Mark Felix on DOW's Innovation Pipeline Strategy

So good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Appreciate you all being here. I know this is not quite the graveyard shift, but it's towards the end and so I'll keep my comments brief. Thank you to Paul and to the OTech Group for giving me the opportunity to be here today. And I feel very honored to be part of a panel of very distinguished speakers. And I think it's probably one of the more diverse panels that we've seen today. It's not all composed of middle aged white men and I include myself in that. So look forward to the discussion. What I have to share with you is a few slides on Dow the Company. For those of you not familiar with Dow, the role that venture capital and corporate Venturing play within Dow, and then just one slide on what our interests are in water and why our strategies, strategic interest there. My name's Mark Felix. I've been working for dow for about 24 years now and latterly in the last few years in the Venture Capital group. Been very fortunate that I've had the opportunity to work in several countries and several geographies and now based in Switzerland. So if I could have the next slide, please. For those of you unfamiliar with Dow, Dow is a global diversified chemical company. We're over 100 years old, based, headquartered in Midland, Michigan, and we participate across a variety of industries. Sales somewhere of the order of 57 billion. And we have about 50,000 employees, just shy of about 50,000 employees in nearly all the geographies that you can think of. We participate across a variety of industries. You can think of everything from electronic materials. I think 90% of all smartphones have got some Dow material in them. We participate in water clearly as well. Just to put a face to the machine. Dow Corporate Venturing is headed by this very nice Canadian gentleman, Monte Byer, and he has responsibility for three groups, one of which is the Venture Capital group. But we work very closely with our Ventures and Business development group and with our technology licensing group and the whole raison d' etre of this group is to create business options and growth options for the company. And one of the models that we use is clearly venture capital. But we work very closely with our licensing group and we also work with the ventures and Business Development group. It's all about creating growth options for us. Give you a bit of perspective on Dow Venture Capital itself. We've been investing consistently since 1993, which is actually actually quite a long time for a corporate venture capital group. And what we want to do is invest in strategically relevant businesses. And I think that's the important distinction. Our returns, in terms of financial returns are necessary, but it's not sufficient. And what the corporation is looking for is how do we add that extra value to the strategic element of what we do. So we are an active investor. We will invest early, we will lead rounds. We are willing to look at very early stage opportunities as well as later stage opportunities. And we typically like to have an active role in terms of a board representation, either in terms of a director or an observer position. In terms of what our ticket sizes are, we operate under a board resolution which gives us the opportunity to invest up to $25 million in multiple rounds, obviously. And our typical D size is somewhere of the order of 5 million. Just to give you a perspective on the water and our interest in water, my colleague Brian Powers is here. Brian, if you'd take a stand, who's actually from the water business himself and he leads the new business development group in the Water. So you can a good conversation partner if you want to talk about it. The way to look at this slide is broken into three parts. One is talks about what Dow's position is or what our perspective is on the industry. And at the bottom, where are areas of interest for investment for us and for growth for the company. So we're clearly interested in technologies which improve the efficiency of membrane technologies. We think there's huge opportunities in wastewater and wastewater treatment, including some of the emerging areas in oil and gas. As part of the business is also the separation technologies, which goes beyond water. And so these are the areas where we would be very interested in having engaged discussions with startup companies who are looking to grow their businesses. Thank you.