America’s Cultivation Corridor, which develops and markets Iowa’s agricultural and bioscience economy, recently hosted a virtual roundtable with three Iowa-based agricultural startups called Startup Success Stories.
The panel featured three speakers:
- Justin Van Wert, chief operating officer of Distynct, which enables remote monitoring of rural swine production barns by first providing dependable internet connectivity to the barn.
- Jason Cope, founder and chief intellectual property officer of PowerPollen, which has engineered new technologies that improve seed production and increase agricultural productivity by enabling more effective cross-pollination.
- Craig Rupp, CEO and founder of Sabanto, a company that creates retrofit kits that turn that tractor into an autonomous tractor.
The panel was moderated by Billi Hunt, executive director of America’s Cultivation Corridor.
The following are four takeaways from the conversation.
- Leveraging the land grant university (Iowa State) means scouring the campus for talent
Van Wert said all of Distynct’s employees graduated from ISU, and when the team started to build the company, it looked for “like-minded individuals with an entrepreneurial spirit that wanted to take on this risk with us.”
“I think we had a very well established program at Iowa State to draw on.”
He said he graduated from ISU in 2011 when the university’s entrepreneurship program was just starting. He went to work with John Deere for 10 years and then came back to Ames, and “to see the resources and the dedication to delivering entrepreneurship and to enable those folks has been incredible.”
Rupp said a lot of his employees come from Iowa State as well.
“They’re very industrious, they’re clever, they’re curious, they’re hardworking – the roll-up-your-sleeves type of young people,” he said. “And we’re a startup in ag, and I send them all over the world.”
He said he has three employees currently in Australia.
“The only way they can communicate back right now is through a Starlink modem that happens to be in the truck that they rented,” he said. “And do they complain about it? No, what they tell me is, ‘Never in my life did I ever think I would be sitting in a machine shed in Australia,’ and that’s the type of workers that I need.”
- Cope: ‘You really can’t be an expert at everything’
Cope said it’s important to network and find people with existing expertise who can help with, for example, navigating a regulatory pathway, as well as intellectual property.
“If we don’t have intellectual property to protect the things that we invest in, innovate, develop and commercialize, we’re a small company, we won’t be around long,” he said. “We do spend a lot of time really focusing on the right way to patent protect our technology, and that’s really about engaging with both local experts and we have a couple firms that we use locally for corporate and patent intellectual knowledge, but also on a national level.
“It comes down to relationships and having people you can go to that you know are going to give you not only the answer you need, but the right answer,” he said.
- Van Wert: Fundraising is about creating partnerships with ‘people that really understand your business.’
Funders don’t only provide funding, but also create connections to other resources, whether that be customers or whether that be a CRM tool, Van Wert said.
“As we went out looking for money, there was no easier money than the stuff in Iowa, because they truly understood the industry, and they really understood our business, and were willing to help that way,” he said. “And so that’s been hugely beneficial to us, and really speaks to what our cap table looks like. And a lot of that is investment right here from home.”
Cope said it takes “grit, persistency and intestinal fortitude to really continue to raise the funds, to generate the resources you need to bring your dream to fruition.”
Cope said PowerPollen started with mostly Midwest-based angel investors.
“To this very day, those people continue to be excellent investors because they’re willing to come in and see the progress and understand what the implications of that progress are.”
Saying it’s a challenge to raise capital currently is an “understatement,” Cope said. He said leaders need to scale their business accordingly.
“You might have to brutally prioritize and strategically plan around a different set of resources to still get you to move forward based on the funds you’re able to generate,” he said.
- Rupp: ‘Don’t build the church for Easter Sunday.’
“Don’t build the church for Easter Sunday.”
Rupp said what he means by that is a lot of engineers will not release a product until it’s perfect.
“You have your innovators and your early adopters,” he said. “They expect it not to be perfect. You need to really focus on how can you get to product-market fit as soon as you possibly can, and it’s a race to get there.”
Rupp said where his company is now compared to a year ago is completely different.
“It all came down to the actual customers telling us and pointing us in the right direction,” he said. “It wasn’t sitting in a cube trying to figure out what the market needs. It was listening to farmers. ‘Hey, you need to improve this. We need this functionality. It would work so much better if you had this.’ They really drove our product requirements.
“And I wish I could have done that a year earlier.”