"While some entrepreneurs discover their business plans are unintentionally full of excrement, Tom Szaky's was designed around it; worm dung, in fact. Inspired by his friends' success using red wiggler worms to process compost and feeding the resulting dung to plants, Szaky felt there could be a business in commercially producing and distributing a product he would call "Worm Poop." Emboldened by taking fifth place in the Princeton Business Plan Contest, he quit Princeton after two years to form TerraCycle and devote himself to delivering Worm Poop to households everywhere.

The Smell of Success
With 20,000 US dollars—the sum of all of Szaky's bank accounts and credit cards—he purchased a processing machine and began shoveling Princeton University's food waste into it to feed an ever-growing colony of worms. A worm can consume twice its body weight each day, so Szaky was soon up to his knees in product. Committed to a fully sustainable offering, he packaged his prized Worm Poop in paper bags and took it to gardening stores inviting them to stock it. The polite response was that the product looked good, but the aroma was not consumer compatible."