How Carter Williams Builds a Strong Network to Drive Venture Capital Success

[00:00:00] Ali: food is medicine and many of the things The biotech and syn bio categories have to offer need to come together and hold hands.

[00:00:06] Ali: sweet proteins were, found in fruits and berries. Largely considered by scientists as probably having evolved with humans. And what we know about them is they were plants and berries that were growing in precious ecosystems and they were dying because they weren't being attractive enough to the apes and gorillas that were necessary to come eat them and spread their seed. And so they biologically got busy figuring out their solution. And their solution was, it's too expensive for me to carry carbohydrates and be sweet and attractive but I figured out. i could Produce one tiny little protein and that actual protein tricks only apes gorillas in humans, um T1 and R one taste receptors, which is where we experience sweet in our mouth. , But. Like any other protein, once you swallow it, , it unfolds and digests just like any other protein.

[00:00:52] Ricky: 60% of the food D market, is natural. overall, right? The other 30 40% is synthetic, artificial, and the main reason is not because of the volume or tons, it's of the dollar value, natural dyes are really expensive and, the synthetic ones are really cheap and are widely used. What is good is that, fermentation becomes more like manufacturing, rather than farming. I believe it's the future of, ingredient production, especially high value ingredient production like colors, flavors, fragrances, and more.

[00:01:28] Gerit: So we're using a filamentous fungi and we're putting that in a bioreactor and then we're fermenting this fungi. And we're just making a red color. So you have to picture a bucket with water, you put it in the fungi, you stir, and then the water turns to wine from a color perspective. So you have this really nice red wine looking liquid. Then we have some different filtration steps where the fungus, goes off, some impurities we filter away, and in the end we dry the liquid, and then we have a very nice red, almost black powder that we then, can ship to our potential customers so they can put it in their end product, like their cake mix or their sausage mix

[00:02:02] Nathan: So conventionally bred purple tomatoes, this is done through wild introgressions. It means that doesn't bring in good qualities for eating but it does bring in the purple. That purple needs to be activated by light. When you get a purple skin tomato at the store, the top is purple, but the bottom is red. And then when you cut it in half, it's red. So in our purple tomato plants, when the fruit first starts to form on the vine, it comes out, it's green. And, when you grow tomatoes, typically they're green and then they start to turn orange and then they turn red. Our tomatoes are programmed genetically through development to turn purple instead. Consumers are very open to products like ours. They're very open to technologies as long as they understand how they're made, why they're made, what problems they solve.

[00:02:41] Paul: what if you could achieve a meat like texture without fractionation, isolation, extrusion, and all these other expensive processes, and instead achieve it merely through fermentation? We take tiny microscopic fungi, we subject them to a special kind of biotech fermentation that within less than one single day. From the time we inoculate our reactor to the time that we harvest it it produces a myprotein. A myprotein has more protein than eggs. More iron than beef, more zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas, and it naturally contains vitamin B12, you get this superfood

[00:03:14] Paul: what if you could achieve a meat like texture without fractionation, isolation, extrusion, and all these other expensive processes, and instead achieve it merely through fermentation? We take tiny microscopic fungi, we subject them to a special kind of biotech fermentation that within less than one single day, from the time we inoculate our reactor to the time that we harvest it less than one single day, it produces a myprotein. A myprotein has more protein than eggs. More iron than beef, more zinc than beef, more potassium than bananas. And it naturally contains vitamin B12, which is typically absent in a plant-based diet. So you get this super food

[00:03:54] Eben: We've consistently done that in our home market we also sell across nationwide in 1300 stores now at three times the rate of the market leader in plant-based bacon, about 50% higher price. So whether you're comparing us to pork, bacon, or folks have had a chance to really appreciate the product we really perform well. And the customers like the product. it's the same simple ingredients. It's salt, it's sugar, it's oyster mushroom, mycelium some smoked flavor. And then, organic coconut oil,

[00:04:18] Mari: So we have between 40 to 60 million tons of sargassum blooming every single year. The Caribbean. Gulf of Mexico. And in the US. I remember reading the UN report like 12 to 15 years ago. They were writing about sargassum that this might become the next huge environmental problem, of this world. And so it happened. So it's a great opportunity to tap in we take it as it is, it's dried material, we have to wet it, and then we start processing it. And out comes white powders. Our products, they don't look like seaweed, they don't taste like seaweed.

[00:04:57] Mari: And they don't smell like seaweed. And that's the beauty of it. the white powders then go to our customers and they are making cosmetics or hygiene products, textile printing processes and nutraceutical.

[00:05:09] Daniel: The things that are gonna make a product successful are gonna be in this order. Number one, great branding and packaging and number two, taste. And you know, if you nail those two things, I really think you could be competitive anywhere as long as you know how to then communicate those things to people. The people that I see be the most successful are very. Scrappy founders who are giving it all, and they're resourceful and they know how to build their network and use that network. You cannot stop them from pounding the pavement, including going and pitching individual stores and then demoing in those stores, and then using that to then get into a distributor and then Really knowing how to play that one lily pad to the next game with just ferocious intensity.