ASH CLOUD
ASH CLOUD
Building a profitable animal biotech company with Mike Seely, Native Microbials
AgriFoodTech Venture Capital investment is down by roughly 90% from the high of 2021 with the lack of exits or creation of profitiable agtech companies resulting from the billions invested frequently taking the blame for investors looking for alternative places for put their money. But there are success stories.
Today we are joined by Mike Seely, the CEO of Native Microbials. Over the last 10 years Mike and his team has built a profitable animal biotech company. I recently caught up with Mike to hear about this journey and how Native created a product farmers wanted, were willing to pay for, and they built the manufacturing process to cost effectively produce the product at market scale.
Welcome to the AshCloud. I'm Ash Sweeting. Agri-Food Tech venture capital investment is down by roughly 90% from the high of 2021, with the lack of exits or creation of profitable ag tech companies resulting from the billions invested frequently taking the blame for investors looking for alternative places to put their money. But there are success stories. Today we are joined by Mike Seely, the CEO of Native Microbials. Over the last 10 years, Mike and his team have built a profitable animal biotech company. I recently caught up with Mike to hear about his journey and how Native created a product farmers wanted, were willing to pay for, and how they built the manufacturing process to cost-effectively produce the product at market scale. Mike, thank you very much for joining me today. Hi. Nice to be here. Absolute pleasure to have you here. So I guess if you think back human history before about the 1600s or 1700s, without microscopes, we could only see what we could see with our naked eye. So this whole concept of microorganisms was just, you know, un uneven incomprehensible. And then then we developed the microscope, and then now over with genomics and other tools that have come about in the last 10 or 15 years, we've been able to understand much, much more about how how huge a role microbes have in basically everything that goes on biologically on the planet. Do you just want to sort of outline how you see microbes um fitting into all those different thousands and thousands of things and and the evolution of our understanding of these amazing small single-cellular organisms?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm not a scientist, so you have to keep in mind that my perspective on it is um isn't it isn't earned from technocratic work. It's uh more just earned or developed from just being around microbiologists for basically the past 15, 16 years, um, in a from a professional context. I think you know if you talked about the arc of the evolution of microbiology technology, I think you missed a period. You know, I think they found, you know, they what's his name? The the French guy, or is it a Dutch guy? I don't know, found microbes with lenses, noticed them, little squiggly things moving around. And then somebody else came and developed the bell jar, which was kind of like the first petri dish, the first iteration of the petri dish. So there was a there was multiple steps to get the sequencing. You know, there was like the observation that there's little bugs everywhere. And then there was the step of, okay, let's isolate them and let's play with them and let's what you know, what are they doing? Let's interrogate them a little bit more. So there's like the Petri Dish 1900s, early 1900s era, and then there was um, I think, yeah, I think now that I think there's been the the PCR Sanger sequencing era, and now we're at more high throughput next generation sequencing, and uh obviously uh overlaid with a lot of bioinformatics. And so I think that's uh I think one thing people in microbiology, or whether they have a commercial or an academic interest in microbiology, kind of overlook is you know, there's a tendency to focus on the omics, like, oh, look at this cool pattern in the microbial abundances across different phenotypes, different states, different environments. Um, or there's a tendency to just focus on hardcore environmental microbiology, which is like, let's isolate things and do assays and functional assays, let's play with them and grow them and check out what kind of things they're making. Um sometimes the two don't overlap. Like you have these two categories of people, kind of microbiology people, where you're either really good at the sequencing molecular bioinformatics, or you're really good at the wet lab, you know, getting in the mud, you know, hacking together really interesting ways of isolating and assaying uh environmental microorganisms. And I think um what's exciting for me to see the evolution of the industry, or the field rather, is the convergence of the two fields more and more. So um, you know, I think that um for advanced microbiology, and again, this is non-scientific, non-scientific, non-scientist, very much a product sales product person, uh, customer, you know, focused person. Um what's what's for me exciting to see is the convergence of those two disciplines because I think that's ultimately where change will happen and where we'll see the manifestation of next generation microbiology uh come to life in the economy in our lives. Um I think there's there's um that's really good to see from my standpoint because that that I think is what's what's meant what's been missing uh from uh the commercialization of advanced microbiology. You know, like historically, if you look at like the companies that sell and make and sell conventional microbes, you know, like lactobacillus, saccharomyces, you know, those are people that are you know maybe more excited, or that maybe the the original people involved back in the 50s and 60s that were um excited by microbiology and productizing and commercializing microbiology, their functional domain was probably very heavily skewed to environmental microbiology because they they didn't have computers back then, you didn't have sequencing, you didn't have like data science on environmental microbiology. And so um, you know, this this amazing microbes as products industry started, it grew, and you end up with yogurts and you know uh bread yeast and things, but you know, unfortunately that hasn't changed in a long time. Along comes sequencing, bioinformatics, and you have all these really new talent, talents, forms of talent in microbiology, but they forgot about environmental microbiology. And so you've got like this old established microbe as products industry built upon very at this point, certainly in a chondrati of winter, this legacy industry, bacillus, lactobacillus, very, you know, a modern microbiologist like looks at these things and thinks they're pathetic. I don't think you could not. Um, but at the same time, these are markets that have formed that are large, that are significant. Um, and so now, you know, and then you have these bioinformatics, omics kind of microbiology people that have now prospecting, using advanced methods, and and now seeing them two come together to now create the next generation so that you refresh the microbiology chondrati of cycles, you end up in a spring season, I think is exciting as a product person. Um, and I'm sure there's many academics or people studying lactobacillus or things that are like probably want to like burn me at the stake, but I don't I don't care what they think.
Ash Sweeting:Well, that's fascinating. And I guess the the question I've been begging to ask on this um is given how technical scientific microbiology is, how does someone with a non-scientific background get to be running a microbiology company? What's the background? What's your story there?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I'm just uh oh man, I who's the microbiologist that chance favors the prepared mind. I would argue that I was neither prepared, I was certainly not prepared. So I don't know if that works all the time. Um, I don't know. I think I come from the Silicon Valley world. That's my background. Um when I was really young, not young, but you know, basically two years out of college. You know, I'm I'm I grew up in and around the the New York City tri-state area, nowhere near a farm, a cow. You know, I think we had we had a pet cat. Um you know, there wasn't uh, you know, I wasn't a scientist, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm more of a I'm not a scientist. Um I you know, I moved to Silicon Valley, I got lucky. I I I got to work at a when I was young, you know, now I'm I'm 45, but when I'm 23, 24, 24, 25, I got to work for a venture capital fund that did science, deep science investments. Um is basically like a you know their grunt, you know, like investing partners would have me do the stuff they just did not want to bother with, and whether it be spreadsheets or stuff, you know, stuff like that. And I got to get exposed to that the world of scientists and developing new products through science from a distance. And then um, long story short, I ended up meeting a uh scientist who had started a business called Taxon, which was had um um which was like the pioneer in you know 16s uh 16s profiling of microbial communities. And this was like way back, you know. This is a very this is a very special scientist. Um his name is Matt. Um, and I was fortunate to learn from him. He gave me the opportunity to help him try to make a business or support some of his business goals and taxon's business goals. Um and uh and this is back in like 2011. You know, people didn't really call the microbiome the microbiome then. You know, they just called it microbial communities or environmental microbiology. Um, and yeah, we ended up the business ended up, we never got to a stage where it was product revenue generating, but the business was acquired for a uh a lot of money uh for the technology capabilities, for the platform methodologies. Um and so I'd say that you know, I kind of stumbled into that um through a friend. I got to meet Matt basically through a friend, my friend Mike, um, another Mike. Um and I kind of just fell into it when I was, I don't know, 29, you know. And uh yeah, and then after that happened, um, you know, I after you know, however many years that that whole thing took on took place, I met Mallory through a professor at the University of California, San Diego. Um, you know, she had just finished her PhD, and she had some ideas for profiling microbial communities that were um kind of took some of those base base methods that were established at Taxon around correlating the relative abundance of microbes across samples, taking that to a kind of in a different direction, using absolute abundance, using um um transcription, not just um DNA, but C DNA, um, and you know, using some novel bioinformatics methods to try to capture the nonlinear phenomena that happens in nature, so that when you when you go to do your associations between the abundances and the metadata, you can resolve some of those ambiguities more directly mathematically. Um yeah, so that's kind of how I fell into it. I've done other things in microbiology too, that you know, I helped start a microbiology tools company, some things on the food side, and I don't know, I've just been very blessed to work with scientists who again back to this like the arc of microbiology. The industry started with environmental microbiologists. What do you get? You get a bunch of lactobacillus and kind of like easy to grow, you know, sort of like things that are readily growing, not necessarily conducting valuable biochemistry. Then, you know, sequencing bioinformatics comes along. What do you get in the field? A bunch of microbiology data scientists, but not necessarily good at wet lab work. Um, and you know, hopefully the convergence of the two enables um the next wave of advanced microbial products, which I believe will likely be, you know, obviously environmental microbial ensembles, consortia, um, things like that.
Ash Sweeting:Because it it comes back to a lot of that that evolution we're going from single species of things and thinking that you know you throw in a single species somewhere and it'll be game-changing to realize that these things are communities and interacting and doing all sorts of and competing and collaborating and all sorts of stuff like that. And so a single species is not gonna not gonna cut it.
SPEAKER_01:It's not just that the single species is maybe not that effective because there are keystone organisms in an environment that you know, like if you have a let's say your house is infested with mice, you know, like do you use a polar bear or do you use like a tabby? Yeah, cat. Yeah, you know, like there are species that can have a pretty big impact um on a single strain, single species basis on the ecosystem, the it's it's more about the the species themselves that matters. You know, most of if you you know, most of the environment, the the abundances of microbes in the environment is skewed. So if you take a handful of soil or a swab of skin or a sample of fecal matter anywhere, you know, let's say there's um just to keep the math simple, this is not actually the math, but just to provide an example of this for the audience, let's say there's a hundred different things there, 95% or more of the biomass is just 10 things. Yeah. And so if you're an environmental microbiologist, like the first wave of people, um, when you didn't know that there was hundreds of things, because morphology doesn't really tell you much, you know, what what you manage to grow on a plate, probabilistically, is going to be the weed. It's going to be the thing that's abundant. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the thing that's driving what we observe. It's not doesn't necessarily mean that it's doing the things that add a lot of value. And so um, yeah, it's exciting for me to see the convergence of environmental microbiologists and you know, kind of microbiome data people. And I think that the critical thing for the future of this category um for second-gen microbial products, it's not just the environmental microbiology piece, but it's the stack around process development. So there are um, you know, if you're trying to build a business off of novel environmental microorganisms as products, you're gonna not only have to be good at environmental microbiology, not only have to be good at micro you know bioinformatics and all of that stuff, but you're also gonna have to be good at stabilizing, formulating, scaling microorganisms that are gonna likely be much more recalcitrant to cost-effective production. And so um, you know, I think that's there's you know, that's an area too where there's been a lot of advancement. And so, anyway, I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying.
Ash Sweeting:Taking a step back from that, because that's all very deep in the science and the the natural side of things, and to you know, microbiomes everywhere. So it's like where do you start in terms of we're gonna choose a certain use case that's gonna have commercial validity or we think it's gonna have commercial validity, we think there's gonna be a market that's gonna want this product, and then we are gonna have to go through all that work, and we're gonna have to find people who believe in us enough to keep on funding us to go through all that work, and that's you know, there's a there's a a big nut to crack in all those things, especially when you know there's literally probably millions of different potential use cases for micro products. So I guess firstly, where do you start and then how do you how do you drive that forward to to build a business that's um not only raising revenue but is is now profitable?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean native is uh profitable now. Um I think it starts with common sense. There's like a you know, there's a um there's a tendency, I think, for people, and I would say especially PhDs, to think that you know to to the where the lines between reality and hyperbole become easily blurred by you know them being smart. And you know, I think common sense is important. And so when we started native, um you know, we don't come from the animal health and nutrition industry. We don't even identify with the industry, we're an advanced microbiology supplier. Um we were evaluating opportunities or places to deploy and develop products from Mallory's original discovery methodologies, and um we just we kind of looked at markets that used microbes as products. We looked at different industries that used microbes as products, and we said, um, well, what are the microbes being used? Are they interesting? The idea being that, like, you know, mallory or whoever, you know, that team can create better ensembles of microbes that are more valuable. And we'll figure out the process development and scale up later. Um and animal health and nutrition stood out to us because you know, microbes as products for animals, whether you're talking about a cow, a dog, any animal species, excluding humans, um at the time that the microorganisms being used were um conventional, lactobacillus, dead bread yeast, you know, these very antiquated microbiology solutions. Um, you know, anything that basically came from generation one environmental microbiology. Um and so we said, look, everyone's there, people are buying microbes today, they use them every day, but they're using these really silly microbes. Like, why would you use lactobacillus in a cow? I mean, I'm sure if you throw enough research and marketing funding, and you're a giant company based in Europe that's been doing it in yogurt for many, many years, you can come up with a positioning to justify it. But from a biochemistry standpoint, it doesn't make sense. And so, yeah, we just kind of looked at markets that were where microbes as products were established, but where the underlying microbes themselves seem to be um. Antiquated. Rather than saying something like super hyperbolic, like we are like the greatest sequencing discovery platform on earth, and we believe in a world where no child goes hungry, and like you have all these like visionary, like hyperbolic, kind of like grandiose, you know, like visions of veganism and whatever other nonsense, these idealist kind of um yeah, we didn't start, we don't start things that way. We build the product, we try to understand like what are people using today? It's common sense. What are they using today? Does that is that a microbiology relevant problem? What are the competitive ingredients? Do we think we can make something better? We don't try to build business off of um or product lines off of uh too much hyperbole. I mean, obviously, if you're an entrepreneur, you have to be sort of crazy, but sell a vision of some sort, but but yeah, but I think common sense is I think ultimately um a little bit of what plays into it.
Ash Sweeting:And then the whole the first product development, how long did that take? How it's rough.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it's tough. You know, people think that I mean the business native today is 10 years, over 10 years old. And yeah, the business is Ebidar positive today, but it was rough. You know, it's it's not just uh it took a long time because you know, we had to start not just from the product side, but we also had to start from the discovery side. We had to start like this, wasn't a technology that was spun out of a university. This wasn't like a thing where a bunch of work had happened over five, 10 years at like the Broad Institute or something, and then we just got a license. None of that, none of that happened. Um so it was tough. It was a lot. Um, we had to do a lot in parallel, and I think the biggest challenge came when the microbes Mallory wanted where her data suggested were important. Um, those microbes were anaerobic, non-spore forming, often in some cases novel genuses, and um where there's really no base to reference to how to produce, how to grow, how to do these things.
Ash Sweeting:So that that just to for everyone's knowledge, that means they're exceptionally difficult to grow. And you know, just because you've identified something that may be super, super useful, it's like, oh, we can have that.
SPEAKER_01:It doesn't mean that there's an easy path from that to actually producing it in a way that it will stay alive and get into where there's been a lot of technical de-risking that's had to happen, but because we stake, we we try to be product common sense people, you know, we've that's kind of forced us to to hire, you know, more engineering type minds past discovery than science. I would say scientists and engineers in some ways are similar, but in other ways very different. Scientists are like more interested in discovery, exploration, you know. Both are really good at math and stuff, but scientists are you know more that you know, their proclivity is more towards discovery, exploration, and engineer is, you know, kind of in my experience is is it's more centered on utility, breaking things down to some of their parts and making it useful. And I think um, you know, I think that's another piece that I think we did kind of well at native is is is having different people that express those creative skills but still work together well.
Ash Sweeting:Was that a difficult transition from the mindset of the business to sort of go, okay, we're in a discussion.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, of course. It's difficult for anybody, any company in any world that's trying to develop something new, you have those, uh you have those um tensions that'll arise. But I think what um I think we got lucky in that we um you know Mallory, Corey, Corey Dodge, Sean Gilmore, um Jordan, Cameron, some of the our product people were you know both um open, they're open to being disagreeable. And it doesn't become it doesn't become like a battle for your identity, you know, and like um uh yeah, it's it, you know, and I think the I think where so when we think of when I think about second generation microbiology being successful, you know, I talk, I think we talked about having good environmental microbiology, good bioinformatics, and now good good process development, kind of more engineering capabilities around that. I think what's done a lot of damage to the field, to the category, has been overinvestment because you know, there hasn't been common sense. You know, if you look at the amount of capital that's been put into the microbe, new microbes as products category, that there's been an overinvestment, you know, and I think sometimes I'm not gonna name names, and people would say, well, you're overinvesting native's like gotten too much capital. And it's like, maybe, you know, over a hundred million is a lot of money in my world, but it's not 800, it's not a billion, it's not 400. And, you know, I'm a little dismayed that more businesses that have raised significantly more capital are not even EBITDA positive. And so, you know, I really hope that you know, future entrepreneurs or even people today doing it, focus on being efficient and using more common sense, and I think um, you know, that's another thing that I kind of worry about sometimes is uh, you know, but I think that that era is kind of over, right?
Ash Sweeting:So how how was it? Because going back four, five years ago, five, six, seven, eight years ago, when there was much more money out there for investors, and there were these companies that were selling big stories and um much more the bigger grand divisions, and you know, having as being I've been aware of what microbus might um native has been doing for quite a while, and you always kept your head head down much more than many of the other companies. But how how was that when there was this big um you know all the all the events there, all the talking, and to sort of you know, stay the course and and keep to your own plan compared to get caught up in all that hype?
SPEAKER_01:I think we, you know, I don't even if I I don't think the hype would have ever come to us, right? Because you gotta remember, you know, at the time there was like just a lot of Berkeley vegans running around talking about how the future is cellular, right? You had like people saying preposterous things about how you know steak is gonna come from steel tanks, right? You had people saying things that so like even if which I which we did not do at native, but even if we were like, let's go, I don't think we even could have gone after those huge rounds because the area that we operate in is it's almost too common sense for you know people, you know, trying to um and for investors at the time, you know, people were like, Oh, yeah, I remember, you know, this, yeah. So I don't, and I think we just avoided it. I I mean I think it was intentional to avoid it. We even if it the opportunity was there to raise insane amounts of money, we would not have because we use common sense. Um it wasn't even there because you know the story was too common sense, almost, you know. Like, you mean the amount of money that's been deployed into I mean, this is the big problem I have with synthetic biology outside of human pharma is it's really underdelivered commercially. Massive amounts of money has gone towards synthetic biology businesses, and almost none come to mind outside of human pharma that is delivered on a really great product, let alone a great business. And um yeah, there's a does anyone's so many people that are if they're even listening to this, like for sure, hate me right now. But um, yeah.
Ash Sweeting:Firstly, I think I think all these conversations uh you know they're better off in the open because you know what's happened's happened, and you know, people look at the numbers, it affects, you know, if you look at what's invested now in many of these things, it's not what it is, all the money's going into AI at the moment. Um, I'm sure there'll be pendulums and all that sort of stuff with with other industries and where investment's going in, but it's it's I think it's very valuable to reflect on that. And the the I think going back to the the single species, single you know, channel like the synthetic biology is very much focused on particular genes or particular very it's very highly, highly targeted, and and then when you start looking at you know the microbiome and the the biology of it, there's there's so many interactions where it is consortia that have um have the impact. So you've got how do you you know the complexity of doing synthetic biology across consortia compared to um a single targeted area or highly targeted area.
SPEAKER_01:I take it I make a much more simplified common sense product view of this, which is like boring and not exciting and does not require a black turtleneck sweater, you know. Although I'm wearing a black t-shirt, but that's not that's coincidence. The I usually don't. The um if your project requires significant amounts of capital, then it better deliver a significant value to the customer. And synthetic biology has a higher capital cost associated with it today than naturally occurring microorganisms.
Ash Sweeting:That's something like a cancer treatment or a novel treatment for a genetic disorder or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:Obviously, that customer is is is the average sales price of the treatment is a thousand times higher, but if you're trying to replace, I don't know, fat or whatever, some industrial commodity with high capital, heavily capital, heavy high capital intensive science on the front end, you know, it's more challenging.
Ash Sweeting:Back to the whole um evolution of of natives process, and we're talking about how you know growing some of these microbes that you have in your products are less than easy, but it's not as though because essentially that's going to be some sort of a fermentation process, so it's not as though fermentation is a a new concept that's been going on in you know, beer, wine, etc., for thousands of years. How how do you see the ability to sort of leverage existing expertise in something as common as fermentation, but then adapt that to something as specific and uh specialized as what you were doing? Or was it basically a blank sheet of paper and and starting from scratch?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean I'm not a I'm not I'm not Corey and I'm not Sean, so I don't want to Well then through your lens as the person who was who was um I think it comes back to common sense. You know, like okay, your trials indicate that your product has a range of performance of X. If you assume you split that value creation four to one, three to one with a customer, what are the requirements from a manufacturability perspective so that you also can achieve eighty percent gross margins? Um the I mean if you look at you know, native has raised over a hundred million since inception, and now we're EBITDA positive, and you if you do a a pie chart of where that money was deployed prior to being profitable, you know, from a from a research and product development standpoint, that pie chart would be eighty percent process development related, twenty percent fancy schmancy microbiome, interesting, ooh, sciencey, you know, it'd be like um twenty percent Mallory is Ponce de Leon and like eighty percent Corey is the shipbuilder. And so um but ultimately Corey or the process development team, you know, they've they spend a lot of time making sure that the experiments and that the activities um harmonize and align towards a business objective. You know, that's a short term, a short-term set of business objectives, not you know, long-term, grandiose, like um yeah. I don't know. Did that answer your question?
Ash Sweeting:I think that that that that that provides a lot of insight into the whole process. So yeah, and it's it's at the level that I can understand. So I'm guessing that yeah, me too. I don't know because there's so much nuance too, and there's so many, it's so easy to get into weeds and something.
SPEAKER_01:I would say it really it just comes down to people, a culture of being disagreeable, and common sense. And like scientists knowing that they're scientists, and the engineers knowing that they're engineers, and then both appreciating each other and knowing where they can add value and work as a team, and not over indexing on science and not over-indexing on engineering, but finding a balance um where um it functions efficiently. You know, the mythical man month, you know, the more software engineers you throw at a problem, the longer it takes to solve the problem. Well, you know, the more PhDs you throw at a problem, it'll be the same. You know, you might not necessarily even get to the problem. And so making sure that you have that both sides of the engineering and science domain appreciate each other. I've seen be really successful. And the only benchmark I have is native. Now, I could be wrong, but last time I checked, native's probably one of the only profitable microbiome companies. There's plenty that make a lot of revenue, but are they profitable? I don't know.
Ash Sweeting:And on on that side of things, you obviously have to engage with customers with farmers initially because the initial products were dairy or the first product was dairy. And you know, you said none of you came from an ag background, from a rural background, or even an animal background. So how was how was that journey? Um both from how they perceived you and then how you built the relationships and and and you know got to where you've got to now.
SPEAKER_01:It's just more common sense. You get to know your customer, spend time with them, you know, understand what they their needs are, try to learn their problems and try to be relatable if you can. You know, I'm very unrelatable to a dairy farmer. There's no question about that. Um but I think they do appreciate you become relatable when you sh when you convey a desire to help them. It's almost irrelevant, you know, whether you have a New York Yankees hat on or, you know, I don't know, a Texas Rangers hat on. Like they don't, if they see you as somebody that's wanting to help them, like any customer, you they appreciate that. And so I think it's about spending time and being genuine about wanting to help them through the technology that you want to supply them with. And I think that goes a long way for dairy farmers, it goes a long way for veterinarians on the pet space. Um, and I think um, you know, I think it it it um we spent a lot of time doing that, you know. Our first in, you know, when we started selling Galaxis Frontier in 2000, the first customers we got in the Central Valley were customers that that I that I'm silliant?
Ash Sweeting:When did when was that brought into the market?
SPEAKER_01:Galaxis Frontier, um, I think it was like around 2000, year 2000. I sorry, 2020.
Ash Sweeting:Okay, yeah, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, man. Cool, awesome. And so when you started selling 2020, 2020, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um you know, I I was going up there and just like cold calling. Imagine a guy like me showing up on a five, 10,000 cow dairy farm trying to talk to them about advanced microbiology. And I would I would go with a PhD in microbiology. You know, I'd go with Lisa, Josh, Cameron, uh, Mallory, and you know, we were like, hey, let us tell you, give us like 10 minutes of your time to just tell you what we do. And if you don't like it, you can tell us to fuck off. And that was like being very direct, matter of fact, you know, um, and then getting that time, every, you know, one out of three dairy farms would say, Okay, man, go. You got five minutes, hurry up. And then if you convey passion for what you're doing and what you're working on, they're like, This is kind of interesting, okay. Well, let me think about it. And you just it's just about being a part of the community, but like really kind of um just sh just sh explain to them why what you're doing can help them and be valuable to them. Um and just, you know. Yeah, I don't know. Did I answer your question?
Ash Sweeting:Uh that's that's it it's in some ways, it's that being yourself, being authentic, being passionate, and and thinking about it through what we got a lot of people, you know, from the orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_01:When I say orthodoxy, I mean the folks selling lactobacillus and dead bread yeast today that would laugh at us saying a dairy farmer will never pay 18 cents per cow per day for what you're selling. And here we are, four years later, taking their customers with customers paying for the value.
Ash Sweeting:Because it makes more than 18 cents a cow per day.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and so it's not like there's this tendency to make assumptions about the customer because it's what you've done or what you've experienced. And in reality, I think customers in general across industries want the best that they can get for their business. In this case, they're animals. And if the value's there, the value's there, and that's what wins. And um and so you have to be willing, as a microbiology related entrepreneur or whatever, to go seed that and spend a lot of time. You can't just sit there in your tower doing science and being the smartest person, you know, in a small crowd. You have to extend that out into the world. And so I think it's important for um for people doing commercializing advantage. Microbiology in any industry to spend a lot of time out in front with the customers.
Ash Sweeting:And um we're getting close to time. So but before we go, what's next for native?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, native some we we, you know, people think we're a cow company, we make products for cows. That's not that's not the that's not that's not really the truth. I mean we we do more than that. We make products for other animals. So we have a big um a growing business on the pet side. So sort of like in in the dairy cow side, we've we've looked at profiled the microbial community of sick and healthy dogs, and and have found organisms that we believe and know are to be are superior to helping them, helping dogs have a strong gastrointestinal system, um, microorganisms that can that can treat and prevent chronic enteropathy and some of those associated um dysbioses. Um we make and sell microbes for direct to consumer. We also have customers that buy microbes from us that resell them. Um so we've and we also in that canine pet world, we actually have a drug that's in clinical trials. Um, you know, it's much more of a therapeutic, but it's a consortia of organisms to to treat, to completely treat chronic enteropathy. Um, we've done a lot of research um in poultry and a lot of research in in the beef feedlot area. Um, and so we're thinking about how to how to commercialize those objects. Um but really for us, you know, it's there's ongoing research and development to new areas, there's investment into you know further validating the things that we're going to be commercializing, both in the form of trials, papers, all that stuff. Um, and obviously the required processes for those products, um you know, from a process development manufacturing standpoint. Um and but you know, it's really from a commercial standpoint, we're just trying to grow, right? So we have a lot of partners. We're, you know, in dairy, we just we've announced a partnership recently for distribution for Galaxis Frontier on the East Coast with uh with uh Premier Select, which is the leading uh genetic supplier into that territory. And you know, there's a lot of a lot of dairy cows in your homeland, it sounds like um, finding partners to bring our products and technology to those other territories, those other regions. And so a lot of from a commercial perspective, it's a lot of partnership development, sales channel development, both in dairy and in and in pet. Um, and uh and then continuing to develop new cool things in new areas like beef feed lot, chicken, um, some stuff in horses that we've been doing.
Ash Sweeting:So awesome. And I gather my homeland being Australia, but also I'm sure that there's lots of cows in, well, there I know there's lots of cows in South America and in Europe and in other parts of the world too. So there's a whole jigsaw puzzle in terms of trying to navigate.
SPEAKER_01:I always have a hard time distinguishing between New Zealanders, uh, like with kiwis and aussies. So I'm sorry.
Ash Sweeting:I was talking about New Zealand, but I shall not be offended. That's cool.
SPEAKER_01:All right, man.
Ash Sweeting:But just quickly before we do go, is there anything else that you'd like to add that we haven't already discussed?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. I don't know if this has been helpful for anybody.
Ash Sweeting:It's been fabulous. This has been really interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Uh um, I think it's uh yeah, I mean, I just to get back to something we were talking about, you know, I you know, I the evolution of microbiology, like its evolution as an industry, as a product category. Um you know, we started like you said, we started with uh noticing little things moving around under a lens hundreds of years ago, to then, you know, the bell jar, the petri dish, trying to get these things alone and start playing with them. And then we ended up with lactobacillus and sacromyces. Um, and that became the status quo. That became like what I view today as the orthodoxy in microbiology. Um, and then we chugged along, da-da-da. And then um, you know, we we we were able to now use sequencing, bioinformatics, a lot of advancements in chemical engineering as well, in terms of process development and scale up. And so now, you know, we're now looking down the tunnel at the next the next generation where it's novel species, novel compositions of species, maybe byproducts or metabolites, proteins uh that can tune the distribution of microbial um communities in a particular way. Um and I think you know, I just you know, I'd like to see this category be really successful. And you know, my view is it is it's the success of the category is much less the fun much less a function of raising exorbitant amounts of capital and living in a world of hyperbole and dreams and is really dependent upon being hyper-efficient, being product focused, customer focused, and you know, making a lot of sacrifices as an individual, as a team, personal and professional. And so if there's out people out there that are entrepreneurial that want to do microbes, you know, uh and you have that mindset. I'm no expert at this, you know, native is no mega company, but I can tell you I think that's the right path you should be taking, that approach. And uh yeah, I'd just like to see the category win.
Ash Sweeting:Mike, so thank you so very much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, man. Thank you for listening to the AshCloud. Please subscribe to Ashcloud if you've enjoyed this podcast, where I will continue to discuss food sustainability with guests who bring a deep understanding of the environmental, political, and cultural challenges facing our society and creative ideas on how to address them.