Rob Trice, until recently a venture partner at Swisscom Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the Switzerland-based telecoms group, explains why he decided to move into agricultural technology investing, which Global Corporate Venturing flagged as a new popular investment trend last week.
Trice said: “Three things happened to me in the last two years, My wife left her job at Stanford for a ranch out on the Pacific coast, which is 45 minutes west of Palo Alto. Through the ranch I saw the inefficiencies in food and agriculture. I then went to New Zealand, and the New Zealand government showed me the amazing stuff they are doing in food innovation. My wife then took me to a hackathon at Stanford design school for the meat industry, which we ended up winning. “
He added: “This led to my team being on the cover of Modern Farmer magazine and in Fast Company magazine, and so forth. This caused me to think that in the telecoms, internet and mobile spaces, where I have worked for a long time, value creation is occurring when those technologies are applied to specific verticals which have lacked innovation and are impacted by low cost disruption and exponential innovation. Food is one of the last big sectors in the world that is not plugged in well to the Silicon Valley IT innovation ecosystem.”
According to Trice his new interest in the agriculture sector, meant he timed the market very well. He said: “One of those lucky things is that I got into this just as things started to explode. A couple of us thought of putting on a small conference [the Mixing Bowl Hub] on the topic of IT for food and agriculture but we ended up having almost 400 people – and it caused me to think, wow, it is time to focus on the food and agriculture space. We [Trice’s angel fund Better Food Ventures] have made seven investments at the seed stage related to IT for food and agriculture.”
He added: “There are social impact investors, that want to see how we can sustainably feed 9 billion people by 2050, there are those focused on healthcare and its relationship to food, there are clean tech investors applying tech to agriculture. The big Sand Hill Road VCs have been reluctant to step into agriculture for many reasons, including skepticism about the potential size of exits. Yet this has changed with Monsanto buying Climate Corporation for $930m.”
Despite leaving corporate venturing, Trice said he would continue working with the networking organisation for corporate innovators he set up, Corporate Innovators Huddle and its advisory board, which is run as a non-profit. The Huddle recently released an update to a crowd-sourced document on the New Realities of Corporate Venture, which can be read here.
Analysis in the Huddle’s document will be featured in our January World of Corporate Venturing report, which will be the definitive guide to the industry. To support this report as a corporate venturing unit, please complete the survey here.