Tag: Angel Capital Expo

There are 7 billion people in the world today, and population estimates say we could reach 8 billion in about 10 years. (Check out this world population clock. The numbers are a little dizzying.)

We’re going to have to feed all those people, but as the population grows, farmland is disappearing rapidly.

Agriculture is ripe (get it?) for disruption, and gThrive is one of the companies providing it.

For those of us who are not growers, it can seem pretty simple. Stick a seed in the soil. Water it. Watch it grow. If we think hard about it, maybe we’ll consider potential pests or soil conditions, but for the most part it seems pretty cut and dry.

Yet, with large fields to manage, it is impossible for growers to know the condition of all of their soil. It’s also hard to gauge how much irrigation a certain patch might need, but water is expensive and can’t be wasted. Drones are increasingly being used to aid in farm work, but they can’t read these soil conditions from the sky.

That’s why Bruce Borden and his team came up with the gStake. The wireless, battery operated stakes boast sensors that read the soil information and transmit that data to web and phone apps.

Currently, the stakes work with Google maps. The location of each stake is noted with a color coordinated system that tells the grower how much water is in the soil,

if there’s enough fertilizer, and if the temperature varies too much.

Yet, the technology has proven difficult to create, and most of gThrive’s competitors are bigger, bulkier, more expensive systems. gStake is the first stake sensor that is inexpensive and movable, providing more value for the growers who can move them around the field.In our high-tech world, it seems like such a simple solution. Of course we should be able to read the ground like that, right?

Each gStake combines 5 different software systems, from the sensors to the transmitters to the apps that read it all. Yet the finished product looks simple and non-threatening, which is key to disrupting an entrenched industry like farming.

The stakes have already been through a prototype run and are now in some field trials in California. Borden sees possibility in the high-turnover, water-sensitive California crops like lettuce. For the average consumer, gStakes mean we can better predict the quality of the produce we buy. No more watery lettuce!

gThrive is presenting at the Angel Capital Expo on Thursday.

According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a full 20% of American adults experienced mental illness in the past year. Most often, these illnesses came in the form of depressive or anxiety disorders.

Yet, the stigma around mental disorders is still prevalent. In our startup culture, we champion the hard-headed, never-say-die entrepreneur. We glamorize the battle to start up and the sacrifices to health and family that many founders are willing to make. And, in the last year we saw not one but two high profile suicides.

Jonas Jones saw firsthand how mental illness affected behavior when he taught in south central LA and the bayous of Louisiana with Teach for America. After he left that organization, he volunteered his time leading groups for local youth.

During that experience he saw for the first time a therapy called “parent child interaction therapy.” Rather than sit with a mental health professional, the parent and child would sit in a room together and the therapist would be behind a two way mirror. An earpiece allowed the therapist to coach the parent through the conversation, and over time helped rewire both the parent and the child for positive interaction.

Jones thought, “There has to be a way to scale this.”

He founded Tao Mountain Inc, a company devoted to building secure online platforms that provide reliable information on a variety of mental health issues. The platforms provide videos, articles, and public discussions around topics such as depression, trauma, eating disorders and more. Profiles are 100% secure, and no one can see what a member is searching for or reading up on.

The first platform is parentchildinteractive.com and focuses on helping parents help their children. Members have access to a wide array of licensed therapists and behavioral experts, all of whom are cleared by an advisory board.

The platform is free to members. Revenue for the company comes through the fees paid by the experts who post videos and facilitate the discussions. The use of an online platform helps these providers scale their own practices and help more people.

Tao Mountain is also able to do a “skin change” and offer branding for corporations that want to provide mental health services to its employees. The example Jones gave me was of the Honolulu police department. Before his company came along, mental health services were offered on a certain floor of a certain building and EVERYONE knew it. If you were seen there, well, obviously you had problem.

The online platform allows members of the force to get the help they need, in the security of their own homes.

Parentchildinteractive.com is fully launched and functional. In the coming months, Tao Mountain will also launch an adult mental health site and a special needs site with the same services.

Tao Mountain is one of the presenting companies at this year’s Angel Capital Expo.

In the summer of 2012 Jaclyn Baumgartner got separate calls from her two brothers, each saying the same thing.

“I think I’m going to have to sell the boat. It’s just too expensive to keep up.”

At first glance, this probably sounds like a rich guy problem. But Jaclyn’s brothers are like the majority of boat owners in America. They make less than $100,000, own a small boat, and only use the boats and average of 14 days a year.

“Just rent it,” Jaclyn told her brothers, which does seem like the obvious answer. Except that boat insurance doesn’t cover renters. Boat rental companies pay for a whole other class of insurance that would never make sense for the average boat owner.

So, with her background as a strategy consultant, Jaclyn did some research into the car-sharing industry, trying to find something that could be applied to boats.

The ultimate problem is that even small boats are expensive and relatively unused, even by the most avid boater. The ability to rent out the boat would help with costs and provide boaters with a wider range of craft to experience.

The solution was, obviously, an insurance policy that would allow for rentals.

That solution, obviously, proved more difficult that you would think.

Jaclyn recruited help and spent 9 months knocking on the doors of major and minor insurance providers. She tried to convince anyone who would listen that a peer-to-peer insurance policy would solve the problem and provide income for boat owners and, ultimately, insurance providers.

“It was like trying to get them to invest,” she told me.

Finally, she convinced a major insurance provider to set up a policy, and Cruzin was in business.

In the spring of this year, Cruzin did a test run at the WesTrec Marina in Fort Lauderdale, FL. By the end of the test run, 10% of the marina tenants were signed up

on the site. The company found that boat owners didn’t just rent their boats. They were also excited to try out other boats and are also some of the most frequent renters.

After such a successful test run, WesTrec was happy to open up all their marinas to Cruzin, and since the summer soft launch, the site has grown to include 27 states. They’ve kept their marketing focus on Florida, so the growth they’ve seen is almost completely organic.

It takes a lot of trust to allow someone to man your boat. Cruzin also prides itself on thorough background checks and vetting processes. Boat owners maintain the right to refuse to rent a boat to someone, and they can even set up a test run with the potential renter. Those measures–plus the $1 million insurance policy–eliminate a lot of the hesitancy owners may feel.

Just a few months after launch, Cruzin is post-revenue, and Jaclyn knows they’ve proven the model. The company will present this week at the Angel Capital Expo, hoping to secure the capital that will help them scale in the coming year.

Find out more about Cruzin on their website.