What led you to the idea of founding Flox?
I’m a founding partner in what’s called a venture builder. We build deep tech companies in areas like AI, deep learning, robotics, photonics, and so forth. We have nine businesses now, plus FloxAI. One of these companies is in agriculture, called Earth Rover, which does light chemical free, weeding robotics. We also had a project with solar energy to dry waste, and that was when we understood that chicken waste had high nutrient quality for this kind of project. I realized that this is a big market with very little technology inside the chicken sheds.
You have a lot of technology when it comes to genetics, feed, and processing in factories, but nothing on the farm side. We brainstormed some concepts and decided to start. I brought in a CTO, some chicken farmers, and some people from Silicon Valley and we started working on it.
Since I was a kid, I’ve been interested in how things work. Eventually, I met my business partner at the time, and we built a company that did well and then crashed. I just stayed around smart tech people, people I trust, and ended up in this direction.
What would you say were your biggest stressors as a founder?
I have got 20 members of staff – the responsibility, their salaries, their families, future, plans, their tomorrows.
Personally speaking, I don’t like the concept of being a leader because it’s a lot of responsibility for me. I prefer to delegate that to other people. What I enjoy is being with other smart leaders and they do the leadership. I don’t like the management aspect of it, I prefer the strategic side.
At the moment, how do you measure success?
In venture-funded startups there is a bit of a track that you’d follow: how many clients are you getting and of what size? For me because of the stage where we are in building a beautiful product, I don’t care about anything else at the moment. I trust our product, so developing it is the first thing.
The second is the standard traction metric that everyone expects you to express.
Getting the product to something that you’re proud of and willing to shout out about is so important. Otherwise, it would make the whole leadership thing even harder. I couldn’t be a leader in something I don’t believe in.
Have there been any pivot points in the company’s lifetime?
We first built this company based on a robot that we had in another company. The chicken farmers asked if we could use robots to do things. We didn’t see robots as the first step for chicken farming. So, the pivot was moving away from robots, towards purely machine vision. Although, ironically, we’ve now moved back to including robots in our offering because I had a lot of experience with robotics with two previous businesses.
Were there any moments when you thought it was all over?
Yes, we had a senior person in the team leave and that was scary. We almost shut the company down. We took a bet with what was the nascent company, and it was a good bet, but it was scary because I could have 10 other things but decided to focus on this.
Can you tell me about your experience with fundraising?
I’ve been very careful in the sector because everyone and everyone is competing with everyone. So, I took zero money from any of the large players.
They kept offering in the beginning and I refused. I only took money from friends that I knew from other businesses or farmers. The first investment we ever took was a very subsidized investment from a farmer. He has been our champion and we have helped him a lot as well.
I was in Europe and got funding after six months, then we went straight to Silicon Valley and got a term sheet in a month and a half.
Any advice for other startups in the industry?
The first thing to say is don’t trust my advice and don’t trust anyone’s advice. Assume that advice comes with strings, whether it’s ego or something else.
For me, nothing else matters more than knowing that I can fully trust the people I work with. If you can have this, you can get through all the hard times. If you get this wrong, you’ll end up hating each other and feeling like you have wasted years of your time.
When you pitch the company to VC's, what do they ask from you before investing?
There’s often that period in which you have no money, but you need to show proof of concept. If the VC is a deep tech AI type of VC, they need to know that your team is top-notch to build the technical product. They need to know that you’ve got at least a couple of interested customers who can test your product.
If you’re looking for more SaaS-style VCs, they’re looking more at monthly numbers, revenue increases, and so on. In our case, most of our investors were their first deep tech investment
What changes would you like to see in the animal health market?
More agritech. Consumers, NGOs, and regulators want better animal welfare and environmental impact. There’s an obvious gap in animal welfare if it was more stable.
I think unfortunately the farming sector is a bit scared of being the first and investing. This is something we’ve seen in banking and what happened with banking? All the challenger fintech came in and devastated old-school banks. Generally, the big animal house companies need to be more innovative and not scared to take on.
