Building the Future Out of What We Left Behind

Dora Gutierrez didn’t grow up planning to be a founder. She grew up watching her mom hustle on the side and her grandfather run restaurants in Jalisco — the heart of tequila country. Business wasn’t something abstract or glamorous. It was a way of taking care of people. And it was always there, in the background.

But her world didn’t start with startups. It started in the structure of big companies.

Amazon. Walmart. AB InBev. She climbed fast through strategy and operations roles on international expansion teams — working in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. What tied those roles together wasn’t just global travel. It was the unique kind of pressure she faced: always fighting for resources, always building from scratch, always solving problems no one else wanted.

“I was close to the C-level early on,” she says. “The projects I worked on were high priority — but never well resourced. So I had to figure things out. That made me more creative, more independent.”

Her corporate career gave her more than a paycheck. It gave her the mindset she would need as a founder: rapid iteration, relentless adaptability, and the ability to stay calm when every plan changed.

That mindset took shape in China.

“I came from American companies where planning took three months,” she says. “But in China, everything changed too fast for that. By the time you finished your plan, the environment had shifted. You had to move.”

It was her first exposure to real-world startup execution — learning by testing, failing quickly, and building as you go. That lesson stuck.

Years later, while working in Denmark, she started thinking seriously about launching something of her own. She’d always been drawn to the fashion world, but what really stuck out to her was how few sustainable material options there were — and how prohibitively expensive they were for small brands.

“I started looking into biodegradable materials back in 2017,” she says. “And there weren’t many options. The few that existed were way too expensive for a small brand to use.”

That’s when the tequila industry came back into view.

She was back in Mexico, reconnecting with friends in the industry, when someone mentioned the huge amounts of waste generated by tequila production — and the potential of agave byproduct as a raw material. The idea clicked.

From there, it was years of slow research, idea swapping, and false starts. She was still rising in her career. But the itch didn’t go away. And in 2023, Dora decided she couldn’t wait any longer.

She left corporate life and went full-time on Snova — a bio-innovation company turning agricultural waste (like agave) into sustainable, traceable biomaterials.

Not synthetic. Not greenwashed. Real products, made from real waste, with real environmental impact.

“We’re measuring everything — from the raw materials at the farm all the way to the final product,” she says. “It’s 100% sustainable. And 100% traceable.”

The business isn’t just about fashion anymore. Today, Snova is developing materials for everything from furniture to pet supplies. The process is long. The science is complex. But Dora’s vision is simple: to build an industrial model that both reduces waste and sparks new local economies in the places most often left behind.

That starts in Oaxaca — once one of Latin America’s most important textile hubs.

“There’s an old textile factory on top of a mountain there,” she says. “It’s a museum now. But it used to be one of the biggest producers in the region. My dream is to bring that kind of industry back — to take what’s been forgotten and make it useful again.”

For Dora, this isn’t just about launching a product. It’s about regenerating a system.

Agricultural waste is everywhere. Climate change is accelerating. Small and medium economies need new ways to grow. Snova is her way of tying those threads together — and building something that could scale globally, but start with one community.

She knows it won’t be easy. It already isn’t. But she also knows she was built for this kind of work.

“Uncertainty is every day,” she says. “But I’ve worked in so many countries, so many environments. That kind of resilience — being able to adapt, stay excited, and keep going — that’s what this takes.”

She didn’t learn that in a textbook. She learned it from working in the world — and from betting on herself.

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