Ethan Brown bootstrapped his venture, then raised from friends and family before pitching VCs in October 2010. A Time magazine story about his technology triggered interest from Kleiner Perkins, whose partners like Ray Lane introduced him to Bill Gates and Biz Stone. Brown chose Kleiner over offers with better terms because their network mattered more than the money.
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You know, the entrepreneurial journey is fraught with lots of obstacles, big, small and medium. But one of the most challenging issues is really raising money. And you've had several different types of funding, you know, vc, late stage equity, and then of course, your ipo. So the first question I want to ask is, what was your strategy overall as you look to how to capitalize this really big idea?
So, you know, and you have so much experience in this. This will sound extremely familiar. So I started first with my own money and went through that, and then friends and family and. And then I sent a note out. I think it was October 2010. Tesla wasn't a big deal at that point, at least not in the circles I was in. And so I said, I think I touted it at Prius for the plate, and I sent it to all these different venture firms, right? And I said, we have this technology, we can do this, and it's really important to focus on this. And I got a couple good responses. But it wasn't until Time magazine ran an article, and this is a great story about Midwestern values. And we didn't know what we want. We didn't want to publish a patent on the technology because we didn't want it to be, you know, reverse engineered, essentially. And I have that concern about patents in food anyway, and so we're still sort of struggling with what to do. We had a handshake. Myself, Dr. Fu, Hong Shay and Harold Huff, the two gentlemen in Missouri. And somehow Time magazine, through their media and PR arm at the school, decided to write an article about what we were working on, but did it in a very generic way and just said, this is a new way to form meets everything else. And then their phones were blowing up with venture firms and with companies that wanted to license the technology. Big, big food companies that were so much more established than me. And they just said, you know what? We already got our guy. And they didn't have to do that. They could have wiggled out, they could have figured out how to get out, but they didn't. And so from that process, I connected with Kleiner Perkins and I had a good friend who had worked together with a Ballard who had done a deal with Kleiner at Amyris. And he said, even if you go with Kleiner and you fail, it'll still be a good decision because they can connect you with the right people. And I happen to get involved with a senior partner there who I cherish, Ray Lane. And he since left. He started Great Point Ventures, but he was absolutely instrumental in this journey and a junior partner, moldesponde. And they really made the connections they said they were gonna make. And so we were able to then go from there to raising money from Gates and from Biz Stone and Twitter guys and everything. And so it was that careful decision. I turned down other venture firms to go with them, and I don't regret that. The other venture firms offered me more money for less equity. But I was really focused. And you see this in my whole strategy. You try to go align yourself with the sort of very best and market players. So when we go into grocery, we go into Whole Foods. You've seen me obsess over certain QSRs. I want to go with the best in class in each category, and I think that really helps your business.
