G2V has a bold vision to transform indoor farming and boost global food production. How will they achieve it? By scaling from a foundation of trust.
We asked Mike and Ryan about the decision to raise capital and daily life as startup looking to rapidly scale.
Arden TseAccelerate Fund | What was it like moving from academia to become an entrepreneur? How did you know that you had an idea worth building a business around? |
Mike TaschukCTO and Founder of G2V Optics | I was at University of Alberta working on a research program sponsored by an industry partner, with the objective of translating the research into a commercial product. It was often difficult to meet both the requirements of the university and the needs of the industrial sponsor, but we were determined to commercialize the science. Towards the end of my time at the U of A, I started developing a first-generation product which simulated sunlight. Within a year, that initial product was purchased by our industry partner. Even more exciting, as I showed the technology to people, the reaction that really struck me was from botanists. They could clearly see the power to control plants and contribute to horticulture. As I learned more about that field, I could see potential to help solve our global problem of limited food production. Tackling those two opportunities propelled me into entrepreneurship, and I left the University to start G2V. |
Arden Tse | What led you to bring Ryan in as CEO? |
Mike Taschuk | Ryan and I have known each other for years. We met at university on academic projects and we did phenomenal work when we teamed up. We published at an incredible rate, and our impact within the research community was very strong. After Ryan finished his degree, we kept in touch. Ryan had gone on to a product & business focused path and was like an armchair entrepreneur initially with G2V. When Ryan was open to a new opportunity, I jumped in with my ask. Because we’d worked together before I knew we had fit and his experience and skills filled our gap. |
Ryan TuckerCEO G2V Optics | Collaborating with Mike was where I’d felt myself really perform. We could push each other to learn more, and achieve more, and we had absolute trust – which is not mentioned often enough in startup lore. Plus, the G2V vision and market opportunity really resonated with me. |
Arden Tse | You bootstrapped to more than $1 Million in revenue. At what point did you decide that you needed to raise money? |
Ryan Tucker | We built business goal posts to signal when we’d hit the threshold to fundraise and considered raising capital twice before. But we were rapidly growing revenue, and we struggled with the choice between staying revenue focused versus taking time out of the business to raise capital. We knew we had to choose between two paths: grow more slowly organically, or fundraise. If we delayed the raise, we would probably miss the much larger growth opportunity to scale in sync with the current market expansion. We considered the foundation we’d put in place with our in-market product, the ROI baseline we’d built with customers, and realized we had de-risked the business as much as we could – we had to leap. |
Arden Tse | What were you looking for in investors you brought to the table? |
Ryan Tucker | We were looking for people who had been down roads we hadn’t, and who we trusted. A number of people we met had massively successful businesses but not in a comparable industry, and not necessarily built out in a way that reflected our values. With Accelerate Fund and A100, we met people who were networked globally, and knew how to build businesses from western Canada which has both unique opportunities and challenges. The majority of our investors we met in the six months before we started our round. We got to know people, spent time exploring who we could learn from, who we trusted. Those conversations often led to “when you raise, I want in” so fundraising was circling back. |
Arden Tse | What has Accelerate Fund contributed so far in your growth? |
Mike Taschuk | Beyond capital, some of the greatest value we get from the Accelerate Fund team is the “sanity checks.” Lots of successful investors or business people in Alberta have a history in energy investing, fewer have done it in technology. With the Accelerate Fund partners, we can check in on terms we were seeking, how to best negotiate, setting our valuation and we’d get immediate experienced perspective. That’s a caliber of advice you’d expect with a bigger round, and it is formative for us as we set out legal structure, deal structure and so on that will impact how we best scale in the future. |
Arden Tse | How were you supported in your early growth by the Alberta tech community? |
Mike Taschuk | The VMS Threshold Impact program – which is the University of Alberta’s Venture Mentoring Service – was instrumental in helping me make the transition from academic to entrepreneur. It’s a big leap. Being able to meet with a group of entrepreneurs over time helped me set goals posts of accountabilities and priorities for every stage of the business. Also, the Creative Destruction Lab program was incredibly powerful – a very high cadence of aggressive goals combined with mentorship from successful entrepreneurs. |
Arden Tse | What’s important about staying in AB? |
Ryan Tucker | We both have roots here. You end up in a place for a reason and we’re proudly Albertan. Our business at its core is agriculture and the future of AI – two things that Alberta is uniquely good at globally. Alberta also gives us access to highly skilled talent and a good cost of living. |
Arden Tse | How do you feel about the stage of the business? |
Mike Taschuk | It’s surreal in a lot of ways. There’s lots of pop culture about startups – you go heroically into the garage, there’s a montage, and then cut to scene of a massive company. Nobody talks about all the steps in the middle. Building a strong scalable business is a lot of fun, a lot of stress, and everything in between. |
Arden Tse | What’s next, what’s ahead? |
Ryan Tucker | In 2020, G2V is launching a new line of cultivation technology. It’s a next generation of products at a feature point and price point that will let us massively scale in the mainstream vertical farming market. Accomplishing that growth inflection was our motivation for the raise, since we already had a successful product-market fit with our Engineered Sunlight™ for the solar and aerospace markets. In the last 20 months, we’ve added about 20 people to our team. We’re all united around a passionate vision. What we’re building collectively is fantastic. |
Arden Tse | What are the hard choices ahead, and how will you weather the journey? |
Mike Taschuk | We continue to make hard choices almost daily between striving for future value versus sustaining known value. We’re committed to growth and choosing continually to scale is continuing to welcome new stresses into your life. What will help us thrive through the experience is the increasing depth of mentors, advisors and investors we’ve selected to surround ourselves with. We are building a community of people we can call at any point of the day, and say, “this just happened, we’re thinking this next” and get a high-level view from people who’ve achieved scale and whom we deeply trust. Trust between Ryan and I, across our team, and with our community will propel our growth and help us weather the journey. |