Today, I'm in Pasadena, actually at Caltech with Brian Frank. Brian is an expert in food and founding general partner at FTW Ventures, where he is focused on improving the worldwide food system.

As I understand it, he's studying everything from biotech and brain health to our inadequate supply chain. Brian has led three startups to successful exits, and he's been a food tech advisor up and down Sand Hill Road. Brian, thanks for coming on the pod today.

So, I warned you, I want to do a quick introduction of FTW and then perhaps play a game.

Sounds great.

I actually didn't warn you about playing a game. But start us with like the basics of FTW.

Yeah, so FTW is a traditional venture fund thematically focused on a sustainable food system. So, we're looking to apply capital, knowledge, and network to the 12 trillion food system that's going to need to change the way that it operates in the future.
The key problems we're trying to solve, since we're a problem focused fund rather than a technology focused fund, is the climate is changing, it's
real, the food and agricultural system contributes to that.

Second, we look at the messiness of the supply chain. You only have to go back a couple years to COVID to see how a major, massive, you know, global phenomenon changed how we think about how we're going to distribute and manage food, Obviously, there's a big human health concern around what we're doing in the food system. We're feeding people calories and not nutrition, and so how do we put the nutrition back into our food and give people the things that they need when they need it. Those are just some of the problems that we're trying to solve but kind of stop there and say, we want to do it in all the technology areas possible.

I like to say we're technology agnostic.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. You and I both have backgrounds as product managers. But you said you're, problem focused, not technology focused.

That's correct. Yeah, we think about the problems we want to solve and we want to bring all of the technologies to solve there because it's not one or more silver bullets. This is a system. And what I like to tell people is to look at the food system. You can't just say, well, plant based meats are going to solve the world hunger problem.

It's not that simple. sitting two doors away from the biological sciences building here at caltech And there's so much going on in biomanufacturing right now to think about the next generation of food products

Okay, so here's the game. Ready? So, at the beginning I said that, people up and down Sand Hill Road call you to ask about advice in the, food tech space. Well, just explain that for a second. Like, who calls you? What do they ask about?

Um, well, there's a very famous one that you can go read if you Google Juicero
well, there's a very famous one that

Um, I am the last quote in the article that was claimed to have taken down Juicero when they were. a high flying startup. So at the time I was called in by Kleiner Perkins to basically help find additional capital for Juicero that was raising another round of financing.

I went to their offices, which just so happened to be literally a mile away from my house in San Francisco. I walked in, I took a look at everything. I go, this is a fascinating business to think disrupting the multi billion dollar juice industry is what mission was. But the way that they were going about it and the amount of capital that they were burning that Just didn't make sense.

And there was no kind of customer. Acceptance yet of what they were doing. And so I said, why would you put all this money so early into a business like this with no customers really demanding this as a solution? And again, you go back to the Henry Ford thing. If you know, if he asked people what they wanted at the time they was building a car, they would have said faster horses.

So a lot of people make that argument. But I go, there's fundamentals in food that some of these businesses were not really understanding. And. I went back to Kleiner Perkins and I said, look, I really don't think you should put any more money in this company. It's going to go south eight ways from Sunday.

I was summarily, you know, walked out of their office. Thank you for your input. But then the Bloomberg article came out where they found that you can press the packages by hand. And it's because of the way that they were processing the foods. They already kind of were doing a lot of pre processing on setting up those packages.

But the short story was If you didn't understand the food system, you wouldn't understand why that would have gone wrong. And at Kleiner Perkins at the time, there wasn't anybody that came from the food system. And so they needed an outside advisor or guidance to kind of understand these complexities.

And as I started doing this with Kleiner and a bunch of other firms, the word just got out, Brian knows food. And at the time, 2015, when I was doing this, there was no specialty in the space. I mean, Cosla was probably the most specialized in the space and had the most bets on the table, and he's a very smart dude. My last startup before actually starting this was a Cosla backed startup, and so I'd worked with him and his team, and I go, they get it.

Why aren't other people getting it? And so that little bug stuck in my brain after having all these discussions with all these But they were still calling me. That's great

I'm ready for your game

You just have to know how to pick the opportunities well. I'm ready for your game. Uh, great question.
Synthetic proteins, so you're asking the right question. let's look at the overall market landscape right now. If we look at where most people get their proteins from today, from a U. S. perspective, and again, there's a cultural perspective to this, so I'm going to focus on the U. S. We split our protein ingestion between primarily animal based proteins and the functional plant based protein that dominates all Others above all else is soy.
Soy is in just about everything that includes a plant based protein today. When I look at the future of protein, we don't have any more arable land to give towards animal based farming. It literally is, we're tapped out, and so we're going to have to figure out per acre, per, you know, whatever your metric, , for land is.

We have to grow or develop more protein. One angle is actually investing in animal proteins, right? And growing animal proteins more efficiently, which is a lot of people that are focused on that area. So I would take a look at how do we grow. Cows chickens pigs and other things more efficiently in the future.

There's also aquatic proteins fish and seafood which are very efficient from a Amount of protein that they uptake to the amount of protein you get out and so there's a protein conversion cycle You should understand which is cows and chickens and pigs are incredibly inefficient fish are more Efficient but plants are the most efficient thing And so let's take a look at what we can do on the plant side if we want to generate more protein and that's probably Where the biggest opportunity is is increasing?

Not only the quantity of plant based proteins, but the diversity. So if all we're doing is eating soy and more soy, we're actually not generating more diverse soil, land considerations, maintenance of our land, and ownership. We're just turning us into one big soy factory. And let me be clear, U. S. is not the biggest consumer of soy.

China is. And so at one point, we are the biggest exporter of soy to China. And so a lot of our soy is either going for animal feed, human feed, or Chinese. Demand and so that economics are going to vacillate wildly and there could be good years and bad years So we need to kind of figure out how to Grow more different types of proteins more cheaply more efficiently to feed a growing population that demands advanced proteins in their products, so If I step back and go well where FTW is placed our back We have a company in San Diego called plantable foods Plantable foods grows the most abundant protein on the planet called Robisco Robisco is the protein responsible for carbon?

Transfer into plants to make Protein so they take co2 out of the air and convert it every plant has this right photo the basis of photosynthesis however, it's been really really hard to pull out of food this company has figured out how to a crop that has it in High abundance and how to pull it out of that crop in a way that can be made applicable for the Broad food it out of that can I buy a hamburger from them?

Not yet.

And so, they built their first prototype farm in san diego We were one of the co leads of their kind of pre seed level rounds We since have helped bringing kellogg's venture fund to invest alongside of us and they've probably got one more scaling up to do to do commercial level.

Protein extraction
Okay, but remember, uh, Kleiner

Yes, your client

so, like, I've, I think people have already heard of plant based protein, and I want to know the future. What about synthetic pro, like, I don't know that landscape as well as you.

Awesome. So you're going right in the right sequence, which is animal proteins were first plant based proteins are second. Now let's talk about near future, which is the generation of proteins using yeast and bacteria as the factories to create these proteins.

We have been using yeast and bacteria for centuries, right? They make our beer and wine and bread, right? We know how to harness these things. The amazing thing about yeast is. Given new instructions they can do something differently so they can take industrial sugars and they can generate High value proteins as long as you can instill the instructions within those cells So more recently a lot of scientists have realized they can reprogram Yeast and bacteria they can create these companies that spit out these high value proteins again I'll give you an example from the FTW portfolio a company called gel tour makes collagen gelatin Using yeast and bacteria as the production
production vehicle

And so they've changed the yeast and bacteria somehow, like genetically CRISPR in the future, and genetic modification going towards genetic engineering using CRISPR in the future but genetic modification And this has been well known and well documented that this is how we make sustainable yeast for all the industries that use yeast because these things die and don't produce things in the quantity and quality there is a very little use of wild yeast.
For example insulin that we use today in for the drug and pharmaceutical industry is produced using modified yeast and bacteria to make it new.

Okay.

Bring, bring, I'm uh, Brian from Founders Fund. Collagen. Talk to me about collagen and all these things. Like, I never know. Should I be drinking it? Should I be rubbing it all over my body? Like, I don't know. What collagen? Tell me about collagen adaptogens. I hear these things.
I don't know what to do with them.
first off. It's an amazing product in the food industry. So you should start off and think about go to your grocery store, Brian
it all the

It's on the back of just every product because it allows products to emulsify or intermix and creates texture within products That's why jello right which is which is and gelatin creates this texture this gumminess this kind of this so it's highly prized from the food industry as creating texture and trapping flavors and doing other things within there But then there's also this functional aspect which is what you're getting at which is collagen is great for our skin right if we apply it so all of our Creams and things like that and oils that we put on our face and our hands.
They generally include some type of collagen now today Most products that we go and buy in the personal care space are fish or pig collagen. and so we're actually using the byproducts of the food industry to then use that for these products. and what. Our company, Geltor, realized was, well, we can make that synthetically and we can use yeast and bacteria so we don't have to rely on the animal system to produce that because if that's going to top out, we're going to need another supply somewhere.

The other thing to realize is there are certain types of collagens, there are vast arrays of different types of collagen, fish collagen pig collagen horse collagen, things like that.

But what we should probably be putting on our skin is actual skin collagen, you know, or gelatin, you know the stuff that makes up our current skin.
Well, we're not in soil and green situation, right? We're not going to go harvest skin from people. So how do we get the most prized college in the world? We can do it synthetically. And so we want to look at ways of making Collagen using yeast and bacteria to generate this highly functional food ingredient, but also has these health and wellness benefits now ingestible collagen versus topical collagen Lots of debate on the benefits there.

It's become very hot and a fad in the industry to put it in waters and beverages and, you know, your local lot, cafe store probably now is talking about collagen latte. I think that The reality is it potentially has huge benefits, uh, ingested internally, where most people are using for internal ingestion is actually muscle regrowth and solving for pain issues related to muscles and tissue in the sports arena.
So a lot of your athletes are taking some type of collagen supplements when they're in between games and things like that because it helps repair Stuff that's happened, you know during the games or workouts and things like that. But there's a lot of just day to day traditional uses for collagen that means it potentially can be a very big market and Brian if I'm advising you Yeah, Brian, O'Malley, I assume,
see. Oh, no, I was going Brian uh, okay, Brian Singerman found a friend, right?

Um, Brian, if you're going to invest in the space we think that there's a big enough market opportunity, but it spans all these different use cases of personal care, ingestible you can even say leather is a form of collagen, so kind of materials is also an open space, and so all these ways that collagen can be used.

Yeah. Could be huge opportunities as we lose animals as the primary vehicle to bring that product to
so, all these ways that collagen can be used um, Yeah, I'm interested, like, personally, like, what should I be, should I be taking collagen?
Maybe, maybe more to the point,what do you really think consumers should know about
here?

Totally. And, and what you're touching on Meredith, is the idea of personalized nutrition.
So understanding yourself, your habits, your behaviors. Do you wear an Apple watch? Do you wear an R ring? Like are you tracking any information about how much you move, how much you sweat, what you're. Blood sugar intake. Do you have a
you're a, you're a Levels investor.

am a levels personal investor in level small amount,
Uh continuous glucose monitor, but they're not actually making the monitor They're actually making the service that indicates what the monitor is telling you to do and so it's more about data gathering and information So the first question is meredith Are you a couch potato or are you an active athlete because your intake of your macro and micronutrients is going to depend on your lifestyle number one Number two, have you ever taken a d n a or genetics test or a metabolism test to understand how your body processes food?

No, can I take a metabolism

Absolutely. There's a bunch of companies out there today, they're trying to do, um, gut microflora sampling and data gathering around that. The most famous of one, unfortunately, is now defunct called uBiome, which used to take a fecal sample and understand your Biome details So you can absolutely get a profile for yourself now based on your own data collection But also with all these services a biome is a popular one day two is a popular one that will collect relevant information about you that can then direct you to say, Oh, you're a protein hound.
You need more protein during the day than the average consumer. Oh, caffeine really reacts poorly your metabolism. You should probably limit your caffeine intake.

Let me go one step better.

The insurance companies are starting to wake up to the realization that this is good for their business, that they can. actually be preventative care rather than palliative care within the what you eat and what you do with your nutrition because for you Would you rather cure diabetes now or deal with it and the symptoms later?

So if we can identify the markers and the indicators for diabetic Then we can treat you with food as medicine More efficiently
dairy movement. So, what you hit on was a lot of people are starting to think of chairman of Philz Coffee.
Yes well we believe heavily in the alternative dairy movement and so, uh, what you hit on was a lot of people are starting to think of alternative milk shouldn't be called alternative anymore because they're becoming prevalent. One of my friends is the chairman of Phil's Coffee and he was telling me how many people in their stores walk in and ask for an almond and oat milk
But the problem is alternative dairy doesn't match up on some of those macro nutrients that we mentioned It's not high in protein generally unless there's protein added it doesn't have all the same consistency and quality that people expect from a traditional dairy, milk And that is from the fact that we use processed vegetable fats and other things
So there's a lot to do just in other milk that someone's going in and choosing that has to be really revolutionized. Sugar, absolutely. Everybody has become sugar conscious these days,
I want to eat a lot of sugar and salt personally, but I don't want to get fat. Can you solve that one for me?

Yes, I can't personally solve it because we're VCs. We don't actually solve problems.
do CBG if
We don't we don't do
don't solve
VCs don't solve problems. We invest in people that do solve problems We identify the problems and then we find the people that can actually go fix it
I want a quick fix

So on the sugar side, there's a number of companies right now working on Sugar that doesn't trigger the insulin response. And so these are protein based sugars company out Israel It's one of the leaders in the space is called a my proteins.
They're generating sweet sugars. The other one is backed by Kraft Heinz called Oobly now, they used to be called Miraculix. They're generating a protein sweetener that you could ingest, but won't have the same physical reaction that traditional sugars will, but you're still tasting something
won't have
One of the areas that we think is woefully underinvested and there's lack of technology is actually salt. replacements. And so sodium consumption has gone up massively. And sadly, the plant based foods industry is one of the key culprits for this because you have to add salt to get the flavor that you would have
Is salt gone up because we eat processed foods?
It's partially a lot of processed foods do overemphasize salt as a flavor enhancer, but it's necessary to get the flavor type you want. So even in some minimally processed foods, you're still getting a high amount of sodium to get the flavor profile that you want. We are. All focused on flavor as a consumer.

It's the number one reason people go back to things that I like the taste of that thing. It tasted good. It tasted luscious. It tasted sweet. It hit some mammalian part of my brain, right? Is why we come back. And so we're all chasing that sugar higher sugar rush and the sodium and the salt that amplifies other flavors.

And so Processed foods is a big culprit of this but we're not fixing it with plant based foods as my point So right now my biggest request from a lot of the big CPGs is technology around sodium replacement or what you would call flavor Enhancement, right?
How do I take a product that would be a muted flavor? And by the application of salt normally would amp up those flavors. You're a cook, right?

You could okay

No, that's why I have this issue I'm frozen pizza,

You're frozen pizza Well, if you throw a little bit of salt in frozen pizza It'll taste a little bit more like the products that you're actually trying to taste And so this is why salt gets used a lot in cooking is it just amps up all the natural flavors and so we're looking for the alternative to that and The funny thing is if I'm to kind of go on the sci fi route it's an electrochemical response And so this thing hits our tongue and creates this electrical stimulation of oh i'm now getting this pop of flavor from this thing there are companies that actually created forks and chopsticks That basically have a low voltage shock to your tongue to simulate what sodium does to your taste buds and I'm just like, this is fascinating, but we don't have enough technology.

Sodium consumption is on the rise, hypertension related to sodium consumption is going up. So there's a big opportunity here to reinvent a whole category.

Wow. So cool. Anything else kind of scifi that I need to be asking about.

So one of the biggest areas of research right now in nutrition is could we potentially stave off and slow Alzheimer's? By the things that we eat and that would be fascinating right if we can find the what are called Nutraceuticals or things that we would place in our foods that would allow us to feed someone that would slow down or stop brain deterioration nutraceuticals

Yeah, so nutraceuticals are compounds that we've either found in nature Or that we've designed to have a specifical nutritional benefit to a human
a good example of that is in grape skins There's a product called reversatol reversatol has been shown stop aging in general and there was a big push for people to Distill or pull out or versatile both from grape skins, but also to synthetically create it
And if we can prove that more things for cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer's exist in nature, we can go make more of them in some way, either cultivating that crop.

Now, Getting back to your question about synthetic biology. I was talking to Abbott labs One of the biggest nutritional companies in the world and what one of the directors of innovation said to me He said I never want a scientist to come to me and say that I have to climb the high mountains on the Himalayas to Find some drug or some therapeutic and I said great You have to invest more in synthetic biology because if we find that compound We can synthetically create that, like I said, using yeast and bacteria.

So this idea of nutraceuticals, it's been mired in the supplements industry. So you probably have seen everybody selling these, you know, supplements on the store shelf that claim to do all these
things. No. The short answer is no. Um, the long answer is, Some maybe if there is efficacy behind what they're doing But the supplemental market was basically said you can't get this in your foods So you should take this pill or this additive in the sink?
Well, what if we can find all of that food, right? and what if we had natural food ingredients that could do all the same things that the Supplements are claiming to do

So that's the ecosystem that we at FTW get really excited about is the idea that you find a compound You can create it and you have a pathway to bring it to market that includes efficacy Testing so that we don't have to be in this world.

Should I take should not take it? It's been proven. It works. It's the insurance companies are prescribing it more than drugs, right? They're prescribing food more than drugs or natural food ingredients more than drugs That would be a great world to live in and then we could expand the production of those ingredients tenfold using new technologies and ways of cultivating

And that's the other key point about FTW, which is you're not a CPG investor.

No, I would much rather someone take that knowledge that we generate and put it in their own product. Now, the reality of the world is the food world is consolidated in maybe 20 major companies worldwide that run most of the food
system. It's, there's a map, and I'll have to send you the map after this, of, these are the companies, and you know all their names, that basically run our food system. That supply 90 something percent of all the food in the world.
is it like Tyson and Protein and Heinz, you got it, those are some of the big names, Campbell's, Kellogg's but in the end it all boils down to those companies being the center of the food world.

Now, We hedge by not betting in CPG because of the history of CPG.
CPG businesses on exit generally trade at 2 to 3x revenue. Yeah, at best. I mean sometimes 1. 5 or 1. 2. You're like, it's a revenues game. We're not From our team perspective, we're not experts at putting product on shelf or driving sales driven growth businesses, which is what most CPGs are. They're brand building, sales driven businesses.

Wait, wait. Bring, bring, bring.

Chris Farmer from SignalFire here. Let's talk a little bit about

What's a next gen grocery store look like?

Let's talk a bunch of different angles chris that we could talk about one is about the infrastructure to run a grocery store Right. So there is how many products you need to have on shelf? How are you doing your ordering? How are you doing your inventory? How are you doing your ready made goods versus your pre packaged goods?

Well, made and pre packaged?
Yes, well made to order or Like my deli or
Exactly. So, um, a lot of grocery stores over the last several years have increased their ready made products and made to order products because it's high margin for them, right?

So you think about okay Well, if I'm gonna do my goods maids like my sushi and this was actually on NPR this week the biggest sushi seller in America Is Kroger's a grocery

Wow.

and you got to imagine the margins on that for them are probably pretty damn good The white labeled coffee business is a multi billion dollar business So if you go into Kroger's or Whole Foods and you buy there whole foods is Allegro brand you buy their coffee They're making stupid money on those things.

So as a grocery store, you need to think about what is yours white labeled or produced? You know on premise or near premise and what you're going to bring in and stock in your store shelves

I mean, the reality is that we are more digitally inclined now than ever before.
We are making up our minds both on our products and what we need for our eating habits for that week at home, talking to our spouse, you know, talking to our buddies, Hey, we're gonna go watch the big game this weekend. We gotta think about chicken wings. I had a long discussion with grocers one time about you know the biggest sales day of chicken wings in the US Super Bowl, right? And so you better stock up as a grocer You better plan and predict that there's gonna be a lot of orders for chicken wings and so More of those decisions are happening outside the store not in the store

Now, what that created was a D to C market for goods, because the ice cream brand said, well, wait a second, why do I have to give part of my revenue to the grocer if I'm capturing intent at the home, I'll just sell them the ice cream, you know, direct to there.
There's a problem with that. Very few people overall outside of the tech heavy places of LA and San Francisco and New York are doing a lot of direct to consumer acquisition of food. on the single digit or percentage side.
retailers D2C in the

But Instacart is using retailers as a backhauler, back end, right? That's not DTC in the way that you think about they still require grocery stores to exist And so DTC is purely I create an ice cream business And I do the 3PL to get my product in the hands of a consumer from start to finish, right?
now the genius of Instacart is Who the hell cares where my tomato came from if it's a good tomato and instacart delivers me a good tomato Could it be an instacart warehouse right could instacart compete with their facilitators down there?

The answer is yes because they're capturing the intent and you need to think about your customer and capturing their intent way ahead of them showing up the door somewhere.

And so that's the future of grocery for me is capturing intent early, The other thing I think goes back to my point about personalized nutrition, which is wouldn't it be great for the retailers to know that I was lactose intolerant when I walked in, or when I was looking on their website, such that I didn't get 50, 000 SKUs slammed down my throat.

I get the 10 that I should care about, right? And so the personalization is going to be a big aspect of food that we're going to see on the retail side to get closer to that.
COVID
supply chains were obvious. Um, all of a sudden, are we getting less global? Are supply chains changing and therefore changing what's on the grocery shelves?

Sadly, no. I mean, again, we had COVID. Now we have the Ukrainian war. The Ukraine is one of the biggest suppliers of wheat in the world. And so, we're still getting disrupted left, right and center because we still haven't created. Centers of excellence all over the world that could grow this food.
I have a fundamental Optimism that is going to change and there's a couple of technologies that are helping us lead that change one is the idea of Indoor farming and I don't want to conflate indoor farming with what's happening in the market right now Which is a lot of indoor farms are going out of business but the idea
is farming, same vertical farming is Indoor farming that goes up in more opaque structures versus a greenhouse.

So indoor farming is the broad category that includes vertical farming, but indoor farming is actually more viable in traditional greenhouse growing, which has been shown to be viable in the Netherlands and the Nordics. There is a ton of product in America grown in greenhouses these days. There's a ton of cannabis products growing greenhouses in Canada, for example, as well.

But you said right now indoor farming is, there's been some going out of business? Did you say

There's a lot of them so app harvest in the midwest and kentucky just filed for bankruptcy They were a large tomato grower indoor grower. Arrow farms in new jersey just filed for bankruptcy recently
So why did that happen, but you're bullish. Again,

I'm still Chris Farmer trying to decide where to put my bets.

Great question. The reason is these Invested overly in the technology and in things that weren't proven over many life cycles To be effective for the margins that they had to create So again, I'll go back to if you're growing leafy greens indoors.
You have to figure out how to be economic margin positive on every leafy green you sell and these facilities were Expensive to set up expensive to run labor was expensive. And the way that you do that is you run them in rural areas, right?
You don't put them next to a big city where energy and resources are expensive trucking and labor is expensive, right? There's not a lot of immigrant labor in the inner cities, right? Because they just can't afford to live They live in the rural areas and that's where you should set up greenhouses and more traditional, you know conservative Farms,
There's a certain set of companies that are getting it right. Bowery Farms is a good example. That's recently taken on a ton of capital to expand. It seems to have gotten the model right. But why I say indoor farming is a solution. You have to step outta the US for Second, US has a lot of arable land, right?

And a lot of farmland. And we have a farming culture and community. But go to someplace like a Singapore, right? Singapore imports. Over 90% of their food from Malaysia and China during COVID when the supply lines were cut. They were effectively screwed And so they said indoor farming is the only way we can be self sufficient So the government set up a program called 30 by 30 So by 2030, they want to grow 30% of all their foodstuffs in market

and So it's a direct response to we cannot rely on the global supply lines being consistent All the time, and we have to take this into our own.
Now, Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world. They can afford to do this. What happens when you're talking about sub Saharan Africa, right? And so, we as a community need to figure out how can build technology that will both work in the Singapore region, as well as in the sub Saharan Africa region.

So, and are the food stuffs, like, what is your belief around applying technology to this? can I apply technology to the commodity foods? To the, where does it work?

Yeah, so let's start in the commodity food space because that's the most challenged one, right? Because it's so cheap right
now, and so commoditized.

So this is why we actually have one of our LPs in our current fund is Louis Dreyfus Company. One of the largest commodity traders in the world. And the reason they invested in our fund is they know that commodities are going to get harder to manage and grow in the long run.

And even small perturbations within those ecosystems mean massive amounts of dollars, right? If you lose 10%, 5%, 3% of the soy harvest worldwide, that's massive. Not only is it going to lead to a lot of starving people, it's just a massive amount of money because of the amount of crops that happen. one of their specialty crops is coffee that they work on and we talk a lot about how the coffee regions are changing from the valley growing to more up mountain and as you go up mountain Because of climate?

Because it's not it's cooling right if it's too hot Right, the plants bake the soils too dry and they start to die off.
And so they got to move to more Higher Higher landscape are better climates for growing that product. So When we look at these things we go well the plants aren't going to pick themselves up and move so As a business a louis dreyfus and all these big commodity guys need to go How do we shore up these supply chains

Mraz is now a of, uh, this farming as like the early adopters of technology.
I mean how does that affect let's talk about FDW a little bit but like does that affect how you're thinking about what to invest in like how are these
industries gonna
you're thinking about what to invest in? Like who's gonna, how are these industries gonna At his field talks to farmer why and so that's how they build relationships as they talk to the community They talk to their distributors.
They have relationships with these people and what we've learned is you're absolutely right It's a conservative industry. But we're now starting to see the first cracks going we have to change our relationship to technology first reason average age of American farmer over 55 years old the sad news is they're either dying or retiring and The next generation doesn't want to take over the farmland, right?
They want to go into tech jobs They want to go into Silicon Valley They saw their parents break their backs trying to make an income and they're not interested in that type of business.
The ones that are are going like, well, why would I do it the same way they did it? We have all this technology at our disposal. So why don't we start applying technology in smart and insightful ways? So we're getting a next generation of The other thing, sadly, that's happening is farmland is being bought up by this big consortium.
You probably know who the biggest agricultural landholder is in America. It's Bill Gates. Yep. Bill Gates is the largest agricultural landholder in America right now. He's bought up a lot of farmland. And when you start to think that these agro concerns, they're going to want to manage and oversee these things with technology rather than with as much human labor as you currently have to apply because it's too expensive to do that way.
relate a story. I was on a panel with Rabobank, which is one of the largest lenders. In food and agriculture worldwide, and they had a farmland in Argentina that was a cattle ranch, and they had given them a financial loan, and they're like, well, this guy's not paying his loan back. Let's go down and, you know, assess the assets so that we can repossess this and we can sell it off and get some more money back.
They show up. All the cows are gone. Like, the guy sold off everything and skipped town, basically. And I looked at him and I go, so you're telling me a 5 IOT device that you strapped to these cows, like an AirTag or a, you know, a GPS unit would have told you that the cows were gone and stuff like that.
And I'm like, yeah. We're not going to do business the same way going forward now that we have this type of issues. We're going to now try and use technology to basically insure and back our loans and do all these things. These are all the things that farmers are starting to have to think about and what I would want to generate as FTW is More incentives for the farmers So they're not the direct payer
These guys aren't sitting on Massive amounts of capital so to your point of why aren't they not making decisions? They don't have another million dollars to blow on a new tractor, right? They're trying to figure out how to get the current crops out of the land right now And they have no extra money to do that.
So if we can find ways for the supply chain to subsidize or support technology Give it free or cheap to the farmer and it benefits the downstream people That's gonna be a win win for everybody
And so, I don't think the farmers are ever going to be the first adopters of everything, but they're going to need to be the last in the chain once someone figures out how to apply and pay for it. And they're going to need to get on board because their businesses will depend on this
But the CPG, I get it, consumers are going to demand it from their products, but it's do consumers or CBG really have the ability to sort of share the information about whether they're sustainably harvested or something?
Um,
it
feel like they just tell
me that.
They do and some, I would say flat out lie to you about their sustainability. but what we're starting to see is the world's going in a direction where Regulations are going to become sticks not carrots anymore mainly the eu is leading that not the us and so if they want to sell their products in the eu They're gonna have to pay a little bit more attention to their sustainability metrics and goals and almost all the global companies do right?
They don't want to sell something different in the us than they
france. And
and i'll give you a retail example A couple years ago walmart decided they wanted to protect against Pathogens in their meat supply chain and so they required all meat producers from china To put their meat on the blockchain
So they, they can watch it.
And Walmart has enough buying power to say, Well, we're not going to buy your stuff unless you do that. And so those things are
blockchain right
now.
How does that they have all their Chinese meat providers on a blockchain right now. As far as I understand, I haven't seen an update. But this is a partnership between Walmart and IBM.
Basically to do that
I'm always fascinated whether it's public like regulators or, or private markets. Like, I'm always fascinated, like, does the, regulator have more oomph or does Walmart?
Well, I have to believe that the government and private industry working together can create a momentum to shift a massive industry.
I fundamentally believe private industry and the CPGs and the retailers need to be the leading force and it's going to be a small group of them that will signal to the rest of the industry how to move because they are lemmings. If someone does something and sees higher uptick of appreciation, support from the consumer and sell through and lower operational costs, everybody will immediately follow.
And so there's going to be some leading indicators. Walmart's one of them.
So, I want to make sure we have some time to talk about FTW. Uh,
this is fun too for
you.
FCW. Uh, this
You don't lead?
We do lead in this fund we lead co lead and follow we prefer leading and co leading Our check size is 000 at the pre seed level all the way up to a million dollar lead check on a small seed

FTO, business, finance, or strategy, um, excites us.
could potentially call you and say, Hey, let's co lead one of these really early stage companies.
Absolutely.
And we want to co-lead because we recognize our value, but we also recognize the value of other people around the table.
I wanna build the M V P team, right? I wanna build the, what is it? The, early nineties bulls, right? The, oh yeah. the late eighties, the, the mid eighties, Oilers and hockey, right? Like, there, there's a set of people that can accelerate your business at the seed and pre-seed, and that will look good to your a investors.
Lead ins to that and that's comes from my experience working with these big VC funds is they always called on me So they knew if a deal was coming for me It was heavily and there was some good information behind it
But a lot of the big VC funds, they have industry specialists,
They do have industry specialists and they call on them very infrequently and only when the deals show up and they're not out hunting and hucking for this category as extensively. So, yes, Andreessen, who I had worked with some of the partners there has people in food and Bev that they can call on.
Two things. One is they call them infrequently because they see infrequent deals in Two. The people are at the CXO level, right? They're big thinkers that are gonna spend 15 20 minutes. What I want is I want the operational guy at the midstream, like the packaging guy that's going like, Oh shit, I need to solve sustainable packaging for our products.
You need the people to actually do the work, and that's where we come in

They didn't want to go to the farms. They didn't want to get down to the level They want to just get this high level kind of view of the world and kind of make broad decision I'm like We're going to be a highly concentrated fund. I'm only going to make so many bets. So I better be a hundred and ten percent damn sure that our company has a path to success
110%
Yeah, that's good. Uh, and you moved to L. A. now literally a year ago.
damn
Thank you. And on the east side. Yes, family reasons kept me over here in the Pasadena area. I recognize a lot of the finance work that we do ends up in Venice, Santa Monica and, uh,
over here in the Pasadena it's burgeoning.
it's Burgeoning.
So Brian, I really didn't get a lot of your background. You've had a lot of exits. We're gonna have to, like, breeze through that quickly.
Absolutely.
know, also, like, you know, where were you in high school?
Like, me quick version of it all.
You know, where were I grew up just out in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I got my first computer at seven years old, an Apple II that was both my dad's work computer and my personal computer.
And so I got enamored with computers and technology very early on. I ended up going to Cornell University, which is one of the leading
tech and food and ag. Yeah, I did a CS degree there. However, my senior year, I took the infamous course in wines.
it's held in a massive auditorium, and you actually get to drink during it. at the same time. I was approached by guy at Cornell, very famous now VC Bill Trenchard who had started up his second business.
He's like, Hey, I've got this bunch of undergrad students that were building this technology. I just did an internship at Microsoft Intel. He's like, I could use someone that understands the business of building technology coming to help us. So I joined Bill and his team
So things magic was happening at Cornell at that time, a bill ended up building that company and selling it to Microsoft. And so I got the taste of the startup bug early. And then I went on to do three successful startups myself, uh, with successful exits
And so I started doing my walkabout with the VCs of Silicon Valley. But I also did a walkabout with the biggest food brands in the world. So I went and advised from Mars and Nestle and a number of other big food brands.
And I came away with one big realization. Tech world doesn't know food and the food world don't know tech and so when you realize that and there was this thing happening in Silicon Valley at the time in 2015 when Everybody was trying to become a food tech business because they thought this was the next big thing I happen to be right place right time with the right knowledge
And so that's what started our first fund in 2019 small prototype fund. And then we went out and raised our second fund a 20 million dollar vehicle that we just closed at the end of the year And we got some of the biggest names in food and ag To invest in it.
and now it's about building that broader community of investors like yourself 10 110 and others that are like look food is not going to be my priority But it's going to be something I want to put money to work on because I think that my knowledge and expertise In b2b sass or deep tech or whatever it is is going to play a role and that's why I'm here I I think LA is a heavily untapped market for this right now because food hasn't taken off here yet and so I think between me and a number of my brethren's the People at Acre Partners, Supply Change, Joyful there's just now a number of burgeoning and growing food tech investors down here.
I think we can create LA as the next big scene, but we need to bring 10. 1. 10 and Upfront and all the other players. In alongside of us so i'm hoping you know fingers crossed pasadena becomes the hotbed of this now Um, and and uh, and there's a lot of support in the community for this.
yeah. Well, I can see why you're the expert and, um, this was a lot of fun to have this discussion. Thanks for coming on. Thank you