“As a founder, get to know what you want as a company…if you want to have some longevity—I call it integrity of ‘people, product and community’—it’s going to take longer than five years to do something meaningful.”
— Douglas Raggio, Bias & Blind Spots
Part 1: Introduction and backgrounds
Highlights:
- Doug: I believe we should have independent food companies.
- Doug: There are thousands of founders who don’t want to sell their businesses in 3-5 years.
- Kavita: I feel like an accidental entrepreneur who had a lifelong obsession with spices and botanicals.
- Kavita: We lose more than one-third of our world’s entire food supply to spoilage.
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Part 2: Doug—Family offices and equity lines
Highlights:
- Every investor is looking at risk and return, and they all look at it differently.
- Private equity and venture capital are playing a portfolio strategy; family offices have a different strategy: no exit required.
- It’s shocking how little track record is needed to get the tide to turn.
- A family will look at things like a bank.
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Part 3: Kavita—the funding journey and end goal
Highlights:
- We’ve been fortunate to have tremendous grassroots traction; we’re still 100% privately owned.
- We relied heavily on retail partners to help us out; the market right now is really conducive to that, everyone wants innovation.
- The Internet is an incredibly powerful tool for raising cash really quickly (Shopify example).
- It’s not immediately a barrier if you can’t raise tons of funding.
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Part 4: Q&A
Highlights:
- How to bring on a co-founder and share your vision.
- Questions to ask potential funders.
- Advice for types of multiples.
This session—The Funding Forum: Growing a Healthy Brand - Funding Alternatives That Create Iconic, Independent Brands —was recorded at Natural Products Expo East 2018.
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