Alejandro Vélez has never told his full story before. In this episode, he goes back to the beginning: growing up in Medellín, Colombia during the Pablo Escobar years, moving to a town of 5,500 people in Michigan at age 10 without speaking English, and getting diagnosed with cancer at 15.
You'll hear how a small Midwest community rallied around a teenager going through chemo, how his mom rebuilt a life from $5,000 and a white van, and how a random question in a Berkeley business ethics class connected him with Nikhil, the person who'd become his co-founder and, in his words, his business soulmate.
This is Part 1 of 2. Part 2 drops soon. 🌱
🔗 CONNECT WITH US:
Back to the Roots: https://backtotheroots.com
Alejandro's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandrovelezramirez
Nikhil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aroranikhil
[00:00:00] Alejandro Vélez: Hey everyone. My name is Alejandro Vélez, co-founder and co-CEO of Back to the Roots, and in this episode, I got the chance to sit down and really dig into my story for the very first time. This is part one of two, and we're going way back from growing up in Medellín during the Pablo Escobar years to landing in a tiny town in Michigan when I was 10 years old without speaking a word of English, going through cancer at 15, and how all of it somehow led me to starting this company.
It's personal, it was fun to revisit, and I really hope it resonates with you. Let's get into it.
[00:00:38] Interviewer: Where did you grow up, and what was your childhood like?
[00:00:41] Alejandro Vélez: I grew up in, um, Medellín, Colombia till I was 10 years old, and then when I was 10, I ended up moving to a tiny little town called Paw Paw, Michigan. When I first got to the States, it was a, a big change, as you can imagine.
I didn't speak a word of English. I was Alejandro, got here, I was all of a sudden my name was Alex. And I was going into fifth grade, Mrs. Schumann's class, and it was a town of about 5,500 people, so it was a tiny little town in the Midwest. And I don't know if you've been to the Midwest, but it is, or Michigan, but it is just absolutely beautiful and the warmth and, uh, just the culture, the Midwest culture just really, uh, embraces you. So that's exactly what I did. I learned English just by being in school.
[00:01:27] Interviewer: When you think about your family's story, what comes to mind first?
[00:01:31] Alejandro Vélez: When I think of stories of my family, I mean, I immediately go to first my mom. I mean, she's unbreakable. She was, when in her early 20s, saw her brother in front of her face get murdered, immigrates with absolutely nothing to the United States, then sees her first son go through cancer, then get diagnosed through cancer again, that's me, and then [00:02:00] my late brother pass, and through that she's just been an absolutely just rock and the epitome of perseverance.
And then a second person that comes through my mind when I think of family and, you know, what inspires me about them is my Uncle Pat. Uh, he was a US Marine and fought and died in Vietnam, and I've heard this story since I moved to the States. That's one of the first things I learned when I started speaking English, was my stepdad talked about his brother Pat.
And he fought and died saving another soldier. And I mean, talk about just the ultimate sacrifice and bravery. When a, a 9, 10-year-old hears that, that story sticks forever.
[00:02:46] Interviewer: How did being diagnosed with cancer at such a young age shape your life?
[00:02:51] Alejandro Vélez: I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 15 years old, and at the time I didn't know what I was doing.
I was with a friend; his name's Derek. I was working out, and he says, "Hey, you've got a lump on your, uh, armpit." Thought it was just some fat. Go to the doctor and realized that it's cancer. Within two weeks, I started chemotherapy. If it wasn't for the Midwest, if it wasn't for that small town vibe, I don't know how I would've been able to put up with the four rounds of chemo and just six months of going through just brutal, just drugs that impacted my body.
And I just feel like the people around me were so warm. I had prayer chains created. Every single person in the school signed it and sent it to me to the hospital and brought it to me, uh, with every one of the kids in school signing and wishing me well. The basketball team for our high school actually shaved their head, and at the time it was actually, we couldn't shave our heads.
That was like one of the things that, I don't even know why that was a rule, but you couldn't shave your heads in high school at Paw Paw High School. But as soon as I went through chemo and started losing my hair and had to shave my hair, they changed that. They put a, a, a pause on that, and the basketball team w- said, "We're all gonna do it for you."
And that's just a couple examples of just how amazing community is to be able to persevere and do really hard things.
[00:04:20] Interviewer: What impact has your mom had on the person you've become?
[00:04:23] Alejandro Vélez: My mom is somebody who will never let you feel sorry for her. She is unbreakable. And it's not because she doesn't show emotion.
She does and gets scared and fearful, uh, and cries. I've seen her cry through tough times, but she just keeps showing up every single day. From when we first moved here, we got here with 5,000 bucks in our pocket. We bought a white van, and the next day she was at work. And I've always watched her work. I look at my co-founder, actually, Nikhil, whose family also immigrated, very different country, comes from India.
I come from Colombia, but both actually ended up in the Midwest. He was in Minneapolis. I was in Paw Paw, Michigan. But it's that idea of seeing our parents work since the moment they get here and also doing it from a place of just appreciation. This freedom that this country's given us just feels different once you're here, and the idea that you can ride your bike to school and not be fearful.
So I think of the idea that you can kind of have two things at once. My mom was working harder than I had ever seen her work, and at the same time happier because of some of the basic, what I believe now should be the basic rights for a human, which is safety and love around you. So, uh, those are some of the things I've learned.
I think people who move to the country can probably relate to this, and that is that it is so different than you could have ever imagined in so many different ways. I mean, you're leaving your family, your culture, your food. So you get here, and I think on one side you're sad and nervous, and you're learning so many things at once.
I talk from my... you know, uh, myself and seeing my mom, uh, we were both- you know, she spoke a little bit of English, but not much. And, you know, I didn't speak anything else. My, my brother didn't speak any English himself. So we're going through a lot of learning, and at the same time, you're getting absorbed into this beautiful culture that is America, and it's the freedom that this country gives you.
So I think both things are true when you come to America: that it's the hardest thing you've ever done in your life, and at the same time, it's the most beautiful thing you could do, and the opportunities that are open to you once you're here are incredible.
[00:07:00] Interviewer: What was it like moving from Colombia to the United States at such a young age?
[00:07:05] Alejandro Vélez: When I first got here from Medellín, Colombia, I didn't know what to expect. You know, I was Alejandro in Colombia. I became Alex. I get to school first day, and it was one of those things where also I'm, I'm, I've always liked to play sports, so I feel like music and sports are this universal language. So, you know, I get to school, I start somehow without communicating in words, it was just start somehow, you know, soccer, tennis come up, and we start, I think, just getting to know some of the kids, and it was one of those things where just the culture of the Midwest really has, to me, been so impactful, and to my mom.
I mean, she's worked really hard, but she's done it from a place of love and just, like, appreciation. So I think we got very lucky and, and maybe I can only... I'm an N of 1. I can only speak to my experience being in the Midwest, but that was, like, a core. Now, the other part of me is I, you know, growing up as-- with a stepdad, with the reason I'm here, he's from Detroit, Michigan, and he was a US Marine.
He lived in Colombia for a couple years with us and had to-- we had to move, and, you know, I think his mentality, uh, that very disciplined approach to the military, I think also was another kind of part of me understanding American culture. I mean, I learned about American culture through school and through my stepdad, Bill, and his stories, so, and which are very much shaped in his background, and he had his own things he was dealing with, losing his brother when he was 18.
So he joined the military; he joined the Marines when he found out Uncle Pat got killed. Uh, he enlisted the next day. So it was one of those things where I've just-- I think through in school, I learned about how kids were with me when I came here, somebody who didn't speak their language, looked different, but maybe through universal language of sports, you know, it was like, "Oh, this kid's all right."
So then, you know, and then within a few months, I started learning English. I got lucky, you know. I was 10 years old, so I learned it quickly. And then on the other side at home, through my dad and talking about how important it was to love your country, how important it was to defend your country, and all the sacrifices that come from having this freedom.
[00:09:30] Interviewer: Can you describe your childhood in Medellín before your family moved to the United States?
[00:09:33] Alejandro Vélez: Keep in mind, Medellín at the time was a very different city than it is now. It's thriving today. At the time, Pablo Escobar was the kingpin and dominated so much of this city. It's a relatively small city, about a million people, but we had 6,000 murders per capita per year, which is the largest murders at the time of any city in the world.
So it was a very really tough time to be in Medellín. I was a few seconds away from a bomb blowing my dad and my brother up. I was kidnapped just because a terrorist group wanted to take a couple hundred people hostage and use us as shields, my grandparents and I were. And it sounds crazy even today. At the time, it was happening quite a bit to a lot of not only folks from, not only Paisas, which is where I'm from, but also all folks around Colombia.
So we were always in this... I mean, we had to open up the windows before we went to school because bombs were going off so often, and you had to open them so the-- so it'd be easier for them to break. I mean, these are the little things that, you know, we-- as we went to school, you-- I saw more than three times as a kid, a six, seven-year-old, people on the street dead.
So this is the reality. This is not just me. This is the reality of Medellín. And then at the same time, on the other side of that reality was my father, my Colombian father, who just instilled this obsession f- uh, around curiosity, and then my mom for discipline. So I felt like with those two things, curiosity, which made me wanna read a lot, I loved to use, you know, loved science, math, which I ended up, you know, loving that too, and then my mom, discipline.
If you're gonna do something, do it well and focus on it. So that kind of brought that to then where tennis became a big piece, tennis and soccer. Tennis became my thing, and I just put my head down and worked extremely hard at tennis, and that led me all the way to Berkeley, where I walked on the tennis team there.
I went to Berkeley, and I studied business with a minor in education, and when I got to Berkeley, I had one dream and one dream only, and that was to be a professional tennis player. I get to Berkeley, top 20 tennis school in Division I in the country, and I realized I'm not as talented, uh, as I thought, and, uh, you can only work so hard.
And the beauty about Berkeley is that you can still have that competitive nature that a sport gives you in the classroom. So I bottled all that energy around competition, which I love, and the idea that you, in tennis especially, if you love tennis, like you get to win or lose on you. You can't blame anybody else like in soccer.
Aanother sport I really like, but in tennis, you just had absolute ownership over your results. You couldn't blame anything, anybody. So I took that energy and I put it into the classroom, and Berkeley is super competitive. I was so intimidated freshman year, and I just, the same thing, went to work, but this time it wasn't on a tennis court; it was in the library, and I was the kid that was in the library.
All my friends made fun of me. I was the guy that was in there nonstop. And, uh, at first, I was not doing very well in school. I ended up graduating summa cum laude, top of my class, and all not because I was the smartest. I just worked extremely hard, and I just put that discipline that maybe got instilled from my mom and that curiosity from my father, and it led to just a pretty, pretty awesome four years at Berkeley.
[00:13:05] Interviewer: Can you tell me the story of how you met your co-founder and started your business?
[00:13:10] Alejandro Vélez: So that's where the fun really, uh, begins. I was, uh, 19 years old. I had just done a summer analyst, uh, investment banking internship in New York. I was at Morgan Stanley in media telecom, and I loved finance, but I hated that culture.
Something about it didn't feel right, so I ended up still signing the offer. It was a big offer when you're 20. You're about to go. I had an apartment in the Lower East Side. I couldn't pass that up. That was the American dream, I thought. Getting here with nothing and making it to a big offer right out of college, a very competitive one.
And I couldn't sleep that night, and over the next few weeks, I end up in one of my lectures, a professor who's really impacted me, Professor Alan Ross, which was a class in our business school, Haas, called Business Ethics. And in that class, the professor brought up this fact that you could potentially grow mushrooms, organic mushrooms, off of coffee waste, but nobody had ever done it.
And only Nikhil and I didn't know Nikhil at the time, but we were the only two crazy random kids who went up and asked for more information. Said, "Hey, you know, this sounds pretty cool. You have any more information?" He's like, "I don't, but let me connect you to this other kid, Nikhil, who asked the same exact question.
You're the only two kids in the class that asked for that." So we connected, immediately hit it off. Like I mentioned earlier, different backgrounds, family from India, immigrated to the Midwest, Colombian, immigrated to Midwest, but just the most incredible human I've ever met in my life, and I just... He became, at that point, my business soulmate.
We've been together ever since. He's my better half, my co-founder, co-CEO, and I can't imagine sharing my just professional problem-solving part of my life without Nikhil. And we met, started researching this on YouTube, went to our library at Berkeley to, you know, look up a book that was written by Paul Stamets.
We cold emailed Paul Stamets, the author. We said, you know, "What do we have to lose?" We just said, "Hey, we read in your book that you could grow mushrooms on coffee waste." So he ends up sending us some mushroom seed to get started, and that was the start of Back to the Roots. So that's really, from that professor, Professor Ross, to connecting me to Nikhil, and then us starting the company, that was all while we were still at Berkeley, while I still had this offer to become an investment banker.
[00:15:43] Interviewer: What gave you the confidence to walk away from a secure career in finance?
[00:15:48] Alejandro Vélez: What made me decide to completely change gears and go from investment banking to mushroom farming and waste collecting wasn't any of that part. It was Nikhil. It was, if he's crazy enough to start something with me, I mean, he's like, "This is the smartest guy I've ever met, the most humble, hardworking, like, just awesome human."
If he wants to do something with me and, you know, start a company with me maybe, I'm like, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I gotta do it." So I called the bank, and I said, "Hey, I'm not gonna go." And I had friends try to do interventions on me. I got into my, my room, uh, my fraternity, and I had three buddies sitting there, and they're like, "Take a seat."
And they said, "You're crazy. You were really into finance, and you became pretty good at it. I ended up teaching a finance class my senior year at Haas. So I got into them. I'm telling you, when I get into something, I get into it. "And then here you are, now you're reading books about fungi. What is wrong with you?
I know it's a stressful time, and New York's stressful, but, you know, you know, kinda get it together." But I just followed my gut and went and started this, you know, went down this crazy path and started growing, you know, mushrooms off coffee waste and had one bucket that we walked into our local Whole Foods store, and that was it.