Building a High Impact Social Enterprise over 20+ Years: Roberto Milk, CEO of NOVICA (Part 1)

Not all high impact businesses need to go from 0 to $100 million in 5 to 7 years. 

NOVICA has built a tremendously important, high impact social enterprise that did $30 million in 20 years. It’s a fantastic achievement.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Roberto Milk: I was conceived in Peru and born in the US. My mother is Peruvian and my father is American. They met when he was in the Peace Corps. They met in the north of Peru and moved to California. Two years later, my brother was born. 

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your education?

Roberto Milk: My dad was doing a PhD program at Stanford. I started at Stanford as a kindergartener. We moved to San Antonio, Texas and lived in different places. I continued my studies in San Antonio. I did an International Relations degree at Stanford.

It was in my senior year when we had the idea for NOVICA. It all took off from there. I really do credit Stanford in a major way for creating the environment for this idea to blossom.

Sramana Mitra: What was the idea and what triggered that idea?

Roberto Milk: The idea that we had was based on trying to find a better way for artisans around the world to sell their goods. My grandmother on my Peruvian side was an artisan.

My grandmother on my father side was a missionary. My grandparents were missionaries. They lived in Cuba for 20 years. My dad grew up in Cuba. From Cuba, they moved to Mexico, Vietnam, and traveled the world. They always felt that there was a better way to do things.

My grandfather would constantly visit social issues and look at them through a completely different lens. He was the person who they credit with the creation of the Cuban cow.

The Indian government sponsored the sending of the bull. It arrived in New Orleans and sent it to Cuba. The Cubans thought he was crazy. He said, “There has got to be a better way to produce milk in the tropics.”

I call him a churchpreneur. He was an entrepreneur but he did everything through the offices of the Methodist church. I grew up in this search for social justice and looking for better ways to do things. That was the upbringing.

Both of my parents were teachers, so we would do these low-budget travels where we would venture off. We would go to Mexico and it would be one day to the next trying to figure out where we would stay. We would go to markets a lot. Really talented artisans didn’t have an easy way to make a living.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of artisan was your grandmother?

Roberto Milk: She knit wool slippers. She was one of our very first artisans. She started knitting them as a way to pass the time and to make some extra money. She was quite talented. Later when she was on dialysis, she would spend the whole session making these wool slippers.

For me, they always had additional value if they were made by someone who was struggling and making it happen. She was quite popular on the website until she passed away.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this?

Roberto Milk: The idea came in 1995. The company was created in 1999. When the idea happened, I was a senior at Stanford. We wanted to create a whole new system. When we had that idea, my girlfriend at that time who’s now my wife introduced me to her mother.

Her mother was with the United Nations. She was a human rights officer. That was the first time we spoke. She said, “I love this concept. If you guys were to start this, I would consider leaving the UN to help you start it.”

That’s when we knew we had something serious. At that point, I changed my whole career path to basically incubate the idea. I started interviewing for investment banking jobs to try to understand venture capital and private equity. We incubated it for four years and launched it in 1999. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a High Impact Social Enterprise over 20+ Years: Roberto Milk, CEO of NOVICA
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