stephen.can@stratpartners.com
I’m writing about agricultural technology for Venture Capital Journal and interviewed Kevin Spry, the founder of crop imaging company GeoG2 Solutions. A few key points are excerpted below. If you or one of your portfolio companies is involved in Ag-Bio or Ag-IT, let me know: alex.haislip@thomsonreuters.com
Alex: Agriculture isn’t something many venture firms look at, but you’ve managed to raise $750,000 from the Halo Fund. What was that like?
Kevin: During the dotcom and even today, there’s this perception among investors that “we’re going to be able to put $50,000 into this, somebody will write a program and it will be Facebook.” When you look at a business that actually has assets, it looks unique. We built a camera system, we have some intellectual property in processing and we have a big-ass airplane. A lot of these investors have been involved in airplanes, using them, but don’t understand that they take a lot of money. I might have been better off telling them that I was going to buy a boat and go fishing.
Confidence is a funny thing: Too little leads to low self-esteem, too much makes one arrogant.
When venture capitalists are confident, it means they expect their startups to outpace the growth in the overall market—a good thing for startups or a bad thing for the rest of the economy.
Mark Cannice has been tracking venture capitalist confidence for half a decade at the University of San Francisco’s School of Business and reports that venture capital confidence is slowly improving from its fourth quarter 2008 low. “Notable return of exit opportunities—especially headline acquisitions—is breathing life into the venture business model,” Canice says. (Read our earlier coverage).
That’s a sentiment that seems to be shared across the board. When the Venture Capital Journal surveyed investors for its January issue, it heard the same optimism for an M&A surge:
Gavin Christensen is in charge of a new program at vSpring Capital, which seeks to nudge universities into getting more involved in the commercialization of their technologies. The carrot is that vSpring will cut the universities in on the carried interest (i.e., investment profits).
The effort is called Kickstart Fund, and is seeking to raise about $10 million for between 20 and 25 academic spinouts from Utah and New Mexico. I caught up with Christensen to ask him a few questions: