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[Applause] thanks felipe hey everybody from around the world thanks for joining us here in beautiful uh south of fargo north dakota um it is a beautiful day we got pretty lucky it's not too hot it's not too humid and we get a beautiful background so excited to be here i um put this presentation together to focus on the 14 startups that are going through the accelerator um and also hopefully it's helpful to the rest of you who are here about kind of the journey that we've taken that bushel so um i can't really see the screen that great myself so i might have to peek in once in a while so start starting from the beginning or kind of who the company is bushel we have 180 people on our team today uh we're based here in fargo north dakota most of us are here in fargo although during this time we don't get to see each other as often as we used to at one point we had 175 people packed in our office that wasn't big enough at the time let alone big enough during the covet era so we've got some fun issues to start working through we started the business back in 2011 i'll tell you a little bit about that story uh but what bushel is doing is enabling clear and simple business between the farmer and their grain companies who buy their grain that's what we focus on i'll tell you what that looks like so we integrate with the existing systems that these grain companies run to manage their accounting manage their financials with the farmer and then we pull that information out much like your mobile banking app today where you can see your checking account your savings balance you can see you can make transfers deposit checks we do the same thing except for the farmer they care about their their scale tickets or deliveries of their grain their contracts that they have in place and settlements when they're getting paid and so those are the three main functions we focus on we have a whole lot more to do but that's the kind of big picture it looks like this it's i think it's probably the best looking one of the best looking egg tech apps out there definitely in the grain industry one of the best uh the contracts it helps the farmer know where they're at in the process uh you know there's a delivery time frame there's a commitment that they've made and now instead of going to paperwork and looking at the files in the cabinet they have the answer right away on their phone on the settlement side again when am i getting paid and how much that matters a lot to the farmers here in the us so um the the last piece is the the platform has evolved initially from a view-only platform to much like your mobile banking app where you first could just see your checking account now you can make deposits for bushel we allow farmers to start to initiate their offers now so they can actually sell their grain through the platform and take it take it to that one next step where you're not just view only by doing transactions and that's been a big part of our progress on the platform behind the scenes bushel is not just a mobile app although it's viewed at that way for most farmers they just know it as the app that they have it's white labeled from their ethanol plant or their co-op or their grain company that they buy or sell their grain to but behind the scenes it's an entire platform the merchandiser at the grain facility is using the tools the messaging is happening on the platform the growers able to see all their information through the mobile app and of course the process completes with contracting and everything so we've got that whole thing going on behind the scenes but that's just a little bit about what we've been up to i'm going to take you back as a as a the 14 startups that are listening in today that you're going to hear from here's what we had to go through to get here so i learned in 2008 when i went to school at north dakota state that computer engineering is really hard that was what i thought i would go to if you're if you're in high school you remember you're like hey what degree am i going to pick i have no idea about how the world works but i'm supposed to pick a degree right now before i go to college and then commit four years of my life towards something i don't understand so what i did was i went through the book i knew i liked computers i knew i liked video games like a lot of computer science students might choose today and i said well uh computer science computer engineering they're both offered at ndsu i just looked at the salaries and the salary outcome was bigger in computer engineering so that's what i picked so that was literally how i started my career in computer engineering learned it was hard it's hard enough that my gpa over four and a half years that took me to graduate was 2.7 the last semester was good enough to be not on the dean's list but the opposite one where you're like 2.0 or below that was my final graduating gpa for the quarter semester i also learned at the same time it was hard to get a job so for some reason i had a hard time getting an internship i applied at microsoft and team here i flew was flown out to seattle final round interview against a bunch of harvard kids and i lost didn't get the job there i applied to john deere but my gpa wasn't above 3-0 so they wouldn't even give me an interview let alone the chance for the job and so i ended up working for kevin bifford actually is how this all ended up who actually ended up helping us with the land here on the farmers kevin and his beautiful beard coming in right now so he he and i i worked at his company as an intern in the summer helping them build some software for their automation platform um on the mobile side i was a big mobile fan when android came out that was my thing and so in the meantime um i started working on at this point given up on the job thing maybe i can start my own company and so i was learning on youtube how to build android apps i was learning what it would take to build a business and kind of top my way fumbled my way through it i call it learning so like i said on youtube then i sent the youtube link to my brother in high school he was all of a sudden two weeks in better than i was at building these tools so i'm like man i'm just bad at engineering i'm just not the best engineer i eventually got my degree but it wasn't a you know graceful process so this is an older this even nine years ago now i think probably but this is our first offices in the ndsu technology incubator where we started the business we were building apps for companies so we thought we could build 99 cent apps and sell them on the app store we tried that the most we ever made was 500 that doesn't go very far with a team of three or four people that none of us were getting paid so maybe it went farther than we thought paid the rent but that was about it uh we started to grow so we figured out that we could contract our services hey we're one of the few companies in the region that can do mobile development you can pay us and we'll help you with your software and specifically with mobile and so that made a big difference um 2014 came around we had been growing we had 20 30 people on the team i graduated ryan graduated from college so we were full time on this thing and this is what 2014 looked like to us so if you've ever been in a startup world just watch this hopefully it comes through online if the more you watch it the funnier it gets we started 2014 we're like man we got a line of credit we got a loan we're gonna grow fast we started hiring sales people we started hiring you know about june you can see things start go poorly and by the end of the year we almost fell off a cliff we literally ran out of money we spent our entire loan our entire line of credit i didn't know this and maybe for the startups on the call you can go negative in your bank account balance with the business with the business bank banking system so we were negative 30 000 in the hole on the bank which is not a small amount of money for how much we were making well we weren't making any obviously at that point but that 30 000 was a lot and the bank was like here's the 30 fee for overdraft for the next day like wow that's amazing and of course you get the paid you know get a check in the next day and you go and put it in the bank quick and try to get back to positive this is how bad things were in 2014. we had to lay off 10 people probably out of the 40 some people that we had we fired all the sales people that we hired because none of them made any sales and we were trying to do this sort of national growth strategy we learned the hard way how not to run a business but i call that flirting because learning means you failed but you you didn't fail because you learned from it and you went forward and figured out what to do better it's only a failure if you stop and you call it a day and it didn't work that's a failure but if you keep going it's learning you can just fail a lot maybe fail fast we talk about failing fast in startups a lot we did that a whole bunch so here's what we did so in the beginning we talked about through the hard years in 2014 and 15 2015 everybody says 14 son felt like a party at our company and 2015 felt like the hangover that's pretty much how this worked out but by that time we realized okay we can't be industry agnostic we can't be experts in insurance and agriculture and banking and manufacturing we didn't know all these things so we're building software for everybody it wasn't very efficient and we would lose money on half the projects and make money on the other half and we're just making it work so we said we need to focus and we picked agriculture as our focus and obviously we're here in north dakota being in fargo we have an advantage we all grew up around the farm most people on our team and also agriculture you know in terms of you know you see a semi going down the road with a truck of grain in it we know what what they're doing where they're going that's just an inherent thing that we understand we learned that that was an advantage because our competitors were generally on the coasts or in big cities and they didn't understand agriculture and so when there was an agriculture bid to be done we were winning a lot of those we started working with some of the better agriculture companies around and we said man we have something here at the same time my co-founder ryan who grew up in wheaton minnesota on the farm with his dad had this passion to solve for the farmer's issues but we realized early on in a couple other ideas that we had had that selling something to the farmer wasn't the answer that that making them manually type in a bunch of stuff just to get a little bit of value out of it that they already paid for is not really the path to to building a great software platform and so we said what if we could get the supply chain the grain companies and the guys who are buying the grain from the farmer to participate in the funding of these programs so the farmer gets the benefit and so do they and that's where we came up with bushels so bushels focused on the relationship between those grain buyers and the farmer and we took it from there so today farmers the 30 some thousand farmers that use our platform today they use it for free the grain companies all pay for their license to it to be a part of the process so that's how the business works um sorry i missed the point we raised the million and a half in funding to launch the platform in 2016 2017 from i would call like regional angels mostly people just had high net worth and they wrote the biggest check was 750 and the smallest check was 150 000 to raise that 1.5 million and between that point and a year and a half later we almost got acquired we went through this crazy m a path that we realized that we shouldn't have been on in the first place walked from the deal and then raised seven million dollars from um what i would call a family um investment group here in fargo we don't have it's not public we don't talk a lot about it they're a great company a great family you can ask me offline if you'd like who they are and then we took the bushel platform and invested in the growth of it we scaled the teams we went from like 60 people at 1.5 million funding to 120 people at 7 million in funding and by the end of last year in 2019 we raised 19.5 million in uh we call it series b uh and scale to today over 180 people on the team so it's it's quite the funding process that the own the first um what you'd call traditional venture capital came into our round in our series b at 19.5 million it's uh conti grain led the lead the the round they're they're kind of traditional venture but they're they don't have any limited partners so they don't have other people's money it's their their company's money and the funds so there's some benefits to that they can have a long view on the world and they they sort of have supported us from here so again when you go through funding process you go through building a company this is the graph you got to remember in your head i talked to you a little bit about the start of the business we were pretty jacked up that we got a contract for 500 back here then you realize that your idea is not that great and you go through this trough of sorrow where it's just really hard and you're trying to survive then it gets really bad and you fall off the cliff and then you start climbing off you know out of the valley that you're in i love this one the false the wiggle's a false hope you just feel like you're going to win but you're not and it just keeps happening you have this that was a crash of an aptitude back in 2014 then you get somewhere in here is where i feel like we are but i've been wrong before where i thought we were here but actually we were here so you know this is going to be this could be extended off to infinity or it could be something where you get out of i hope bushel is working on our way into the promised land that's what we're working on so from a startup expect it that's what it's going to look look like for you that's just the facts so how do you raise 28 million and make that many mistakes along the way that's the question that i think a lot of startups would have that are listening in today so uh starts with a vision so as we got through to 2014-15 that history helped investors feel confident that we wouldn't make all the same mistakes again so there's some value in that learning but the biggest thing was how do you set a vision that's exciting and our focus on agriculture and the launch of the bushel platform set the vision for why we we wanted uh the types of investors that we got in so infrastructure in the united states physical infrastructure is probably our greatest advancement in agriculture it allows us to move grain and physical goods more efficiently than almost anywhere in the world we have we have the highway system the rail system we have the barge and exporting systems we are some of the best if you go to brazil where felipe grew up they are not even close to the same efficiency that we have here and they're one of the biggest competitors but our efficiency is so far beyond everybody's in terms of transportation that allows us to be competitive around the world digital infrastructure on the other hand is significantly lacking in the u.s so we have a lot of investments in technology yes we have internet everywhere etc but what's lacking is our ability to transfer information between companies and farmers and all the people in the supply chain that component is missing we talk a lot about blockchain and there's a million companies trying to build a blockchain nobody solved this problem and the main reason they haven't solved this problem was because every one of these companies from the abcds chs on down have their own individualistic systems that were typically built in the 80s or 90s and if you know anything about technology that is a long time ago that they're running these systems on and what happens is you have to get the information out of those systems so bushel's vision was to connect up these systems that are disparate and don't work together and make the information accessible so we did that and that's where we set our vision so to connect and enhance the food supply chai through digital infrastructure how do we solve for that problem that's our vision so we're working on that at bushel so i start with that when i talk to investors and then we you kind of got to walk investors through what your plans are right so when we raise the million and a half and then the seven that was a land grab phase our goal how do we get as much market share as fast as possible and the reason we could claim that was because we were first movers so first mover advantage gives you the ability to get market share early and it's a lot harder to take market share away from somebody uh if you if you're the second or third player so the goal is get as much as possible so that you have the most likely chance of holding on to the majority of the opportunity so that's what we built our game plan around and then you have to build a moat so the moat is this description that an investor will ask you to say what is your competitive mode the answer has to be something to the effect of here's how i'm defending my business i have and why nobody else or it's hard for somebody else to come in and do it again and for bushel once you integrate with our platform we're tied into your accounting system we're tied into your business workflow all your farmers are using our tool it's kind of hard to just drop all that and switch and and it proves it because we've hardly lost any customers in the last three years on our platform i mean three or four companies have left maybe out of 150 so it's good turnover that's a moat that you build we talk about the game plan from you know not just building an app but a platform you talk about building an ecosystem in our case because we're a platform needs to become an ecosystem for it to be valuable we spend time on that we talk about why we're competitive who we're fighting against and then you go from from that point you talk about your team and your traction so most investors after the fact will tell you you know you say why did they invest in the company they'll tell you because of the team is is typically the answer that they lead with so if your team isn't there or you just can't prove a track record then you probably are just earlier in the funding process and that's okay and you got a lot of learning to do like i did but once you get far enough to raise a 19 million dollar b round you've got to have a team that you can talk about and they have to have all this different experience i've got a guy that worked for apple and killed the lisa program back in the 80s and then launched oregon trail in minneapolis right that guy's got some good experience he's been leading our team for five years as our president uh our dan our our sales vp incredible experience knows agriculture literally helps on the farm every year he can talk to these grain merchandisers like nobody else these are the kinds of people you got to bring to the table eventually then you got to show traction you got to show progress here's our revenue progress and i put this corona side in here because we have this plan and i'll just tell you that it's not going to be that this year but it's not going to be that either so it's going to be somewhere in between and corona just decided to wipe out some of our revenue for the first half of the year but we'll be all right um and then you need to talk about what is your not your mo but what your what is your unfair competitive advantage in the case of bushel at this stage in our business and this is kind of what i'm working on for my 2021 fundraise i might have to do we have unprecedented access to over 30 000 farmers in the united states and canada nobody literally nobody has the access to farmers that we built on our network to allow this kind of information flow and for the farmers to engage in the process nobody's done it and we can talk about it and that's a huge advantage that we have so how do you turn that into value and and value creation in the market that's we got to solve for and when we talk about our farmers these are you might talk about your user base in the process our farmers are not thirty thousand consumers that spend twenty dollars a year on your product these are typically multi-million dollar businesses is thirty thousand million plus dollar businesses that are transacting on our platform in some way that is the difference you got to figure out how to communicate who your end user is and how they're going to matter now they're not even our customer the farmer is using the platform for free they're the end user the customer is the grain company those are 10 million plus dollar businesses at a minimum some of them are 100 million billion dollar businesses that are licensing our platform so we got a lot to talk about when we do that we talk about the facts and the stats market share progress etc you talk about you know in our case data matters so we're trying to show that we can digitize the supply chain while to do that you got to show how much of the transactions you've already digitized for us at bushel this last in 2019 we have 7.5 billion bushels billion with a b bushels of grain out of 23 billion that probably transact in last year so we've digitized a lot of the process our goal is to digitize basically half or more over time and then that that solidifies us as the leader right so that's the kind of things we talk about and we talk about our customers talk about our market share and that's how you end it and then you got to ask the question are you willing to invest in our company and you set the terms so i won't go into the terms today we don't have that much time but that's kind of the process of how we thought about raising the money that we have so far and i'm looking forward to hearing the next seven pitches and the seven after that after lunch today so thanks for having me i just want to um ask you some questions you know since you i have you here we have a little bit of time um so the first one was being here in north dakota and fargo did you feel that you didn't have the competitive advantage of other players around the us um do you think like coming from silicon valley or the east coast is that a competitive advantage for for this so when we first started fundraising i i did the traditional go to silicon valley try to get meetings just like my internships i couldn't get in the door a lot of times i pitched google ventures in like an initial pitch in to get a meeting uh andreessen horowitz you know big companies that i think are great at what they do in investing never got meetings and you know it may be our pitch i would argue that maybe it's not our pitch and it may be just a complete disconnect from the coast and what agriculture in rural america does and we had a hard time explaining the problem that where i didn't have to you know you're going to have hard time raising money when you have to explain that an elevator is a grain facility that moves grain up and dumps it into a bin and not the thing that you get in to go to the hotel right that is the level of disconnect we had when we were talking to some of these venture groups they were so you're doing an elevator business how does that work at the hotels jeez we got a long ways to go right so that wasn't a good path so i went back and said okay who's gonna know our business and could at least innately understand what we're trying to do that's where we started in the midwest so we raised from north dakota south dakota and minnesota the first couple rounds um they've got a new york money on the last round but they're a grain company 100 years old business that's been around for a long time they they led the last round we kind of had to go find people who knew what we knew and understood the value of agriculture in the world i mean it's one of the largest economies in the world is agriculture all of our food comes from the process but if you don't inherently know that it's hard to get excited about the supply chain in the united states for example so that's that's that's some of the battles that we've gone through yeah that makes sense um did you how many times did you think you're going to fail and how did that feel i would say there's been three times where it's been really close um twice we've been negative bank account balances in two different years so that's that's not good um honestly even before the last round of funding a series b round we were hoping to close around in june or july it dragged on not for bad reasons but it dragged on to december we because we had existing investors we had to do a bridge loan of a million dollars just to not go broke as we finish raising 20 million dollars i mean you think oh i'm about to close 19.5 million dollars but we're also almost broke at the same time and they're valuing the business at this but we're almost have no money it's like the most craziest train you've ever been on a roller coaster ride it's like uh at one one morning you got a deal you're excited by the afternoon you might not close the round of funding and you're gonna go broke like everything's just crazy all the time and you just have to figure out as an entrepreneur how to kind of just kind of be level steady through that you can't have your team freaking out because you're freaking out uh you know you got to like hide some of that and figure out how to deal with it and and if you have enough learnings over the enough years you get good at it but um it's it's it's pretty intense and one more just so to finish um what's the end goal of your end goal or bushels and goal what do you want to be what do you want to do so we think we're on track at this point to be the number one player in this particular arena that we've defined as you know digital supply chain and ag right and if we keep down that path we'll probably have to raise another amount of funding to to kind of get to the final stage of capability because we've raised as much money as we have we have to figure out how to return money someday we don't have restrictions like traditional venture where you've got to sell in six years or our fund's going to pull the money yadda yadda but we have to figure that out and so we have two paths we will either go down an ipo path or an acquisition path to be acquired by a strategic player now that's a difficult discussion egg because you don't want to be necessarily acquired by somebody who everybody believes to be competitive so you have to look maybe outside or maybe a technology player that wants to come into the space maybe a microsoft or somebody like that that cares but then you have the ipo path which is what our companies set on we have a five-year plan to be ipo fit as a business so you have to have a certain amount of revenue and a certain amount of growth and your margins have to be right to be able to go public and so in the next five years that's our current plan we're on year one of five of figuring out how to go public that's where we're at right now well thanks jake thanks felipe