Juntos es Mejor

Miguel Garza ’12 came to law school expecting to follow in the footsteps of his father and older sister, both hardworking fixtures of the legal community in Laredo. But law was never the only thing that interested him, or his family.

For example, there was the successful gym the family ran back in Laredo. Buoyed by that experience, Garza and a law school classmate started a consultancy that helped brands and businesses in Austin get themselves ingrained in the local wellness space. Then, they pivoted to the idea of an agency for fitness trainers.

“I just kept doing things that were interesting to me,” says Garza now of how he kept one foot in law school and one in the business world. “I was outside of the typical law school experience—but using everything I learned there to further my interests and follow them.”

After graduation, that approach led him to encourage his sister, Veronica, to think bigger about her success in the family kitchen producing delicious, grain-free tortillas. Surely there were others, Miguel thought, who craved the traditional Mexican American foodways cherished by the Garzas, but who, like Veronica, couldn’t partake because of autoimmune or other lifestyle conditions.

That’s how Siete Foods was born. And grew. And exploded.

Earlier this year, the company was purchased by PepsiCo for $1.2 billion. Even so, don’t expect much to change at the company’s South Austin headquarters. Miguel and Veronica and all seven of the Garza family members involved in the family business—the siete of Siete—are staying on to help write the company’s next chapter.

The ethos behind that loyalty is simply expressed on the Siete website:

Embody a Juntos es Mejor culture: value humility, foster diversity, love people always, and operate with a “family first, family second, business third” mentality.

We sat down with Miguel Garza to learn more about his story.

When did you know you would be an entrepreneur?

We never said, “We’re going to be entrepreneurs.” What we said was, “We’re going to wake up and press tortillas and family and friends will want to buy them.” I am driven by wanting to solve a problem, and it’s been a continued effort of putting one foot in front of the other and finding incredible people and saying, “Hey, we want to go that way. Do you want to come with us?” It’s really been putting a group of people together to go accomplish something. I see it more as coaching than entrepreneurship.

And health, right?

Oh, that’s absolutely a passion of mine personally, and that’s something we share together as a family. On holidays we get together and we’ll do, like, a Christmas Eve workout, or a Thanksgiving morning workout. And on Saturday mornings, some members of the team will come to my house, and we’ll do a workout. It’s interwoven into how we live. I would describe Siete as “health aspirational,” meaning, health is a journey, and not just defined by a destination. You’re just trying to make choices over time that compound towards better health, on that continuum. I use the word aspirational because it gives us the freedom to continue to make new choices based off the information that we have today that we may have not had yesterday.

Food is not just physical nourishment, it’s culture. It’s why sharing a meal with people is so powerful.

Are you fully aware of how much joy Siete products give to people for whom food has become really challenging?

I reflect on my sister’s story. She couldn’t eat tortillas or tortilla chips and even gave up rice and beans. She was effectively disconnected from her culture. Food is not just physical nourishment, it’s culture. It’s why sharing a meal with people is so powerful. So, when people email us and say, “My 5-year-old son has never had a taco, and we just were able to share a taco with him, and he’s so happy,” and they use words like “life changing,” we have so much humility in what we were doing, that we read that and think “that’s hyperbole.” But we know it’s been life changing for us. It’s great to get that daily dose of humanity that we’re sharing and spreading that joy with people.

Let’s go down memory lane. Did you like law school?

I’m thankful for the experience, because it was so challenging. But it was an intimidating experience. Everybody there is smart. And there are courses I wish that I go back and take again and engage with them in the way I engage in learning now. Today, I can see business problems like they are new and fun challenges—I would have gotten more out of law school understanding the problems then in that way.

You just love learning.

Definitely. I enjoy obtaining knowledge and then figuring out how to apply that knowledge to different settings.

Is your lawyer brain always on?

Well, the people who work with me would say that I ask a lot of questions! And that I’m always trying to find the best, or the right, answer. That I’m always engaged in critical thinking, logic, assessing problems, trying to understand the different facts in play and trying to find a resolution.

I often say that I can’t think of any specific class that prepared me for exactly what we’re doing today, but some sure come to mind. A law and economics course taught by Professor Jens Dammann. There are foundational principles he taught me that challenged my way of thinking and made me look at the world differently for business. For example, he talked about search costs, that humans have only so much decision-making capacity in a day, and that it’s desirable, as a business, to reduce the amount of that search capital that they must use.

Then I remember taking Alternative Dispute Resolution and learning about BATNA, or the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” Today, whenever I’m having conversations, I’ll use that. I’ll ask, “Hey, what’s the best alternative if we can’t get to an agreement?” And if your best alternative is to walk away, then it’s okay to feel good about that.

I also remember learning an important lesson from my sports law course with Scot Powe. The first day, he asked a question and I thought I had the right answer. But he made me realize: He wasn’t asking the question for me to have an answer—he was asking the question for me to have more questions.

So, when I think about all those things, and I think about my law degree, it obviously has shaped the way that I think about problems and resolutions, and how I don’t see problems or solutions as linear, but rather as pieces of a puzzle to be put together.

Engage your fellow classmates, really engage them at a personal level, and try to make friends. Because those relationships are what you will lean on into your future.

What’s your advice to current law students?

The school is filled with people full of high potential for whatever they’re going to get into, and each of them has a story. So, my recommendation is, engage your fellow classmates, really engage them at a personal level, and try to make friends. Because those relationships are what you will lean on into your future.

Don’t be intimidated. I was very intimidated by my classmates, and I think you should get past that and be almost naive and just meet people. Be emotionally engaged.

It’s an incredible learning environment—you learn a lot from your professors. But I think anyone would be fascinated to understand how much we could learn from our fellow classmates, with everything that people either have already gone through or are going through.

How has being Texan influenced you?

Well, our family was created through The University of Texas. My parents met between Gregory and Jester in the early 70s. My mom was walking one way, my dad was walking the other. She said, “Oh, I think he’s cute.” And then her friend said, “I know him,” and called him over!

It plays an important character in my family’s story, not just for my parents’ meeting, but for how it developed all of us. My wife graduated from the School of Theater and Dance and was captain of the rowing team. I had my undergrad time at McCombs and then my law school experience. One sister got her degree in Mexican American studies, another sister got her master’s in health education, and my oldest sister got her degree in journalism.

Beyond that, my grandpa was a paratrooper in World War II, got shot behind enemy lines five times, was in the Battle of the Bulge, comes back, and goes to Baylor under the GI Bill. For my generation, college was an expectation—more what secondary degree we were going to get than if we were going to get one.

And I say that because, as we started this business, our idea was that we were advancing Latino stories further, so that those stories could reach higher. That’s one reason we’re so proud to share that we’re a Mexican American food brand, and so proud to share that we’re from Laredo in South Texas.

We’re proud to share our culture with our consumers, and we’re incredibly humbled and honored that they want to take a seat at the table and share in that food and culture with us. And the lessons and the friends and the professors and everything that we got from the university have been part of the underpinning of the story that we’re able to share today. It’s so much a character in the story and a part of who we are.

And you’ve stayed in Austin.

Austin has a startup community that is amazingly supportive. It takes a village to build something and being part of the community here in Austin is great.

I don’t know any other place to have started a business, but I do know that when I feel the energy of the startup community here in the capitol, it’s empowering. It makes you believe in what can be built. And I think that that exists across industries. Poppi calls Austin their home now, as do brands like Vital Farms, and Kettle and Fire, or Yellow Bird hot sauce. And there’s Whole Foods, or Waterloo, all these brands that call Austin home because the energy of that community is infectious. I think it enables you to dream a little bigger and reach a little higher.

The heart of this company is from Laredo, and we were able to build it here in Austin.