Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Googins.
Hi Josh, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
In high school, I was made to leave public school and transferred from Austin High School to The Griffin School in Hyde Park to finish out my senior year. It was then that I picked up mushroom cultivation along with a lot of other skills and interests in the sustainable agricultural space. At first, as a hippie Austin teenager would, I started out with psychedelics and psilocybin but quickly saw all of the implications of the broader world of mycology. I became enamored with books about how they can sequester massive amounts of carbon, fix toxic soil and water, grow into shapes and be hardened into polymers and textiles. I saw the immense industry that could be revolutionized and the positive economic and ecological impact that mushroom cultivation and the emerging industry therein could have. So, I took an internship at a small start-up mushroom farm in Austin called South Austin Mushrooms and worked for free for eight months growing oyster mushrooms primarily and troubleshooting. All of the industry standards that other industries rely on were not (and are largely still not) known at the time so there was tons of fabrication and innovation. Not many people were willing to invest in gourmet mushroom farms at the time so money was always very tight and still is. Necessity begets ingenuity.
From there, I worked on more home cultivation until a breakup led me to move to Maui to WWOOF (organically farm as a volunteer traveler) in Hana. From there, I met the right people to start my own start-up called Maui Mushrooms in 2014. We did some very cool work and grew tons of mushrooms but in order to make it profitable, we would have needed to find a lot of financial backing and solve some significant supply chain issues. It turns out that shipping equipment and supplies is incredibly expensive when you’re in the middle of the Pacific. Who would have thought?
When I decided to keep up my travels, I was searching for another place to start a new company, but also just enjoying taking up odd jobs in bartending, carpentry and farming veggies and cannabis from Northern California to Denver and eventually made it back down to my home town of Austin, TX where I formed Googins Biotech LLC. One of my old Griffin buddies and fellow mushroom cultivators, Adam Vicknair had just split with his company, Fallen Oak Mushrooms. I liked the name, saw that there was a partial brand built and asked for permission to do business as Fallen Oak. It ’twas then that Fallen Oak Mycology was thus born! It’s been a long road fraught with lots of weird situations while traveling broke, building very weird contraptions and spending tons of time at farmer’s markets, in “labs” and banging my head against the walls of a half-built shipping container. Now we are on the cusp of some pretty big dreams and it’s finally all starting to fall together.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There have been no shortcuts or smooth paths on my road. Whether that’s a part of my character, karma or just how things tend to go with start-ups, I don’t know. What I do know is that every single failure has nearly cost me everything I have. Without trying to sound too cliche’, I can say that I have thankfully seemed to fail forward and scrape myself up off the floor again to keep chipping away at this. If it wasn’t a passion and/or obsession to get to a point of fulfilling a carbon negative footprint and make a significant impact on the industry and environment, I definitely would have chosen an easier industry. Or at the very least, gave myself a break to get a job and feed myself properly.
Struggles include but are not limited to:
– Lost friendships (several)
– Bad credit
– Everything stolen multiple times. I can elaborate more here.
In general, when you’re perpetually running low on money because all of it is being sunk into a business that takes up most or all of your time without paying you, you are pretty exposed. I flew to Seattle to check out some equipment from a mushroom farm that I wanted to purchase. It was a beautiful trip but on the last night, I parked my rental car downtown before I had to catch my flight at midnight. When I came back to my car to drive to the airport everything I had brought had been stolen out of it through a smashed window. Laptop, business documents, passport, chargers, personal hiking bag with clothes, climbing gear…everything. Two weeks later, my dog almost died, then COVID. Investors dropped out… boohoo.
– Entire $30,000 warehouse structure ruined by a storm.
There have been quite a few setbacks.
As you know, we’re big fans of Fallen Oak Mycology. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Fallen Oak Mycology exists solely to seek solutions through mycology to improve the human condition. Mentally through therapeutics and nootropics. Nutritionally through healthy products and fresh mushrooms. Environmentally through the waste generated in the growing process. Ecologically through furthering the understanding of mycelium’s role in our agricultural, textiles and land management. As an umbrella to the public-facing entity that is Fallen Oak Mycology, Googins Biotech is the environmental and ecological vehicle currently being “driven” by Fallen Oak and its products. The destination in this analogy is a company with a carbon negative footprint. I aim to raise the awareness of mycology’s broader impacts by providing monetary incentives in our economy, building a platform and blueprint for others to follow. I’d like to demonstrate that successful business and waste do not need to be correlative aspects of our economy’s evolution.
I think what sets Fallen Oak apart from others in that we don’t want to attract any one sect of society into this mission. Our branding is specifically geared toward an appeal to the widest possible demographics that mycelium and its fruits and functions hold the keys to our future as a species. I’m proud of our branding because of the aesthetic value it promotes. Simplicity, integrity, industry, ingenuity and eloquence. As far as products go, I’ve tried to create products that toe the line between bougie and quality. We want our branding to fit in the health food stores and farmer’s markets alike without playing into the idea that everything that’s good for you has to be expensive. Also, that not every product that is ecologically and environmentally intelligent has to be high-brow or “woowoo” centric.
Fallen Oak Mycology produces high volumes of mushroom substrates and cultures of multiple species for professional and at-home cultivation. We also produce health products like our cordyceps and chaga or lion’s mane coffees. This coffee product is our response to the mushroom coffee craze that has been sorely lacking in quality of both coffee and mushrooms alike. It is important that consumers know the difference between consuming mushroom mycelium and mushroom fruiting bodies. Our coffees contain what we think should be the industry standard of quality in regards to both. Consultations and conversations are also a service that I will always happily provide.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
It would be wonderful for us to have a bigger audience to serve. I think I, as the owner and primary laborer, I have had trouble finding the time to project this mission and brand properly. The work is finally beginning to speak for itself, which is what I would prefer anyways. But I think it would be of immense help and support to just simply have more customers, more awareness and more people to directly engage with.
Also, if any of you reading this would like to try our products, please let me know. Any and all help toward getting them into more stores, on more websites and generally higher volumes of sales will allow me to gain more momentum toward the broader and more exciting aspects of this whole thing. As many people can now see, our environment does need some support from its largest host organism. So, it’s up to humanity to invent new ways of providing food and resources for our colony that is also just as beneficial to the planet from which we came.
Project this and you’ll be of help. Spread the word. You’re already helping by asking these very questions. So, thank you.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fallenoakmycology.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fallenoakmycology/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fallenoakmycology
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCCyn6LBqAduC61S-ndEB-YQ
- Other: www.joshgoogins.com
Image Credits
First Photo with blue vest in the desert – Lyza Renee Everything else was taken by myself – Josh Googins
