The Mentor Effect: Hard Truths and High Impact Advice for Founders

Jordan Tyler: Welcome back to Founders in Focus, where we're taking you behind the scenes with entrepreneurs, innovators, and visionaries redefining the future of animal health, agriculture, and food innovation.

Now, if you've been following Founders in Focus through our inaugural season, you know we usually sit down one-on-one with bold entrepreneurs inside the Plug and Play Animal Health and Agtech accelerator program. But today, we're flipping the script. Instead of spotlighting startup founders, we're shining a light on the mentors who guide them through their arduous journeys of entrepreneurship.

Today, we will share a live panel discussion recorded at the recent Plug and Play June Expo in Topeka, Kansas, co-moderated by myself and my lovely co-host, Mark McAllister. You'll hear from three powerhouse mentors, Dr. Trish Jackson, Dr. Kevin Hahn, and Cole Ahlvers, each of whom brings decades of experience across regenerative agriculture, veterinary drug development, investment strategy, and the pet food industry.

From navigating risk and farming to the real economics behind veterinary care, all the way through to the rise of fresh and feline nutrition, this panel pulls back the curtain on what it takes to build a successful startup and how the right guidance can be a game changer. So, grab a notebook and pen or fire up your Notes app, because the conversation you're about to hear is packed with the kind of insights every founder, investor, and startup mentor needs to hear.

Let's dive right in, starting with brief introductions from each of the panelists and then getting right to the meat of the conversation. We're your hosts, Jordan, Tyler—

Mark McAllister: —and Mark McAllister—

Jordan Tyler: —and this is Founders in Focus.

Dr. Trish Jackson: Hi everybody, I'm Trish Jackson. I have a consulting company, I work directly with farmers, I'm a soil scientist—I'm helping farmers transition to regenerative ag or more nature-based solutions. I grew up in a farming community in Kansas, but I never did anything with farming until I went to graduate school and discovered that soils were where it was at. And so that was my pathway to where I'm at today. So, I'm excited to be here.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: Hi everybody, I'm Kevin Hahn. I too am a from a farm background. I grew up in Indiana. I wanted to not be a farmer, I wanted to be a park ranger, but that didn't turn out so well for me. I actually turned out to be a veterinarian and then a medical oncologist, then I started some vet practices, then I started some telehealth practices. I had a CRO for a while, did some contract research for Big Pharma.

Came here to Topeka in: 2007

Oh, one last comment—I don't know how they got my picture here. But that's me in my Cardinals shirt, sorry Royals fans. But I enjoy a life-work balance, and one of my passions is, my bucket list is, to go to baseball games. I have a hot dog and it counts if the home team wins. Took me 20 years to get the Cubs.

Cole Ahlvers: Cole Ahlvers with NQV8. Grew up in a farm about an hour from here. From there, grew up in pet food. Been in pet food for 20 some years now. President of a company called NQV8, where we have a consulting business that focuses on animal health—everything from formulation to finished bag, and then we also have our own fund. So, we're on our second fund right now. We've got 24 investments, all focused in the animal health space. Anything from pre-seed to seed to series A, and even in fund two I have a couple of series B and series C investments, but excited to be a part.

Mark McAllister: Awesome. Thanks for joining us here. We want to kind of kick off, you know, get more into the actual startup side of things. So, each of you touch companies in some way, either as an investor or advisor or, you know, [on the] operations side. Give us an example of a company that you think is really shaping your industry at the moment, and maybe if not a company, a product type or a product category. And Trish, we can start with you.

Dr. Trish Jackson: Sure. In regenerative ag, one of the real struggles is that there's pain points all over the place for farmers to transition, and a lot of that is data-driven decisions. They need good data, and they also need the education around how to understand that data, how to interpret it and make actionable decisions.

So, one of the companies I really like is Soil Regen, by my good friend Liz Haney and Russell Hedrick, they're the co-founders. They work really hard in helping farmers translate their data into action and they make plans to help them transition their farm over time so that it becomes profitable to make that transition faster.

So, as we all know, it's really hard to change, especially in farming. And so, helping farmers see that goal and make that transition in a short amount of time is pretty commendable in my opinion. So, I really like that one.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: So, how many of you in the audience own a cat or own a dog? And how many of you don't like your vet bill when you leave the veterinarian?

I think the biggest issue facing most companion animal owners is the increased expense of animal care. And if you're a veterinarian, your biggest worry is being able to pay staff and afford the cost of goods. So, one of the areas I see that's really emerging in our industry is making smart decisions, financially smart decisions as a pet owner, whether is a diagnostic test or it’s to pick the right pet food or it's to pick the right flea and tick medication.

They're looking for decisions. So, we're seeing not only an emergence of new diagnostic companies, but animal health companies that are helping you monitor your pet's health so that maybe you don't have to see a veterinarian as much, or if you're a veterinarian, getting involved in more in telehealth and telemedicine visits. So, we're seeing a little bit of both sides looking at the financial costs of pet ownership and what kind of new technology can help us manage those costs.

Mark McAllister: When did you first see that trend emerge? And maybe give us some reasons you think it's accelerated so much recently.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: The day I got out of vet school, almost 40 years ago—it's been a constant issue. In fact, there was a survey done about six months ago asking pet owners what would be the maximum amount that you would spend on your pet if you wanted to actually spend on your pet's condition. And I won't tell you the number— you'd be surprised, maybe you wouldn’t surprised—but they did the exact same survey 10 years earlier and the number was exactly the same. So, in the last 10 years, costs have gone up, but the mental number that you're going to spend in your pet hasn't changed. And so, it's always been a concern.

In fact, probably the worst customer I've ever had as far as complaining about their vet bill is my mom. And, you know, how can you defend charging that much for a pet? And the, the really is it's part of the decision-making process to educate. And so, I think one of the struggles we have as a profession is educating about our fees and the costs so that it becomes more acceptable conversation, so you want take care of that pet.

Cole Ahlvers: For us it's on the feline side. One of the things that you mentioned, feline used to be a forgotten species when it comes to animal health. All the new companies, all the new brands, they're going to get in the canine, then we'll do feline after we've been successful. The last probably five years, feline has really flipped that. It's some of the hottest brands out there, where that's Nacho Eats [Made by Nacho] or some of the new machines that you're seeing with the Petlibro product and the one that we have with BistroCat. It's an interesting dynamic that's out there. Now there's a lot more focus on feline, so there's a huge opportunity. Now, it's a different consumer. It's a picky animal. It's hard to find the right products, but if you can, you can find a lot of success.

The other side that we're seeing is fresh. Everybody's trying to get in the fresh, but how do you make fresh profitable? This is the biggest hurdle there. And then another one, it's not necessarily a product or product type, but retail—who's your retail partner? Used to be you want to find your PetSmart, Petco, get with one of those, launch a product, you'll be fine. Now it's shifted more to the Amazon’s of the world, the Chewy's of the world, and that's just a whole different supply chain. So, trying to get the entrepreneur to understand how that supply chain works, how to be successful, and what ultimately is great. If you can find somebody like a Walmart—I know that seems strange—but they still sell over 26% of the world's pet food. Find somebody like that to partner with and truly buy in, then you'll have a leg up. I mean, the retail side of it is huge, because all the independents are just getting crushed right now.

Mark McAllister: Can you share a little bit more on your portfolio construction, kind of the way you approach this? I think specifically because you're so specific to animal health, or at least you, you know, you invest pretty heavily there. Give maybe the, you know, the startups in the room and some of the other corporates an idea on where you look for opportunities and how you try to construct a portfolio of animal health companies.

Cole Ahlvers: So, for us, we try to be very diligent in the idea. We don't want to have competing brands. You're going to have somebody that's got a dog food that's competing with another dog food, but you don't try to get two of them that had the exact same kibble that's in the exact same store, and you're trying to compete at the exact same level or where they're at in their stage. S

o, if we've invested somebody that's at $100 million in sales, and then we have somebody that's in let's say $5 million—to us, that's a lot different. If you have somebody like Nacho Eats, which is Bobby Flay’s company that we're invested into, that's different because of the celebrity aspect of it. But Bobby's actually writing checks, which makes it different. He's actually promoting the brand, which makes it different. So, it's all those aspects that fall into it as far as where they're at, but we try to be as intentional as we are with every investment to not have competing against each other because then you don't know. Well, if I'm putting this into this, is that going to translate into the other one from a confidentiality standpoint? Well, let's be honest. We're all in pet food. You can only make a kibble so many ways. So, how do you really, truly differentiate yourself? It's the marketing, it's the team behind it, and ultimately it's the founder.

If we're going to invest, the idea has to be solid. It has to be defensible. But we're going to invest in the founder because, you know this, something's going to go wrong. How are you going to pivot when it goes wrong? How are you going to react and have you been there before? So, that's what we look for more often than not.

Jordan Tyler: Kind of a follow up question, and this one is for you Cole. So, in the pet nutrition space specifically, you're talking about a lot of shifting priorities, a shifting distribution landscape and retail landscape. So, how do you really separate, you know, true innovation from something that's just maybe chasing trends?

Cole Ahlvers: So, back to the founder, that's where it all starts. So, the founder, the founder's group, have they done it before? So, what is their background? Have they done it before? Can they raise money? That is one of the biggest things. If they're able to raise money, honestly, so they can continue to focus on their company. Most of our founders struggle when they're spending 80% of their time raising money and the other 20% actually running their business, because then we end up running their business and that's not what we should be doing.

But as far as the trends part of it, it's kind of a Catch 22, because you actually need to be following the trends or ahead of a trend, because you can have the greatest idea out there, it could be the coolest technology, but if nobody buys it, it, it really doesn't matter. So, it's kind of, it's balancing the two of, “Hey, is it in the trends or are you ahead of a trend?”

So even in pet, we look to human a lot. We get a lot of our ideas from going to baby food, things like that. What is next in the human side because the humanization of pets, and can you get ahead of a trend? And then is your idea defensible? You know, you can be in the trend and be actually right next to somebody, but if you’ve got something that's defensible from a marketing position, you have somebody bought into it, you really can set yourself apart. But again, the founder is key.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: And I'll just jump in a little bit about that. You know, obviously we're here in Topeka, which was, you know, the corporate headquarters for a number of years for Hill’s Pet Nutrition. And part of what I enjoyed with my time at Hill’s was not just the founder of Mark Morris and actually his daughter-in-law, Betty Morris, still is here in the city and very vibrant, active person in the city. But the founder really sets the tone. And the tone we had at Hill’s and still have at Hill’s is it's all about the science. If you deliver the science, then you can deliver the nutrition. And I see a lot of people here that I've worked with at Hill’s, and we would get very frustrated with the marketing side, and you can come up with some good marketing phrases, but as long as the science supported it, we felt comfortable. We had a product that would sell, and the consumer would come back and buy it again. So, I think having the founder set the tone of the company, whether it's, you know, a million-dollar company or a billion-dollar company, the founder has to set the tone for the course of the company.

Mark McAllister: Yeah. We'll stay with you, Kevin—you've been a part of research projects, you've been a part of, you know, the operational side, you've been a part of the corporate side. There is typically a difference in pace between research, between academia, and between industry. Color us, you know, kind of the scenarios of both there. And then, you know, maybe how that either runs to a head at a startup, or just the differences between the two and how to play one against the other or to take advantage of both.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: So, the key word that comes up is always patience, and balancing the patience between the people that work for you, plus the people that you're paying or you're investing with, is to have that patience. Because for some projects, the research may take, you know, two or three years. It may take just a few months. It depends on what the project is, but it's trying to balance the patience of the research with the investment, with the customer that's anticipating the sales someday.

So, it's like the kid in the backseat—well, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? And you've got to say, “Well, here's the pace we're on. This is the speed we're going. Can we balance that patience?” So, you know, at the academic level, when I've done research, it's a bit of a slower pace and your deliverable is a publication, so there's not a lot of pressure there. But you do that exact same research in an organization that is developing the product—everybody's waiting for that return on investment because they say, “Okay, that's going to cost, you know, X amount of dollars, but we need Y to cover that.” So, it's really a balance of the patients in the organization and who you have as your partners that can actually understand that level of patience.

Mark McAllister: Would you have any advice, or maybe what is your advice for academia? And then maybe advice to, you know, startup founders on how best to partner there?

Dr. Kevin Hahn: So, I've worked with a lot of people in academia. I've done research for corporations and I've worked with other academicians who start their own companies. I think the part that I find challenging is, and Cole, you can speak to this as well, and that that is—I have my idea, I know what I want to go with, but I know how much money it's going to take to get there, and they start selling percentages of their equity in the company. And I find it very frustrating that I've met with a lot of academicians that are now 5% owners of their idea, rather than 100% owners of their idea.

The current company that I manage, my partners and I, we started this 11 years ago, and we did it with our own capital raises. We didn't go to family and friends, we went to ourselves—well, I guess our spouses too. And we're all still married! Happily, by the way. But it was one of situations where we decided let’s not give away the store, and it comes back to my word: patience. We're going to be there, but it's going to be maybe five or six years. Yeah, we could go out and do a capital raise, give away 55% of the company, be there in two years. But you know, five years is fine.

And so, I think the balance that I see is, with a great idea that starts in academia for it to be commercialized, it's going to take some time. Because I mean, with no disrespect, the academician is going to take the time to do it exactly right, whereas maybe me not being in academia, I say perfection is the direct enemy of “good enough,” and we need to be good enough to get it into the market. We don't, we can be perfect after the fact, depending on the idea, but I think that balance of academia and commercial activity, my concern there is that there's a many, many people who are giving away equity too fast.

Jordan Tyler: This next one is for you, Trish. So, you bring a unique sustainability perspective to this panel, and I'm curious, you know, greenwashing is something that we are all unfortunately very aware of as we strive for a more circular economy and a more sustainable future. So, in your experience, where has the agricultural or ag tech industry kind of gotten it wrong in terms of implementing sustainable solutions? And what are you seeing that's really starting to move the needle?

Dr. Trish Jackson: This is a tough one because I think we've gotten a lot of things wrong. But let me just start with one thing that industry I think has gotten really wrong, is the expectation that change is going to happen like that. With a startup with a really, really great idea, you have to develop relationships in order for your idea to really take hold. There has to be that word-of-mouth, even these old-fashioned pathways to change. So, one thing we've really gotten wrong is expecting rapid change, and so if you want to have more rapid change with farmers, you have to make them feel comfortable with the risk. And so that sooner pathway to a higher return on investment to, you know, making that change, we saw some really great ideas in the pitches this morning that help address some of those issues that farmers that want to go down this pathway are facing. So, that's a big one.

Another one is we really haven't developed the market for, you know, the specialty, all the storage, let's say for regeneratively grown grain for example. We just don't have the infrastructure and the market demand for those products in order for farmers to take advantage of higher market value as it should be. So, those are two main points I would point out.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, I appreciate you bringing those points up, and I'm curious: over the next, let's say, five to 10 years, it feels like we're kind of at an inflection point or coming up on an inflection point in a lot of these initiatives as we collaborate more and we break down some silos. How do you see that accelerating over the next maybe five to 10 years?

Dr. Trish Jackson: I think that we saw examples of that this morning, I want to reiterate that again, you know, leaning into these technological innovations that we have that address some of the bottlenecks. I guess I mentioned earlier in my comments that farmers really need to be comfortable with their decisions. And so, they need to have data-driven decisions, but they need to really understand what the data means in order to feel comfortable with the decisions. So, I think that's going to be a real breakthrough if we can find the tools, you know, like in their pocket that's really readily accessible and easy to use. I think that's going to be something that is going to help a lot.

And then education. So, I'm a recovering academic, and the pace of academics is pretty slow compared to industry, but what academics do well is talk to people and educate people. So I, you know, I mentioned one company that I really like in the startup space, and they're working hard to help farmers understand what they need to look for in order to support their decision making so they can reach those goals in regenerative ag that they're seeking.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: You're talking the same language, except I'm going to talk it in pharmaceuticals, and that is, there's a lot of barriers that I see startups having in getting into the pharmaceutical industry. And part of it is the slow to adapt, to change, and or pushing the current paradigm that needs to be changed. So, for example, this new space next door that we're opening up. Link is a perfect space for small batch or small volume pharmaceutical manufacturing. The current industry standard, though, is the Big Pharma, like the Bayer or the Mylan, or now it's named something else. But you know, they say, well, they want to do 5 million units—we're looking at maybe 5,000 units, and so the barrier to entry is trying to help the scientist think about how they can do small volume manufacturing at the same quality as the big manufacturer and do it efficiently. And if you look at a lot of the red tape that the FDA has or the Center for Vet Medicine has, we need to break down those barriers of red tape that exist so they can get into market with their idea.

So, I think it's not just the farmer, it's the pharmaceutical, the pharmacist, or the scientist. Every one of them has their own struggle with red tape, with paperwork, with the process, but breaking through to that next transformational step, they need that mentorship, they need that energy from others around this room to make that happen for themselves.

Mark McAllister: I want to throw a quick question back to you, Trish, on the regenerative side. The data and the research I've seen, and I'm sure you've developed some of it is, you know, basically, essentially the J-curve of adoption in regenerative practices where first couple of years, there's really not ROI—in fact, there may be negative ROI for most growers—but, you know, you're investing in year seven, year eight potential. That's a tough sell for growers. You know, like Cole and I could tell you that, I'm sure you've spoken to growers who tell you the same thing—we're worried about this year's bottom line, and most of the time we can't make it anyway, so stop talking to me about carbon credits that I will never see. Right?

Is there a fundamental block in the opportunity of adopting some of these with most growers? And if not, how far out are we on the education side? Maybe it's a, you know, a different version of the question Jordan asked, but give us a little more context there if you could.

Dr. Trish Jackson: Okay, well one thing that came to mind while you were talking was something that's resonating with some of the older farmers that are kind of aging out of the system and they want, you know, they want their grandchildren or their children to take over the farm, is the concept of legacy. And so, a lot of farmers realize at this point in time that what they're doing isn't working anymore. They can't really, you know, keep going down that pathway with the blinders on.

So, there's a lot more curiosity about what is the soil health stuff that I keep hearing about, and so if you approach farmers with that concept, that longer term view, they know that they're trying to pass on a working farm, and it's the current generations’ responsibility to keep the farm and the family, right? So, that is one way to talk to farmers about this legacy that they're leaving. You know, why not leave it better than you found it? So, that seems to be one kind of nick in the armor, I guess, to get us through, that's changing the conversation.

Mark McAllister: Awesome. We'll go a little more generic here and talk about some past experiences, and Cole, we'll start with you. What's one of the hardest lessons you've either been taught or been proximate to with your time in the industry, or maybe your biggest failure?

Cole Ahlvers: This could be a long story. Yeah. Honestly, for us, it was in fund one. It was one failure that we had in fund one, one of our 14 investments. We had one that honestly, we thought was on cruise control, and being new to the fund and venture capital space. We invested early on when they were in their pre-seed and then they'd got to their series B round and a $38 million valuation, had brought in the money for that round and we didn't have a seat on the board, didn't have any insight into it. We'd done some early consulting work for them, and honestly, they had three big private equity firms on their board and thought, “Hey, those are the smart guys in the room. Let them go and we'll be good.” Come to find out, they called us about 10 months before the company closed the doors for good and said, “Hey, we need some help.” We're like, “Oh boy, this is not good.” And we're operators at heart—we grew up in manufacturing, so we sent our team up there, did the evaluation, came out of it and said, “Okay, here's how you fix it. We need to throw some more money at it. Here's the amount of money.” And realized that these private equity firms said, “Yeah, that's not going to work.” They could write the check, but to them it wasn't worth the effort. It’s just a write off. And they went through an ABC process, went out the door, company closed, and 52 employees were out of jobs and our millions of dollars were down the drain. And I sit here today and tell you we could have saved the company if we had that insight.

So, what we realized was, yeah, there's a lot of great partners when it comes to taking money. One of the things we tell our entrepreneurs: make sure you pick the right partners. Because it is going to get hard. You are going to have these hard conversations. Make sure it's somebody that will continue to not just put money in foolishly but allow you to have those conversations, give you room to pivot. And then also for us as a company, anytime we make an investment, we have a board seat, we have an advisory board seat, something that we have insight into the company just to see what's going on.

Listen, we know—we're smart enough, we know we can't save the day every time we feel like we at least put the right people in the room, have the right conversation to do it. But yeah, that was a lesson that was very painful. But I'd tell you, it made us better as we went into our second fund and how we structure stuff, and now that we have outside money into the fund, feel a lot different on how we approach things. But also with those entrepreneurs, just giving them the lesson of “not all money is good money,” and to be very strategic. Into Kevin's comment, be very careful about the equity you give away, because you can never get it back. And what a private equity firm has in mind is a good deal, the entrepreneur likely won't see it that way if you're not aligned.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: Yeah, I was thinking about some of the areas that have been successful, and obviously the great failure, I think the word that comes—another word comes to mind besides patience is diversity. And it's diversity in your business plan, because something's going to happen where your business plan fails, and you don't want to have all of that failure on top of you.

. So, back in the day, before: 2008

But I think it's one of the situations where I think be focused on your business plan, but have a little bit of diversity. So, when your business plan doesn't go the way you thought it would, you can pivot to something else fairly quickly and keep your vision alive, even though your pathway may be circuitous on the way there.

Dr. Trish Jackson: My example is really in the ag tech space, the concept that if you build it, they will come… No, not necessarily. Okay? You might have the best idea, the best of everything, you know, the best technology, and if you don't know how to market that or to build those relationships with farmers, you know, it's not a guaranteed thing.

So, that was an example of my experience. There was this fabulous world changing technology, but if you don't, you know, approach farmers, right, or market it correctly, it's just not going to work.

Mark McAllister: Yeah, pervasive across Silicon Valley is the idea that if you build a great product, like the best marketing is a good product, because there are plenty of examples of these rocket-ship companies, particularly in software and, you know, consumer products that fit that model, but the reality is like 90% of it is distribution and sales. And you can have a great idea, but unless you can get in front of the right people, it just does not matter.

Jordan Tyler: Kind of along the same vein, and Kevin, I'll pose this to you first—in the founders that you have worked with, the first time founders, so first-time startup, what do you think is one of the most common misconceptions that that person comes into a program or comes into a startup having.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: I'll go with my most recent founding partners who just exited. For years, his belief was that everything we were going to do was going to be a billion-dollar outcome. Everything is a blue-sky billion dollars. Now, we never did that, but we did good enough. Then one of my first founders that I worked with, it wasn't about, “Oh, it's going to be a billion dollars.” It's going to be, “Everybody's going to just, you know—if you build it, everybody's going to come to our door. They're going to want this service.” And, and I guess I'm the middle, my middle founder, it is what every idea is going to be golden. This person never had a bad idea.

And so, between Blue Sky and everybody's going to like it and it's the best thing since, you know, white sliced bread, It's interesting. I'm the behind-the-scenes guy. As I was telling you earlier, I'm the guy that spends the money. I'm not the one that makes the money. So, I'm a researcher at heart. I like to create ideas. I can't sell them. And I know some people in that know that out there, but it's one of the situations where the founders I've worked with all believe that everything is just golden pathway. And it's been my job to say the pathway is actually made of bricks, but they're made out of clay, not gold. And let's be patient on that pathway.

Jordan Tyler: And first you have to build the bricks.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: You have to build the bricks.

Jordan Tyler: Before you start on the house. Exactly. Cole, what about you?

king right now. Back to your: 2008

So, if you're going to go raise money, raise money for what you need and some, because you need more than you think you're going to need. Because something's going to go wrong. You're going to have to pivot, you're going to have to adjust, and the last thing you want to do during that critical phase is go find a way to raise more money.

So, raising money is one of the, probably the biggest thing from a, “Hey, what did we think?” to what the reality is. And the other thing is, when somebody comes in with a plan and says, if we just get this percentage of the actual market, we'll be this successful—I hate hearing that. If I hear that, I'm probably not going to invest. I don't want to hear you tell me you're going to only get this percentage of the market. What is your real plan? What is the real market? Because we have so many people come and say, “If I get 1% of the market, it's a hundred-million-dollar idea.” No, it's not. It's probably a zero-million-dollar idea.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: Yeah, I think what you're saying there is very key, and that is where do you get your data from? And in the animal health market, it's really a struggle to get accurate data. In my past experience on the human side, if you're a drug manufacturer and you're selling drugs into the human market, it's all traceable. It's all trackable. So, I could look at drug X, I know exactly how many units were sold for what price, for what discount, for what wholesale, where it went, was it prescribed, et cetera. That kind of data doesn't exist completely in the animal health side.

So, for a lot of the startups, looking at either a drug or a device or a food, where do you get your data to show what that market size really is? And who did you do it with? Did you estimate that there's 50,000 companion animal clinics? So, if there's 50,000 dogs that come in, or one dog per clinic every day, that's 50,000 dogs a day, is that really a true data point or not? Because you really don't know. So, I think, you know, between trying to raise funds and defend your market value is a struggle in the animal health market.

Cole Ahlvers: Especially on the food side. Back to the retail conversation, what retailer are you going into? I mean, like, Tractor Supply doesn't even share their data yet. You actually have to get that a specific way. Are you going to Amazon and Chewy? Because if you're going to Amazon and Chewy, the data that you're going to get from Target and Walmart probably isn't going to apply to your go-to-market strategy.

So, where your data comes from, and the other thing is the price part of it. You know, understanding all the things that are going into your product and how those are going to shift every quarter. Because when you deal with commodities and deal with food, you're targeting something that's going to take nine to 10 months to develop. By the time you get to market, that pricing you're working with, and you're probably not big enough to contract out all your ingredients like a Hill’s or somebody can, all those dynamics are going to be shifting by the time you get to market. So, knowing that you have that wiggle room in your margin build and everything on the front side is huge.

Jordan Tyler: And Trish, from more of an agtech perspective, what do you see with founders in that space, the biggest misconceptions?

Dr. Trish Jackson: This is more of a general one. It's just the hiring too many staff too fast. Um, so I kind of want to defer to Cole because we were having a conversation before this panel about what they learned about it and how they address that staffing issue.

Cole Ahlvers: Yeah. Hiring too many people too fast is a huge problem, because especially—one of our companies hired 14 engineers. I don't know what they thought they needed 14 engineers for. Let's just say it didn't go well. But it is such a huge suck of time and resources, and not just because you hire them, you're paying them—it's the training. If most of the time if you hire, make the wrong hire, especially to key positions, that's a year's worth of salary, but it's a year's worth of your time. And as a young startup, it's hard to get that back for us. We always encourage them to lean into consultants, but not just any consultants, like folks that actually understand in your industry what you're trying to achieve.

There's a lot of good groups out there, especially in animal health, that you can find that are very target-specific and can allow you to do what you're good at. What you want to do is find somebody that you can either bring into your company and hire or rely on a consultant to walk before you run, to be able to hire the right person, but more importantly, let you run your business. You have to spend your time running your business. The more time you spend on the other things—raising money, worrying about personnel—the worse off you are. And it is the biggest financial drain you'll have.

Dr. Trish Jackson: And just to kind of put a bow on that, hiring generalists instead of specialists is really a good strategic move. [People] that can wear multiple hats, and in agtech, specifically you need to be able to talk the farm talk. You know, put your elbow on the side of the pickup truck and stick a piece that wheat and your teeth and go to town.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: So, I'll put a plug in for the Amyl Health Corridor. This area is really blessed with a large number of consulting companies. In fact, one of the models that we embraced is outsourcing our employees.

So, we're a very lean organization, but we're a global organization, but most of our global partners are our outsourced consultants, and most of them reside between Manhattan and Kansas City. So, we're very blessed for a lot of startups where they use internal consultants like you have or use other consultants. There are regulatory, quality, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, engineering, the whole depth and breadth you can find in this area. And everybody's got either a group they can go to or introductions they can make. But this area is really rich with a lot of smart people that are willing to lend a hand to startups.

Mark McAllister: I'll double down on this a little bit. And this, to each of you sitting up here—something that we study a lot at the early stage, you know, on the investor side, but something that I'm just, you know, personally very fascinated by, is the characteristics of good hires, what to hire for. So, you mentioned hiring generalists instead of specialists. What other characteristics are you looking for? What makes a successful employee, or successful employee for a startup specifically in the early stages?

Dr. Trish Jackson: As someone who is hiring into a startup, I’ve warned them—you know, I asked them specific questions about how they felt about switching in the middle of the day, you know, from 180 degrees what they were doing. If they were comfortable doing things that they weren't hired for. I think making sure you have those conversations, you know, and set that expectation that it is a startup and we're all working towards success, but it may not work. So, I think that's a key for me, is setting expectations and making sure that they're flexible.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: Alright, so I'm a little cheesy, but I believe you have to have a life-work balance, not a work-life balance. And so, when I look in some of the startups that I've had, you're going to spend more time with that person than probably members of your own family. You're going to learn more about them than probably your own child growing up. So, you want to make sure that they're fun people. So actually, one of my first interview questions is, “What do you do for fun? And are you having fun?” Because I don't want you to bring down the happiness in my room. And so, I think it's got to be part of the focus. If it's not fun, then it's work, and I've been blessed that I've never had a work a day in my life.

Cole Ahlvers: To build on that, we have a rule that it's a word you can't probably say in this setting, so we'll just say it's the “good human rule.” You can't—you’ve got to be a good person. At the end of the day, especially to his point, the idea of you're going to work with these people more than you're going to see your family, and you need to be able to get along and you also need to be able to have hard conversations.

One of the keys, and maybe it's not who you should hire, it's who you shouldn't hire. You don't need to hire yourself. You need to hire people that will actually challenge you how the best idea in the room wins. You don't need yes-people around you to make you feel like the smartest person in the room. I learned that a long time ago. One of my best skills is hiring smart people. Get as many smart people around you as you can find. Because when you have people challenge you, especially in the early days of a company, that's when the best ideas come out. That's when you can pivot. That's when you get to the other side. Because you are going to have a lot of hard conversations and you want know those people in the room are not yes-people, they'll have your back. And at the end of the day if you disagree, you can still be friends.

I know it's crazy in the world today, but you can actually have different ideas and still be friends. Get enough of those people in the room and you can be successful. I mean, I grew up with sports, played college sports, big believer in having a lot of athlete types on the team, not because of the sports part, but from the competitive part, from the winning and losing and being around that, that environment. What we believe creates a great culture and ultimately a great team. And that team is what's going to make you successful. Your idea may be great. Your team is what's going to put you to the finish line.

Mark McAllister: Yeah, building that a bit, I think it was Palmer Lucky has reiterated this numerous times over at Anduril, the concept of, like, hiring your replacements. It's like, if you're the best person on the job, you should do the job at the company, and your goal should be, you know, as leadership, as the executive team, to replace you across the team. If you're not doing that, you're not, you know, hiring the best talent out there. I thought that was a really interesting way of just kind of framing the mission there.

We'll kind of summarize with a question here and then we got a fun one to end on. A lot of success at Plug and Play we’ve found in the collaboration between industries, and that's not, you know, just the collaboration between maybe competitive companies, but the collaboration across sectors of the economy. And so, I think the way I'd frame this to you guys, you know, with your diverse backgrounds, is have you partnered with someone outside of your industry that maybe unlocked a new perspective, unlocked a product? And what did that look like? And is that something you target generally? Trish, maybe we can start with you.

Dr. Trish Jackson: I was just thinking about this startup who was a soil scientist and an engineer, and the soil scientist understood what needed to be collected in the field to help the farmers, but they had no idea what was, you know, available in terms of measuring these things out in the field. Because a lot of times we have to wait for that data. You know, you need it today, but you have to wait for it. And so, the engineer had that understanding of these available technologies that could be applied to that problem. And so, I think that when you get those two people together or multiple disciplines together, you discover questions you didn't think to ask or solutions that you didn't know existed.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: So, about maybe three years ago, we did reach out beyond our limits as far as being drug dealers and decided to get into sports nutrition and sports medicine. And at the genesis of that idea was that some of the pharmaceutical products that we were developing in manufacturing would be used for treating certain conditions, but those conditions could also be managed by a physical therapist or through proper nutrition or through proper exercise. And the idea was, “Well, we don't know anything about that. Why don't we learn more about it?” And so we decided to create kind of another venture into this combination of sports and medicine.

Now, I'm not an athlete, but I've raised three athletes where I paid for all their eggs and milk. But knowing about, you know, what goes into that? So, we made a pivot to learn more about our competition, which was the non-pharmaceutical competition but more in the wellness space. And it was a great venture. We actually spun that off and we, you know, we said goodbye, it's a successful venture, but it was a combination of physical therapy, sports, nutrition, and actually predictive genetics to help the athlete have a better quality of life and not need a pharmaceutical intervention. So, it was an interesting venture. We had some rough bumps, some down, but it got us out of our comfort space and learn more about the area that we can play in.

Cole Ahlvers: Yeah, we're actually using a sports physiologist now for one of our projects, and their focus was human forever and now they're focused on dogs and how we can bring that into the hunting and game market for dogs for certain types of products and treats and just the way that they look at the world. It's different than [what’s] been done in animal health. So that's one specific example.

I think for us in animal health, we always are looking towards human health. Most of the trends you see in animal health come from human in some facet. I think the interesting dynamic on the other side of that is now there's a lot more money from the human side in animal health, and they don't realize how hard pet food is. They actually think it's, “Oh, it's pet, it's easier.” I'd probably eat at most pet food manufacturing facilities before human food [factories] that I've been in my life, so take that with a grain of salt. But just the idea they don't appreciate how hard it is for animal health and how we make pet food. So, to me, that's one of the biggest things that's interesting is how those trends overlap because there's a lot more money coming into pet from animal health today than there's ever been.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: But I'll follow up on that and say that there is more money in human health that's going towards animal health. But what the human health people don't understand is that a dog is not a small person and a cat is not a small dog. And so, they think that it's instantly translatable from human health to animal health, and many of us in animal health know that that's not always true.

Cole Ahlvers: Not even close.

Jordan Tyler: Absolutely, and comes full circle to your point earlier, you know, really doing the research is, is so important, especially when you're coming up with a new innovation. You have to understand it first. Build the bricks, then you can build the house.

So, I want to thank everybody on this panel. This has been a really fascinating conversation, but I want to end with some fun. So Trish, I'll start with you. Obviously you have spent your career building, advising, scaling, everything in between, and you've seen a lot. So, if your career had a theme song, what would it be and why? And if you want to sing a little bit of it for us…

Dr. Trish Jackson: Well, one song I really love is “Won't Back Down” by Tom Petty. You know, that sort of resolute optimism. I have had to do that and maintain that in order to continue down this pathway, because there's lots of ups and downs, and it's just, but the ups are so worth it, so worth it. It just keeps me going, so I won't back down.

Dr. Kevin Hahn: I don't remember all the lyrics and I'm not going to sing, but it kind of starts with, “You hear the clock ringing… you get on the 8:15 to the city and you know, there's people looking pretty and, you know, I'm just, they're just taking care of business. So BTO—for the younger kids, Bachman–Turner Overdrive, “Taking Care of Business.” And I'm just sitting here playing my guitar and sitting on the beach and just taking care of business. It's not that easy. But that's my theme song, taking care of business.

Cole Ahlvers: I feel like this is where I should have read the questions ahead of time… Probably a newer country song, Larry Fleet, “Earned It.” There's two or three verses in there. It talks about the lessons that you learn and how they apply to your life and how they're always changing. And then at the end of it, each one ends with “because of the simple life.” And that's what's great about, I think, my career, has been—it's long days in the plant. It's long travel. It's building the team. Sometimes you don't know if the next day what's going to happen with what entrepreneur. At the end of the day, we are around a lot of good people. You mentioned it. This industry's full of good people and it really is that simple life and a crazy world that we live in, and being able to go home to that. Every day is a blessing.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah. What a great note to end on. Thank you all. So, let's have a round of applause for our panel…

That wraps today's episode of Founders in Focus. A huge thanks again to Dr. Trish Jackson, Dr. Kevin Hanh, and Cole Ahlvers for sharing their time, insights, and—let's be honest—some incredibly valuable hard truths about the road to success in animal health and agtech.

Whether you're a founder trying to break into a complex market, an investor looking for the latest and greatest ideas, or just curious about what makes or breaks early-stage innovation, we hope this conversation gave you something to chew on and take back to your team.

And if you're part of the Plug and Play community, remember—the relationships you build with mentors can be one of your strongest assets. Don't wait until you need advice. Start these conversations early.

We have just one more episode in season one of Founders and Focus, and we hope you'll stick around to close it out with us. We'll be taking you behind the scenes of another program and event fostering bioscience innovation in the Midwest, because as we heard several times during the Plug and Play June Expo, it takes a village and support systems for startup founders are crucial for long-term success. We'll be back with more stories from the front lines of innovation in just a few weeks. Until then, stay curious and stay connected. See you next time.