Nate Cooper of Barrel Ventures on the Multi-Trillion Dollar Opportunity to Fix our Broken Food Ecosystem (EP.241)

I’m excited to have my friend Nate Cooper, partner at Barrel Ventures, on the show as our second in-studio guest. Nate invests in seed stage companies in the food and beverage space. He’s excited about anything pre-farm to post fork and everything in between. Nate views our food ecosystem as broken, with a multi-trillion dollar opportunity waiting for those who solve it. I’m a personal LP in Nate’s fund, and am passionate about food and packaging; these industries are enormous, and while everybody’s been focused on web 2, the world keeps humming along. We don’t realize how important these things are until they’re taken away from us. The market is resilient, and the money eventually rotates into things that actually matter. 

Guest - Nate Cooper, Managing Partner at Barrel Ventures 

howardlindzon.com, barrelvc.com 

Twitter: @howardlindzon, @nrcoope, @PanicwFriends, @knutjensen 

linkedin.com/in/nathan-cooper-2ba9aa19

#fintech #invest #investment #venturecapital #stockmarket #finance 

Show Notes:

Introduction (00:31)

Welcome Nate (01:24)

Chicago is my kind of town (02:14)

Michael Jordan ‘attends’ Nates bachelor party (03:52)

Masters at their craft (06:02)

Business runs in the family (07:05)

Midwest entrepreneurship (08:26)

Kellogg MBA (10:00)

Winding down Wise Apple (10:54)

Getting started in venture (12:05)

Being the best in the world (15:18)

Investing in the food ecosystem (16:26)

Execution Risk / Market Risk (18:28)

Bioplastics (19:49)

Staples prone to supply shocks (20:39)

Tech is the sauce (22:05)

No pop like OLIPOP (23:15)

Genius of Liquid Death (26:11)

Panicked about getting old (30:09)

What else excites Nate about food (32:05)

Rolling up food brands (33:08)

Howard’s radical free idea (33:33)

Investors want brand and formula (34:57)

Wrapping up (37:44)

Closing thoughts (40:23)