Up on the Rooftop

It’s a journey that in many ways has surprised Haley, who until early 2012 was working full time for Corporate Fuel Partners, a boutique investment bank and private equity firm in New York City. He always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but never in his wildest dreams imagined he’d become an urban farmer, he said.

“I always thought if I did something with entrepreneurship, it would be on the real estate side or on a different level,” he said. “My mom and dad never thought I’d be slinging greens.”

The two years he spent at Mendoza in the Notre Dame MBA program helped solidify his long-term goal of becoming an entrepreneur, giving him the tools to jump in when the opportunity arose to get involved with a startup from the ground up, he said.

He sharpened his financial skills in the upper-level signature course Applied Investment Management (AIM), where he mastered how to do financial modeling and analyze a company’s balance sheets, statements and cash flows. Those skills have proved invaluable in his role at Gotham Greens, where he needs to prepare monthly and annual reports, analyze the company’s cash flow, create budgets and raise capital.

“That course was my first introduction to that, and it has been a crucial skill that I developed,” he said. “I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if I hadn’t taken that class.”

Another influential course he took was an entrepreneurship class, which exposed him to writing a business plan and the world of startups, he said. As part of that class, he developed a business plan that outlined how to build a community in Vail, Colorado, that would lower its carbon footprint via solar panels and a large rain catchment pond, he said. The idea won third place in Mendoza’s McCloskey Business Plan Competition.

Gerard Pannekoek, who taught entrepreneurship at Notre Dame at the time and advised Haley on his business plan for the sustainable community, remembers him as a passionate and eager student interested in the environment and sustainability.

“He was a very focused and persistent individual, which is a characteristic of a successful entrepreneur,” Pannekoek said.

It wasn’t until 2008, a year after he graduated from business school, that Haley decided to dip his toe into the startup world, this time for real. His good friend, Viraj Puri, whom he’d met while studying abroad in college, had built a 1,000-square-foot greenhouse educational facility on a barge on the west side of Manhattan.

The experimental greenhouse was a model for hydroponic farming, a technique in which plants receive all their nutrients from their water supply and don’t require soil in order to grow. The technique is ideal for urban environments where nutritious, high-quality soil and viable land are scarce, Haley said.

Chefs who visited Puri’s greenhouse were so interested in the produce grown there that Puri realized he might be onto something, and enlisted Haley’s help. The pair spent nights and weekends the following year interviewing chefs, visiting large- scale produce and farmers markets and talking with greenhouse experts to see if it was possible to do hydroponic greenhouse farming on a commercial scale.

Turns out it was, and in 2008, they founded Gotham Greens, with the goal of building their first greenhouse on a roof in an industrial section in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They raised money from family and friends, and shortly thereafter brought on Jennifer Nelkin Frymark as the company’s chief agricultural officer, renowned in the agricultural community for her expertise in operating greenhouses in harsh environments like the South Pole and the desert.

Haley kept his day job at the boutique investment bank until early 2012, working for Gotham Greens on nights and weekends as the company built its first greenhouse.

From the get-go, the company’s mission has been to turn the traditional method that supermarkets use to source greens on its head, Haley said. Most of the lettuce that consumers in New York City buy today is procured by a company that obtains it from hundreds of farms across the country or world, then packages and ships it to a distributor in New York, who finally sells it to retailers, Haley said. Gotham Greens’ vision was to grow its own lettuce, pack it on site and then directly sell it to the supermarkets.

“We wanted to cut out all the middlemen involved,” Haley said. “Our idea was to vertically integrate the entire supply chain.”

Clever design has helped them achieve that goal. The green- house atop Whole Foods takes up only half an acre, but produces what a 10-acre soil-based farm would in a typical growing cycle, using just one-tenth of the water, Haley said. The farmers at the greenhouse can turn 26 crops in a year, all of which is made possible by a sophisticated computer climate control system, which regulates everything from light levels to humidity and dew point.

The company does not use pesticides, but rather combats pests by creating its own ecosystem, releasing 10,000 beneficial insects into the greenhouse every week. Each of the greenhouse’s nine lettuce varieties receives a proprietary nutrient solution, which optimizes the growth and flavor of the greens, Haley said.

The company is in the midst of building two more greenhouses, one in Jamaica, Queens, and the other in Chicago. It will be adding at least another 70 to 80 employees to the existing 45 in the next several months.

The Chicago greenhouse, which will be atop an industrial building in the Pullman Park neighborhood, will be 75,000 square feet, the largest greenhouse the company has built, and Notre Dame staff, students and alumni will be able to see it from the road on the drive from Chicago to South Bend.

As the company enters a rapid expansion period over the next several months, Haley said he frequently finds himself returning to the lessons he learned at Mendoza, particularly those around ethics.

“Ethics has ended up becoming a big part of the business, from who I hire to how we deal with vendors,” he said. “The school really taught me how to treat people ethically, be responsible and kind and walk a straight line.”