Mimi:
Welcome to The Badass CEO Podcast. This is Mimi MacLean. I'm a mom of five, entrepreneur, Columbia Business School grad, CPA and angel investor. And I'm here to share with you my passion for entrepreneurship. Throughout my career, I have met many incredible people who have started businesses, disrupted industries, persevered and turned off opportunity into success. Each episode, we will discuss what it takes to become and continue to be a badass CEO, directly from the entrepreneurs who have made it happen. If you're new in your career, dreaming about starting your own business or already an entrepreneur, The Badass CEO Podcast is for you. I want to give you the drive and tools needed to succeed in following your dreams.

Mimi:
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Mimi:
Hi, welcome back to The Badass CEO. This is your host is Mimi MacLean. And today I have on Vanessa Dawson, and she is the CEO and founder of Arber. It's the first of its kind, plant care company, whose core mission is plants and plant wellness. An entrepreneur with a background in digital development venture and private equity, Vanessa has experienced operating, investing and consulting with a variety of companies from early stage technology startups to innovative teams and Fortune 500 companies.

Mimi:
Prior to launching Arber, Vanessa founded a crowdfunding and payment platform company called Evry, designed to make payments for group activities more efficient. She also started The Vinetta Project, a high impact capital platform that accelerates female founders growth and helps provide them with resources to build their companies. Through Vinetta, she was able to cultivate a diverse global network of founders, investors and corporate partners focused on closing the gender based funding gap for the female tech founders. Vinetta has enabled the flow of over $225 million in venture capital to seed stage companies, creating millions of dollars in economic value. Vanessa was also recently elected to the National Women's Business Council, a nonpartisan federal advisory committee established to serve as an independent source of advice and policy recommendations to the administrator of the SBA, Congress and the president and economic issues of importance to women business owners.

Mimi:
To get your Top 10 Tips Every Entrepreneur Should Know, go to thebadassceo.com/tips.

Mimi:
Vanessa, thank you so much for coming on. Actually, after reading your bio, I'm super intimidated because you are totally the badass CEO with what you've done. It's really impressive. There's so many different aspects to talk about with your career. But I really want to talk about is your latest venture, Arber, and it's something that's near and dear to my heart with healthier living because me having chronic Lyme, you have to clean up everything. And one of the things is making sure your pesticides that you're using for your gardeners outside or on your plants, they cause so many health issues that people don't realize. So when I saw this opportunity to talk to you, I was super excited because it was something that's near and dear to my heart. So I would love for you to just talk about how you came up with your idea and then how you just transitioned away from finance and investing to do your own thing.

Vanessa:
Yeah, amazing. Well, thanks so much for having me and yeah, it's a very exciting opportunity. There's not a ton of products like this in the space, but there are a ton of chemically driven products that, like you said, people, consumers just aren't totally aware of the not only human and negative impact, but environmental impact and otherwise. So it's a massive opportunity. So I guess, where to begin? I kind of started Arber, this is my fourth venture now. So it's come from a career of entrepreneurship trying to figure out which one stuck and which one I truly could dig into, pun intended with this one. And I think I really love the product world. I've built a ton of companies within tech and software and I think coming into consumer goods and creating products was really a fascinating switch and also one where I thought I could have a lot of impact, which has always been important to me as an entrepreneur.

Vanessa:
So yeah, this really has been a working process and a labor of love for the past three years. I was working, primarily was working actually supporting other female entrepreneurs for the last seven years through my project Vinetta, Vinetta Project, which was a community for high growth female entrepreneurs building primarily again, tech companies. But we did get into consumer. We worked with a ton of great corporate partners. And so it was really interesting to see what JP Morgan was looking for on the market and what Procter & Gamble was looking for on the market, and supporting these women and accessing these really great Fortune 500s and kind of understanding the innovations that they were on the lookout for and the big opportunities that they first saw.

Vanessa:
And so after working with Vinetta and just scouting for a very long time, you get to see thousands and thousands of companies. And so yeah, again, you get to see kind of what's missing potentially in the market space. And I had moved from New York to LA a couple, I guess four or five years ago now, and started what I call millennial adulting and bought a house and started gardening again. And yeah, I was just getting back into planting. And so taking care of plants, something that I've always done as a young girl and that my mom and my grandma really cultivated in me.

Vanessa:
And when I went to buy products for this space, it was just a really fascinating retail environment. There was just really chemically driven products that again are super harmful, a lot of them are super harmful, for the planet, the pollinators, the people, your pets, and or there were organic or naturals, which is a greenwashed word in our industry and in the number of industries. And those products are just primarily brands are using similar ingredients, so neem oils or [inaudible 00:07:07] or BTs, and they're just kind of repackaging and repurposing under a new brand.

Vanessa:
So not a ton of scientific, technological complexity, new ingredients. And a lot of the greenwashing really exists because they're not as strictly regulated or tested. So certain organic products I even found were harmful to beneficial insects or harmful to soil or waterways. So yeah, there was just a really interesting space to be had within the garden world. And after, again, working with so many female entrepreneurs over the years, I hadn't seen anyone doing anything in this space, which was so interesting to me as well. So we've gone non-toxic really inside our homes. We've looked at our skin care and our laundry and our children's routines and our cleaning routines. But when you looked outside the home, I couldn't find anything that really satisfied me from a technology perspective and a brand perspective too. So Arber, that was the beginning of my search for Arber.

Mimi:
That's awesome. I love that story. Obviously, you had a lot of experience, but this is like your first time really getting into the consumer products experience for your own personal ventures. How was that? Did you just call up people that you knew already? What was your first step to say, "Okay, I'm going to do this company, now what do I do? Who do I call? Where do I find how to source it, how to make the products?" Because it didn't exist. You're asking to create something that doesn't exist.

Vanessa:
Yeah. I did a to of research on whether I wanted to sell a product B2B, so like mass scale. Do I want to be in agriculture and selling into wineries and farms and doing mass market with products like these? Or do I want to create again, a very consumer home and garden product focused more on the brand and on that distribution and pricing and costing and service to the customer. And that was where the technology was sourced. So I actually discovered this woman who I fan-girled, named Dr. Pam Marrone. And so she has built a career, for the last 30 years in this industry, called biologicals, which is a technology that is used very heavily in the agricultural industry, to start to replace or supplement chemical pesticides. So she's been developing and discovering these biological ingredients through numerous different companies over her career.

Vanessa:
And so she'll go, she'll put together a team of scientists, they'll go out to the fields quite literally, and just find unique environments, whether it be in the soil or whether it be in a corn field or whether it be under a maple tree in Japan. And you find these really interesting microbes and bacteria and plant extracts that are doing the work, they're preventing disease. They're preventing pests, they're boosting plant immunity. And so she brings those back to the lab, figures out how to naturally, or I should say organically, not synthetically, produce them through fermentation or other processes. Then has mass produced a number of these biological products for agriculture.

Vanessa:
So when I first saw Pam, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is my competitor, this is who I need to be." And she's very focused on agriculture, but then very quickly I realized this technology has been around for a long time in agriculture. It's kind of just getting there where economies of scale are coming down. So manufacturing prices are coming down, access to these ingredients and R&D is coming down in price point, and they're not accessible to the home gardener yet. So I was like, maybe I should partner her with this doctor versus trying to compete with this person who has 30 years experience and a PhD in entomology from Cornell and the list goes on.

Vanessa:
So I classic LinkedIn drops into the DMs and we just started talking about our histories as entrepreneurs and what she's working on and what I want to do with biologicals and home and garden. That was really the moment where I started to piece together what the products could look like because Pam has had such a depth of experience developing these products and I've had more of a depth of experience on the consumer side. So we kind of collaborated on what that could look like.

Mimi:
Now, is she a partner or is she a consultant?

Vanessa:
She's an advisor. So yeah, she's an advisor, an investor in the company and yes, she's kind of my chief product and scientific advisor and we work very heavily on the product lines together in the formulations and the different technologies.

Mimi:
That's amazing story. But it's true, there's times when you have to look at someone strategically versus competitive and see where you can leverage them. I think the next hurdle that people tend to face when they want to start a company is the financing. That's obviously your expertise. Is that something that you financed on your own for a while, or did you immediately try to get friends and family around? How did you finance your company right off the bat?

Vanessa:
Yeah. I initially worked with a partner on the fundraising side of things, which actually didn't go very well. So I realized, like you said, this is my expertise, why am I not just leaning into this and going for it, leveraging the networks I've created over the past 10 years, the validity within the industry and the knowledge I have of venture and what venture is looking for and everything else. And I actually stumbled very early upon a solid list of consumers. So when you go to venture, you really need to be specifically targeted towards the types of investors that invest in your sector. So I've spent a lot of my career developing investor relationships in software, which is a very different world than consumer investing. However, consumer investing has scaled at a enormous rate in the past 10 years due to just a number of consumer brands that have come to the market and the D to C opportunities that have helped these brands scale dramatically.

Vanessa:
And so there is a great list of leading consumer investors, both angel and otherwise. So you start with a list, you create your hot list, your dream list. Then you map it out by stage and you have to really get an a champion though. And so I was very lucky in getting a champion in a man called Ben Zises. So he is a very early stage consumer investor based in New York. He was the very first investor in Quip, he was the very first investor at Caraway. He was my very first check and we just really jived after our first conversation. The investor relationship is almost as important as any partner relationship too. They're really with you and supporting you in believing in the opportunity that you're creating. And yeah, I met Ben very early on through a couple people in my network and it just happened to jived. And so he's been my first investor and has helped me source a significant amount of the investors in my network right now from the consumer perspective or the investors in my round.

Mimi:
That's great. Now, when he invested, at that point, what stage were you in? Were you still in idea stage? Had you already developed the product?

Vanessa:
Pre-seen. So he's taken a risk on, are you going to name this properly? Is the packaging going to look good? Do I believe you actually have access to these formulations and can create these ingredients? So yeah, he's taking a massive risk and not just his own capital, but leveraging his network too. So it's really kind of a trusting relationship in the team and each other.

Mimi:
Yeah, yeah. And then what have you found, either with this company or with the other two companies that you started, what do you see as the hardest lesson you learned, or what would you wish you knew when you started that you know now?

Vanessa:
Yeah. It's been a very crazy year launching company within COVID and especially launching a consumer goods company. So a lot of my barriers or struggles were directly tied to that. Freight prices have gone up insanely. Labor shortages are just across the board in every area you wouldn't even think, like who can go and sticker a bottle for me this week that I need 50,000 done. And you can can't find temp labor to do a thing or they don't show up. It's just, there's been a lot of challenges that then roll down to your costs, into your margin, deplete your margin and otherwise. Launching within a global pandemic, I would say, is a lesson.

Mimi:
It's good and bad because your direct to consumer?

Vanessa:
Yeah. Actually, we're omnichannel. So we are director consumer. We sell in independent garden centers. We also sell in big box retail. So we decided to go forth within all of the different channels.

Mimi:
So the pandemic was actually people started gardening more because everyone was home. And then people started shopping online more, where they're not used to before as much.

Vanessa:
That's true.

Mimi:
There's benefits of it. But yes, especially now I would think it's even harder with getting employees and like you said.

Vanessa:
Yeah, that's actually very true. There's been great things for the gardening world in terms of 20 million new gardeners added to the market who are expected to stay and just a massive increase in appreciation for the joy of a gardening and people wanting to get back into that and grow their own food and otherwise. So that's been a fabulous result. But yeah, some of the supply chain issues definitely have been a little tricky and we're still crawling out of that stuff. I think building the team, I wouldn't have made any changes. But I think being really conscious of your very first hires and making sure that they're the right fit because regardless of the title that you hire them for, they are wholly and fully a part of the company in so many ways.

Vanessa:
And so as a solo founder, that was really critical to the process. And I think I got extremely lucky with that in all of my amazing first hires. But I think that's something to really think about as a founder and as a solo founder in particular. What would I have done differently though? Honestly, with this company, I just kind of knew this this is the one that's going to fall into place. This is by no means been easy, but I really feel like because I'm so passionate about this space, I'm passionate about the brand, we're leveraging new technology. There's just so many pieces of the pie that I got wrong in past companies that I'm leveraging now. So maybe it's what I did wrong in past companies that I more could focus on.

Mimi:
What would you say would be a thing that you did wrong in the first two companies that you're bringing over?

Vanessa:
Yeah. I think addressing the market opportunity and specifically new technology or new product I think is really huge. So a lot of us, especially as a investor, you see so many of the same thing over and over and over with not a ton of differentiated value. And so I really think that that is some thing for entrepreneurs to really hone in on and focus on that brands cannot be the only distinguishing factor between what you're going to bring to market. It really has to have a lot of different layers than that and making sure that this really doesn't exist in the way that you are going to bring it to this space. It doesn't necessarily mean you need some crazy IP or otherwise, but it has to have pretty differentiated and unique angle.

Vanessa:
I think the biggest lesson as well, learned from past companies, is kind of finding your triple bottom line is important to me at least and really just keeps me going and motivated. And not all my past companies had that. I need that mission and impact that I can have, not just the revenue and top line goals. I want to have an impact on the world. I want to create products accessible to everyone to help them grow a better world, which really is our vision with Arber. So I think that is potentially the failure of some of my past companies, it really didn't have that full scope and depth in terms of what the business could be.

Mimi:
Right. Have you set yourself up as a B Corp or will you do that? I know it's so much work.

Vanessa:
Yeah, we haven't yet. We're nine months old, but definitely looking into that. Like you said, it is a bit of a lift. So yes, on the to-do list definitely, but not quite yet.

Mimi:
For anybody who's listening, a B Corp, it means that you care about the people, profit and planet. It's very hard to get, it's expensive to get. There are companies like Toms or-

Vanessa:
Patagonia.

Mimi:
Patagonia, that's what I'm thinking. Patagonia, Beautycounter is. That's the only reason why I knew it, because Beautycounter became a triple bottle line. So as you would know this even better than I do, but starting Vinetta, the percentage of female companies that get funding is so small compared to men. Is there something they advise? Because I know a lot of women I talk to at any stage, their biggest headache is funding. Sometimes they either don't even know they can get funding, they don't realize it. They just keep investing. So I guess my question is, is there any takeaways? I know we could have a whole podcast just on this subject. But is there any takeaways that people are doing wrong or they're not doing that you could say, okay, this is what you need to start doing in order to increase that percentage?

Vanessa:
Yeah. If you do want to go for venture in any of your startups, you need to start developing that network early. I think it's a network that is naturally men, I don't want to say are born into, but they are, they're naturally born into. They have other guys that are doing deals, that are working on Wall Street that run the private equity shops. The majority of people investing are men. Therefore, the majority of networks and deal flow that comes to them are other guys. So the networking aspect of it is so crucial. I wasn't able to raise three million quickly for this company because I can just wake up and give a pitch. It really was done because I spent the last 10 years building a network and understanding of a venture and what they're looking for and of investor in that it works and otherwise. So I think that's really critical.

Vanessa:
And not always looking though, or understanding the different fundraising mechanisms. There's a ton of different ways to get money. You can get equity, you can get debt, you can get family loans. I think figuring out whether venture and equity financing is really the best thing for your company and for you is also an assessment that I think needs to be done in addition. And then further to that, getting as far along as you can in the concept before money is absolutely required. This is I think why technology startups were such a great low barrier to entry. You can really hack something together that is your minimum viable product that you can show to the world or get user interest in, or even start to acquire customers without having to spend a ton of money.

Vanessa:
You find a developer that's passionate about it as well. You give them a portion of the company. You find a designer, you build that team in a pretty low cost way and put something out in the world and see if it sticks. And then the more validation you get, the easier it becomes to raise money because obviously they see that you have some traction. And so trying to build that MVP they call it in the industry, and trying to build it very cost efficiently is always a great way to start. You'll also learn so much as to whether is this really something that I should be doing? Is there interest for it? Do consumers care about it? Yeah, you'll just learn a lot by trying to bootstrap it for a certain period of time in the beginning.

Mimi:
I totally agree with what you're saying. And also, I was wondering, you've looked at so many deals, you've seen them succeed, not succeed, become unicorns, not become, whatever. Have you seen a trend as to what makes some women entrepreneurs more successful than others? Either characteristically, experience, things that happen, their team? If you could look at things that well, that's why that company did really well or that's why this one didn't do well, have you seen any common themes in what you've invested in?

Vanessa:
Yeah, that's a really, really good question. I hate to use the word aggressive associated with women because it's so negatively associated with women a lot of the time, but I think there is a certain aggression and energy in a positive way that you can feel that nothing is going to stop this person.

Mimi:
Determination, right? The grit.

Vanessa:
Yeah, it's that determination, that you can just feel it in someone. And their story will even resonate more with you too when you hear that and whether they hand you the product or not, you can just really get behind their vision because sense that determination and grit and the no fear, no stop kind of attitude has definitely been something that I've always seen in entrepreneurs that I've gotten excited about or invested in. And again, I think that little bit of traction and, or having tested the market. I really like to see someone who takes a data driven approach to things. Not just I want to do this because I like chocolate bars and I can't find a chocolate bar I like. Okay, show me. Do 20 other people agree that this chocolate bar needs to exist and how it's different? I think data driven founders has always been something that I've always looked at and, or founders that have identified and tested the market opportunity in a very clear and solid way and have put in that additional work up front to see if it has legs or not.

Mimi:
That's good. Okay, last question. This has been amazing. I could talk to you forever, but I don't want to take too much more of your time. But to close, what last minute advice would you give other founders or female CEOs? We've covered so much so far, but anything that we haven't covered, that you could give them inspiration, motivation, tips on your experience of the three companies that you've started?

Vanessa:
Yeah. I think entrepreneurship is a journey, but it's also very freeing in the sense is for your time and your ability to control your schedule and work around family. And it just really opens up so much control over your own destiny and over your schedule. So I think it's a great career and space to be operating in. Being an entrepreneur, I think understanding though the stresses of that and, or knowing the opposite side that you are also always on and it's really difficult to shut down at night and even shut your brain down as to what you've been doing all day or all year or all month. I think you need to know and appreciate both sides before you jump into entrepreneurship and know that the first thing you start isn't necessarily going to be the one. This is my fourth company, probably hundreds of more ideas that I've noodled on for a while.

Vanessa:
And I think don't give up if the first one doesn't take. I think you learn so much from the things that you start and maybe weren't totally the right timing or the right market. But yeah, you'll grow with that and you won't make those same mistakes or it'll be better timing next time. And so if you do know entrepreneurship is for you, start now, start something now. Give it a go, learn from it and continue to iterate and grow as an entrepreneur with your new ideas and new markets and new opportunities as they come. And it's a great opportunity for women entrepreneurship. I think it's an awesome career choice, if it is a career choice.

Mimi:
And you meet the most amazing women too, at least I have, like talking every week, every single one just blows me away. You just meet some really inspiring, intelligent women that are just doing really, really cool things.

Vanessa:
Definitely, yeah. The female founder is absolutely unbelievable. I feel so lucky to have a part of a massive one for Vinetta, for years, and continue to be in some of my best friends and lifelong loves are all on the female founder community.

Mimi:
This is awesome. Thank you so much, Vanessa. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on The Badass CEO. To get your copy of the Top 10 Tips Every Entrepreneur Should Know, go to thebadassceo.com/tips. Also, please leave a review as it helps others find us. If you have any ideas or suggestions, I would love to hear them. So email me at Mimi@thebadassceo.com. See you next week and thank you for listening.