Wilson Acton is managing partner at Tall Grass Ventures and came to venture capital by way of a fifth generation Moose Jaw farm, an agriculture degree, a construction company and a decade as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer. He explains how venture capital actually works, why his fund invests earlier and more hands on than the standard model, and what he looks for in a founder. His central observation for producers is that agricultural software is currently at the stage enterprise software occupied in the nineties, single tools solving single problems, and that the platforms which consolidate it are what comes next. He also makes the case that most of the world's protein comes from animals and that the sector has been under invested while capital went elsewhere.
Every farm now runs on a handful of apps that each solve one problem and none of which speak to each other. Wilson Acton has seen this before, in a different industry. Enterprise software looked exactly like this in the nineties, and what came out the other side of it was Oracle, Salesforce and SAP.
Acton is managing partner at Tall Grass Ventures, a fifth generation Moose Jaw producer who became a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, spent a decade working on corporate deals, and then went back to building companies. His fund backs agricultural startups earlier than most investors will, and his description of what that work actually is stays useful whether or not you ever take investment: building a business is solving riddles, and the more of them you solve, the better you get.
What's Inside
- Why he thinks farm software is at the same stage enterprise software reached before its winners emerged, and what that means for the tools on your desk now
- The two things that kill a deal, learned across a decade of buying and selling companies
- Why founders who fall in love with a problem often build something the person in the field does not need
- His argument that capital went into turning peas into burgers while the majority of the world's protein stack sat under invested
- Why the buyer for a farm tool is sometimes the agronomist rather than the producer, and what that changes about pricing it
- What happened when a Moose Jaw kid on a twenty five hundred dollar horse turned up to compete against people named Cargill
Connect with Wilson:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilsonacton/
Website: https://www.tallgrass.vc
Email: wacton@tallgrass.vc
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