days of the units going out on Kickstarter. And it was literally put us out of business almost.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went from, I mean, the definition of zero to 100. We went from one prototype that we did a video on to 40,000 unit order and highly discourage or do not recommend this to any entrepreneur to just go from a prototype to 40,000.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things, guy. One, just unwear the manufacturer. We actually manufacture them all in the US for a brand who we really try to focus on US manufacturing. And a bulk of that, probably half of that went to the tooling, which was really expensive and the design cost and engineering costs. So yeah, most of that was there. And then for initial inventory costs. But I think the risk Almost less about the initial forecast because we had pre orders, thousands of them from our consumers through Kickstarter. We had POs from retailers. So we knew what the demand was, but one of our biggest mistakes we made and almost put us out of business was we started feeling a lot of pressure to deliver this on a timeline that we Was too aggressive and we didn't know that it was too aggressive when we put it out there in Kickstarter”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that was the beauty of Kickstarter where it was both to raise funds but to see if anybody would buy this thing. And then for if you really made a splash, retailers would eventually, it would get sent to a retailer. Petco and Whole Foods became the launch partners”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bigger than mushrooms, it's something else that people wanted to reconnect with food. And I think that was that month was our proof point.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's something here, and do people actually want this thing? And we put a hundred thousand dollar goal up for 30 days and we ended up hitting $250,000 of pre-orders on Kickstarter and another 250K on our website in the following 30 days after close. We had almost half a million dollars of pre-orders off of like a three-minute video and a concept. And that's when I think we realized this back to the roots”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I will say this one, though, we learned a lesson here with our mushroom kit. We were anxious doing this all. We were anxious because our brand, who we were, identity, we'd walk into Whole Foods. And it was like, oh, it's the mushroom guys. That's who we were. And now all of a sudden we're experimenting with fish poop and, you know, like microgreens. And so we actually ended up on this product. We put it on Kickstarter. And it was partly to raise funds for it. But really, I think it was for the two of us to try to convince ourselves.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the side of our mushroom kit facility had a bunch of piping and buckets and started kind of building our own and tinkering and had actually built out a really rough, again, like buckets kind of prototype of like we had beta fish and had some the waste from that was enough to grow herbs and microgreens that you could harvest up top and we were talking to all the aquaponics experts. We actually funny story guy, we ended up reading the Steve Jobs biography and we're super inspired by their design principles and cold email Johnny Ive from Apple on a Sunday afternoon and he actually got back to us in like five minutes and we were able to spend a handful of sessions with him kind of mentoring us and showing him prototypes and design things. So it was amazing experience designing this thing.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vegetables and the plants in turn were cleaning the water and taking out the nitrogen from it. So it was this really cool closed loop system where the fish feed the plants, plants, clean the water. And this is where our own curiosity about just growing food and growing things different ways was like had been peaked now and we were obviously doing with a mushroom farm, but we were like, what else people are growing? And we started asking ourselves like, is there a way to do what we did for mushroom farming for aquaponics and shrink down a big mushroom farm down to this tabletop classroom experience”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. It was called Growing Powers. This huge city block sized aquaponic system, a guy named Will Allen. He won the MacArthur Award for this. He was raising tilapia. So Aquaponics is raising fish and plants. All the fish waste, the fertilizing, the”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if you're in every Whole Foods in America selling mushroom kits and you're doing really well, the math suggests that you could probably do like five, maybe seven million in revenue maximum a year. So you could do a significant small business for sure, but that's only if you did it in Whole Foods, and you'd have to kill it.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not trying to be. That's so harsh, and I love it. You know what? The beauty about the United States is if you execute on one thing extremely well, there is a pretty large market for it. I mean, just Whole Foods alone was five hundred stores that we could take this product into. And running the numbers on it, you could do a couple million dollars.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's kind of crazy because, yeah, he was a competitor to us and he could have easily said, nope, I'll wait till you guys, you know, go out of business because you're not going to be able to scale it the way I can. And instead, David. Basically, looked at us and said, You guys have so much energy, and you're getting people growing mushrooms. That's a good thing for me. So let me take it off your plates and you guys focus on what clearly you guys are really good at, which is getting the word about out into the world about mushrooms. And that's like the partnership right there.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You essentially get out of the farming business at the sort of at the end of 2012, 2013, you start to transition out of the farming business because really this company can grow the mushrooms, sell you the ground, whatever's left.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were doing in our warehouse in Oakland collecting the substrate, the coffee grounds, mixing of the spawn, growing the kits, packaging them. We fast forward ended up now Those from him as a supplier to us. So they're the ones incubating all of that. Here's this huge warehouse, 10,000 square feet. We had at that point, what, 35 people, Alex, we knew what that meant was that the people, the space, everything we're doing. All of that would go away.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brilliant him and Chris Bailey, the two guys who run that just brilliant people and best in class at growing fresh mushrooms. You know, it would take us decades to get to the experience these guys had. And we just hit it off also just in a relationship standpoint. And you fast forward a few weeks and they grew some and we tested them out. And it was night and day quality. Like, I mean, yields, consistency, everything that goes around making a healthy mushroom substrate and spawn. It was just night and day. That was probably the biggest defining moment, I think, in our journey earlier for Alex and I both when you realize, one, you don't have to do everything. It's okay not to be the best at everything. And it's okay to let some things go. And that was the hardest thing in life because that was our identity.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it became so clear that with fresh mushrooms, we could have a local farm, sell locally, get our mushrooms into people's homes locally, or we had this other avenue in which these mushroom kits could be shipped nationwide. And it just was like, let's do the ladder. Let's do that. And let's put all the energy on that.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, at that moment, I think we were going to realize they're both pretty different things we were selling. One was more this branded experience that acquired education and teaching people like what is a mushroom kid, what's a grow kit? What is this? I can grow my own food at home. There's a lot of education focused versus selling fresh mushrooms, which was a kind of a different thing and scaling up that production. So I think we started realizing there's we may have to choose one of these things.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a big decision because I remember you were basically MIA. We had two phone calls allowed for the 45 days and it was like, Of a once in a lifetime thing, like who knows where it goes”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a handsome, he's a smart, charming entrepreneur doing cool stuff. And they thought he'd be a great contestant and just who he is.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they kill him. Yours. It was a friend of one of the casting directors for the Bachelorette, I think, had gotten a mushroom kit from Alex and heard about the brand through a demo at an LA Whole Foods. A lot of random things came together where they were like, oh, you should just talk to Alex. And somehow Alex got connected to the Bachelorette casting director. They loved Alex and thought he'd be a great fit for it.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That time to really kind of make us focus in on the design and the user experience. We came back with what is a version of what it is today and started selling that on Whole Foods. And we were for a while selling both of them, mushrooms and mushroom kits.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had gotten our mushroom kits from farmers' markets, then we got them into Whole Foods. And Randy was a mentor of ours and actually remember the first time we took this big basketball size bag that we were growing these mushrooms and we had slapped a sticker on it from FedEx. We thought it looked beautiful. We were in a meeting with Randy talking about fresh mushrooms. And at the end of the meeting, we pull out this mushroom kit with all the confidence in the world as if it was the next iPhone, right? And we put it on the table with like one more thing, Randy. What about this mushroom kid? And he looks at this bag and he literally falls out of his chair. He's like, that's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. No one's going to buy that in my store. And he just, you know, laughed at this thing. But he was also, you know, by that point, a friend, a mentor, and it wasn't a no. He was like, just go back and figure this thing out. It's cool, but this thing looks hideous. No one's going to put this on their windowsill. And it was actually the push that we needed.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, this is 2011, you've got these sort of three, let's say, legs of the stool, soil, fresh mushrooms, mushroom kits. Was it just, were you just so busy that two of you and your small staff that you couldn't really figure out? Where this was going to go, or at this point, did the two of you start to have conversations saying, hey, you know, maybe we should kind of assess what we want to do here and where we should focus. Or was it just like, let's just keep doing this way?”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. But we were also doing a lot of farmers' markets at that time, too. So that was a lot of Alex and I every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 10 hours for years. That's all we did. And that's the mushroom kit. So we sold our, we started creating mushroom kits. We were first selling them at farmers' markets and getting a great feedback.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not even in our radar, we were all focused on grants, actually. That was all our energy because we knew that we had something that we could see it and feel from customers that they're like, this is so cool. You're taking waste. You're selling the waste. You're selling fresh mushrooms that come from waste. So we felt that always. And that's why we stayed in it.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We still knew we were figuring all this thing out. Like there was a lot of moving parts. I mean, we were doing everything ourselves and we were still making a lot of mistakes. I mean, we would throw away stuff like nobody would invest in a business like that.”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I wonder in that first, I mean, it would take a while. We'll get to this later, but it would take a while for you guys to actually go out and raise money. But why didn't you do that early on? Why didn't you go out and look for investors?”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“11 grand, yeah. And he ended up building his beautiful automated thing custom built for us at his machine shop. And I remember the vividly the first time that we got this machine, put coffee grounds in there. Literally, it took 90 minutes. We hit one button and 60 seconds later. He had perfectly dried coffee grounds at the right moisture consistency. game changing moment never forget that clicking that button”
2021-11-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT