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In this episode, Jim Barrood sits down with Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, to discuss his incredible entrepreneurial journey—from launching a fertilizer business out of a Princeton dorm room to building a company operating in 20 countries and pioneering the circular economy.
Tom shares how TerraCycle is transforming "trash" into opportunity, why most recycling systems fail, the future of reusable packaging through Loop, lessons in purpose-driven entrepreneurship, raising capital, scaling through acquisitions, and why understanding incentives—not just good intentions—is the key to driving meaningful change.
Jim Barrood: Let's do quick introductions. I'm going to start really easily with Tom. Tom, tell us, just give us a quick thirty-second on what you do, what you're focusing on. And then just to make this personal, tell us what your favorite chocolate-related candy is. Chocolate-related candy. Could be candy bar-
Tom Mastrobuoni: This is what I get for missing the planning.
Jim Barrood: Actually none of them had this question. So it's personal, it's relatable to all of us, especially me. So go ahead. Okay.
Tom Mastrobuoni: Morning, everyone. I’m chief investment officer, Big Idea Ventures. We operate a number of venture capital funds focused on the food, ag, and material space. Our latest fund works on commercializing university IP and starting companies in rural communities to create living wage jobs.
We're really proud of that effort. Been in the food industry since twenty seventeen where I started working for Tyson Foods running their corporate venture team. Did that for a couple of years, and prior to that, did a lot of stuff at Philadelphia Dairy Mart. My favorite chocolate, Reese's Would have to be my favorite because I can't just have one food.
Maybe the chocolate and peanut butter would be Yeah, that's
Jim Barrood: great. A lot of protein. Go ahead.
Jay Bhatti: Hi there. Thirty years ago, I graduated from Rutgers University so it's really fun to be back here. I considered yesterday visiting campus. And the first fifteen years of my career, I was, working at big companies like Microsoft, and I started my own company, and I employed a lot of Princeton graduates because there's nothing more fun for a Rutgers guy than to have a lot of Princeton people working for you.
And then for the past fifteen years, I've been in venture space, investing heavily in the food category and invested in over fifty-plus food companies. The big-- best success I had was a company called Freshly, which has a lot of New Jersey roots. We had twelve hundred employees here, and we sold the company domestically for one point five billion dollars.
And the funny story about that is they s-- they were called S3 Foods in Arizona. They ship you food. I said, "This food is great, but no one's buying you in Arizona. Move to New York." And then me and the CEO and the other co-founder were driving up and down the turnpike looking for co-manufacturing spaces over here.
And I said, "The food name S3 Foods doesn't work, but Freshly does." And I remember negotiating with someone over the weekend, buying the domain, and then building a website for them. So heavily operationally involved with a lot of our companies. Half of my portfolio dies. That's just the nature of venture.
The other half is still around. And then there's several, like Freshly and Daily Harvest and Ollipop and some others that have done pretty well over here.
Jim Barrood: Oh. Who said chocolate most?
Jay Bhatti: Oh Kit Kat, who
Jim Barrood: else? That's a very rich choice. Save chocolate.
Jay Bhatti: Actually, no. The Reese's is. And I thought there was also Hershey's Kisses.
Jim Barrood: Okay.
Robert Grey: All right.
Jay Bhatti: Take two. Ollipop.
Robert Grey: Hi, everyone. I'm Robert. I'm with a group called Plug and Play. So Plug and Play is actually a pretty broadly generalist investor, but I oversee what's called our Sustainable Future Group. So we are working across ag tech, animal health, food and beverage, and manufacturing sustainability.
Those three similar yeah, Plant and Play is three things, right? We're an early-stage invest- investor, one of the most active early-stage investors in the world. We do about twenty deals every year, not only in food and bev, again, it's very agnostic. We're also a corporate innovation platform. We work with about six hundred large corporations companies across the entire kind of agri-food value chain particularly from, the growers out west to Pepsi, Mars, Coca-Cola, et cetera.
A lot of your acclaimed fragrance houses ingredients manufacturers to Walmarts and Costcos of the world. So we do that entire value chain. And we try to drive, pull through, essentially help those large corporates work with innovative technologies and try to bring products to market faster.
And the last thing we do is we run accelerator programs, which are equity-free and industry-themed. So we work with the corporations to identify the top candidates and work with them to really build the cohort. We do that twice a year across those forty-five industry verticals. We're also present in about seventy locations in twenty-five countries, so it's a lot of volume.
Myself mostly worked in the biotech space earlier in my career, have now been on the venture side. Been part of two startups, one kind of failed had some luck with Plant and Play. The second had much more success, got an IPO in South Korea. And then worked at a large food company out of South Korea called CJ at the headquarters, and since then opened our business as well.
So I've been at Plant and Play about three and a half years now driving all our innovation and activities across those twenty-five industries. Chocolate. Chocolate. I was going to say Reese's. It is technically my favorite, but it did remind me I don't know if you guys have had chocolate licorice before, but that was a big- Is that ours?
Yeah, exactly. So a big part of my childhood with my dad on long road trips, that was always a staple.
Jay Bhatti: So I'm changing my answer. I just remembered I'm an investor in Wave Chocolate, which has caffeine
Robert Grey: in it, so that's my pick.
Steven Finn: All right, guess I'm up. Hi, everyone. I'm Stephen Finn, co-founder, co-managing partner at City Capital. We invest almost entirely in the food system in basically two categories. One is consumer-facing grocery brands. The other is, B2B, like deep tech, food tech mostly ingredients and infrastructure kind of stuff.
I run that side and spend very little time with brands, which would be a disaster. Is that on you behind there? Yeah we have, I think, a hundred and twenty portfolio companies. They're about eight years old. I think what makes us unique in this space is that half or more of our team was a former operations consulting firm.
So I, I always say kind of half-funding joke that half my team wouldn't know which end of the day, so they'll fix your food company all day. And that's our meaningful contribution. For chocolate gotta be a shill for my own portfolio. And that's the Midday Squares Cocido bar is-
Robert Grey: Ooh.
Steven Finn: -amazing.
Robert Grey: If we're going to do this. Yeah. Sorry, I'm going to put a shout-out to a broke broker there if this is a game. So it's from Hubli. They're a sweet protein. They have-
Jim Barrood: I
can't say that. You work with people all day, you start pitching all these products. Now, I'll just say a Tic Tac. No, not that. That's... i'm going to have a Kit Kat or Twix. This is probably about six, seven, right? Is this going to probably- Frozen Twix or- Six, seven
Tom Mastrobuoni: -Ambien.
Jim Barrood: Ooh. Wait. Ambien. Also peanut M&M's. Okay. So as you can see, this panel-
Tom Mastrobuoni: Gate five -
Jim Barrood: is really amazing. The breadth and the spectrum of what they're focusing on and the number of companies that they've invested in is extraordinary. So I'm really delighted to be moderating this panel of such smart people.
But you folks need to get your questions ready. We're just going to go through the landscape of the marketplace, why greater New Jersey is amazing place to start and to scale a business. And then we'll go and get your questions. So I want each of you to talk about where you are. When I was looking at Lou's presentation, I was thinking of food tech winter because of some of the, obviously the decrease in funding and the numbers for funding that.
And why don't we start with that? Are we in a food tech winter? And then talk about what you're seeing in the landscape.
Robert Grey: I get scoliosis. That's amazing.
Tom Mastrobuoni: So I think... I don't know if it's so much winter as it is investors started taking their reality medication a little bit and started to refocus on KPIs and unit economics and some of that tool mania of the alternative protein, cultivated protein, "Oh, wait, we can't really do this at scale, at cost?"
So I think we've seen a pullback from that. And people are a lot more... I know we are a lot more focused on unit economics. That's great, you can create X, but do consumers want X? And can you beat out Y on price? Because the only... We talk about taste, texture the flavor, but price is a very important driver, especially in the current economic situation around food choices.
And you see a flight to value, you see a flight to a g- food people are comfortable with and less of an opportunity for emerging brands to break out because their costs are invariably higher, right? Because you're fighting for slotting stage you're buying eyeballs in the supermarket.
I similarly say Raven Brands because I'm more good at that.
Steven Finn: Been around.
Tom Mastrobuoni: Yeah. But I think... I don't think it's a winter. I think you're seeing a much more disciplined deployment approach than we've seen in the past five years. I think Lou's slide was spot on.
Steven Finn: But I'll chip in on that. I think it's winter for the rest of the war, right?
So I think we, we spend all of our time here and it's really interesting to see the ebbs and flows of outsiders coming into our space. Five, six years ago, you have COVID driving supply chain crises. You have a world where we're reading reports every day that thirty percent of Gen Z is going to be clap-based forever, right?
And is it-- No? I'm good? No? No. Oh, I still think it will come out. That's a Lego Jim thing. But yeah we watched those kind of predictions not play out, and it's a lot of the generalist money came in and went to the wrong places a-and then got set on fire, and now generalists are steering away and then just, call it AI or whatever else we're doing today.
A lot of the reason to that was that the companies that are working on the wrong things are working on the wrong things in the biggest markets. So I'm-- full disclosure, I am a longtime investor and board member for Lou and BlueNalu. But when I look at his space specifically if you can choose to make whatever animal cells you feel like replicated a big steel tank and turn it into food, Lou's choice of tuna, you could look at and say that is a relatively small market next to beef, next to chicken, next to other things.
But his specific target of Pacific bluefin toro goes for over a hundred bucks a pound, and a lot of the money that was set on fire in this space was set on fire chasing the trillion-dollar chicken market. Chicken is basically the only protein that's become cheaper to produce over the last thirty years.
It's a buck a pound on a good day wholesale. That means in a world with no infrastructure in place where all of these companies basically have to do everything themselves, that the chicken company needs to put a hundred and thirty times as much steel in the ground to do their first ten million in sales and probably with negative margin, right?
So that there's-- I understand the desire to save the world. I think- Many people who started chicken companies should have started nonprofits instead. I think that would have been more likely to actually impact the world with the money they raised instead of creating the food. Ted Winter, one last thing.
Jay Bhatti: Yeah. One interesting, when I got into food investing back in twenty thirteen our thesis was like, "Hey more and more food is going to be sold over the Internet." And we were right about that, and we were lucky to catch the wave with investments in Daily Harvest, in Freshly, in Chef's Plate, which was like the Blue Apron Canada, and a really good exit on over a year.
PetPlay, for example, as well, too, dog food. And, then what happened is when you had the zero interest rate phenomena and then people saying, "Hey, food is now i-Internet enabled, so now it should have Internet type of multiples," you start to have your West Coast VCs come in and pour a ton of capital in there.
I'll give you two personal stories where I was just, I'm actually happy about this environment, by the way, because I'll say, for example, you're going to deal with investors now who are actually people who know the space, who can tell you how to properly capitalize your business. Steve and I are, like, looking at your portfolio we're investors in five similar companies from Jesse and Ben's to Tea Drops and Super Coffee.
I'm like, "Oh, we're pretty much are friends." But you actually get people who are, know the space. But what happened is, when you had a lot of the West Coast VCs come in who wanted VC type of multiples, like a software or a Google type of exit. One deal we were working on, we were negotiating a five million dollar round or a five million dollar raise on a twenty million valuation.
Tiger Global comes in and says, "You know what? We'll give you an eighty million dollar pre." I'm like, "What the world?" It was just, it was almost insanity. And then another situation where I was the minority investor in a in Superplay, they raised a bunch of money from the West Coast VCs, and I begged them not to take that money because I'm like, "Look, there's a lot of money they're giving you.
I think you're smiling, but I know what they're going to do. They're going to have lead seat on the board. They're going to drive you to grow at an unstable rate that y- that these types of businesses can't grow at." And guess what? They pretty much had to file for chapter seven, like two years later, and they were profitable when they do that investment.
So I'm actually happy that we got some of that nature out of here, and you're actually getting real investors that actually know what they're doing and can guide the right way, and you're not getting a lot of the, tool of me.
Robert Grey: Yeah. I'll just add, I think we saw the exact same thing happen in AgTech from about twenty seventeen on.
So we've followed the similar curves. I think what's unique these days is we're seeing this great cohort of new founders coming in from this kind of FinTech one point O into FinTech 2.0. And I think that's like the also the benefit of the general scope going out and, the reality setting in and valuations becoming much more realistic, is we're seeing these founders who've gone through that, who've learned how to scale in a yeah, almost like a free money kind of market, and now they're coming in date.
But then they quickly hit the reality. They've learned all of those lessons, and now they're coming into to this with, much better perspective. I think that almost reset where we are today. So I think it's really promising actually
Steven Finn: now. I think that's a great point. And I think also, as opposed to five, six years ago, we now have more of the ecosystem, more infrastructure even solve a narrower problem because there's potentially a customer base out there who will buy it than if, but yeah, of course. It's sitting on what we call our do one thing policy. That's been really hard to do for a long time, and now I think we're in a place where we're being able to really buckle down and do the one thing that differentiates them and still in business center.
Jay Bhatti: I think one thing I'll add over here, the infrastructure is really fixing here.
Like what you're talking about here, we can have an incubation lab, but studio and stuff like that. A lot of the people that are investing in the food space are always coming at it like, "Hey, what value do I add to our entrepreneurs beyond just giving them capital over here?" So there's a lot of venture people I work with who are like, "Hey, these guys really know how to get into retail.
They could get me into twenty thousand stores," of a Quickserve, for example, and great, I'm going to work with you over here. One of the things we did on our end is like we were so in the digital world that we got really good at it. I came from digital world. I sold companies in the digital world before.
So we created a division called Red Krypton, which some of you are fans of Superman and that basically did nothing but help our portfolio companies that we invest saying, "Okay, let's make sure you're running all your Meta and Google Ads right, you're bringing all your email systems right, all the e-commerce is set up perfectly."
And so one thing you're going to find is in-- if you guys are all going to look for capital sometime, just don't look for capital saying "Hey, what is your strength over here? What is the thing that you bring to the table that is interesting beyond capital? Do you have connections to everyone in the industry?
Do you have connections with getting into retail? Do you have digital expertise that can help me amplify my consumer base over here?" So that is becoming, important, but the nice thing is the community and venture investors in the space are doing those things over here today.
Jim Barrood: Yeah, and I'll just add to that -- the infrastructure has come so far, the ecosystem's come so far and the entrance of plug and play into the state and region has been a real boo-boost for everyone.
But that funnel and that sort of those that sort of reputation acceleration area is really important. Also, there's SOSV that's been around a lot and raised. So ten years ago, none of this. Essentially zero, right? It was obviously big incubation center here at Rutgers, but no matter investors, no talent the silver mining sort of component, right?
The influx of even more talent to the state, and then all these entrepreneur and innovation support programs in the EDA has really created just such a robust community and innovation ecosystem that it also spills into the food tech area. So we're really lucky.
So just want to give that context. So as far as New Jersey, right? As far as how do you see this greater New Jersey, this greater region area as far as related to food technology? I think what we've seen is good momentum, but tell us where we're going. What do we still need to do to keep this this momentum, traction going?
Jay Bhatti: I'll lean in over here. I did a TEDx talk, and someone reminded me of that this morning, many years ago, and I talked about what we need to do to bring innovation back to New Jersey. And then
a year afterwards, when Governor Murphy got elected, I had the privilege of serving as chair on his transition team for innovation and venture. And, hats off to Governor Murphy. He did a tremendous job of pushing innovation in New Jersey for younger companies over a year. Historically, government, he's very focused on the bigger companies out there.
But the EDA, Governor Murphy, a lot of his initiatives with the Evergreen program, venture program, stuff like that, he's really done a great job with setting up a great foundation for the future for New Jersey. And I personally very much feel if you're in the food supplement, category, New Jersey is one of the top three places in the country to be in.
Because what I say is, if you drop a pin on Rutgers University and go around a hundred miles, that's a great place right here. Whether it's University here, PA, you are in a great environment because the only other places I would build a food company would be Austin, and I have a lot of investments in Austin because there's a, that is a CPG capital world.
One of my partners down there was early member of Whole Foods, and we work very closely on companies down there. Would be... Another one would be California, LA. Southern California would be a great place over a year as well, too. But these are my three hotspots over here. You are in one of the three hotspots in the greatest country in the world to build a company.
So I think New Jersey has a very bright future in this category.
Robert Grey: Yeah. I look at it slightly differently. We use something internally in our team. It's like the Global Innovation Index, if you're familiar. We took this model and said, "Okay, where are there large kind of corporate clusters?
Where are the startups being developed? And then where are there really smart people, driving R&D and technology through universities, which, with great food science programs and things like that?" So the areas we saw pop up as an, on our heat map that we created were Chicago, New Jersey Texas broadly, so Austin or either Houston, and then California.
So ju-just from a United States perspective. And so when we go into a new territory, that's what we're looking for, right? Where are they- Where are ecosystems very strongly in those three kind of areas or where are they missing something where Click and Play can bring something novel to that?
We're definitely, kind of all in on New Jersey, starting with Governor Murphy and his strategic innovation centers. So we have three locations down here. I can't really say too much more, but I would say definitely keep an eye on Click and Play and what we're doing in New Jersey. There's definitely some big news coming out.
But we're really focused on this ecosystem. I think from the food perspective, where I then start to delineate is much more on the ingredient side, the ingredients, flavor, fragrance houses, and that's what's also a big differentiator for this ecosystem versus like in Austin or versus like in Chicago.
I think that's a really interesting strength of New Jersey as
Steven Finn: well. Another strength is all the biotech and kind of- Exactly ... the JCC there, right? I think, we have a lot of pharma here and pharma people, even though they don't know how to conserve dollars put it that way. Have a really interesting, have a really interesting knowledge base to bring in to specifically the tech side of food and the real revolving innovation.
Jim Barrood: Thank you for that. And I should note that there's one-- there's another company called 1435 Capital, which has hundreds of portfolio companies, including many CPG. Ben Jen is right here just so you know. So there's, again, there's a lot of activity and a more of a concentration of capital in capital out here than you see in regions.
So that's great news. How much time do we have?
Steven Finn: You got another ten minutes.
Jim Barrood: Ten minutes. All right. We'll open to questions. So just tell us what your biggest hit or biggest win has been as far as investments in food tech, and then we'll go to questions because I want to get your questions in as soon as possible so you can get the answers soon.
So go ahead. Oh, where should
Tom Mastrobuoni: we have... You first. Okay. So I have in the latest fund, we haven't had one yet, so we're working on that. Although company Steve Greer partners in Extra Buy was doing some interesting things. That was a company that had started to solve the scaffolding challenge for the cultive protein industry.
So we invested in a lot of cultive protein companies. I invested in Future Meat, rest in peace. ... Tyson were really mad they didn't exit that secondary combined tracker would have been awesome. Okay. Take another donut. That's a great man. So but next year we started to solve that scalping problem because a lot of altern-- a lot of cultivated protein companies except for Lu, because Lu's amazing and can do nothing wrong- have trouble creating that fully real cultivated protein, right? A, a cut of protein, whether you're talking about steak, a chop, et cetera, a chicken breast.
So we said all these companies are struggling with that. Let's start a company that sells butter to all the restaurants and create scalping. So we did that, but the protein, cultivated protein also for us. So we pivoted to a delivery mechanism for molecules, whether you're talking about NAD+, GLPs, insulin, any molecule that can be electrospun, we can create a basically a composed patch that transfers it directly.
So it's a really novel delivery mechanism for supplements. That's probably going to be our biggest hit. Prior to that was the Beyond Meat secondary ended with Tyson.
Steven Finn: I was going to say that.
Jim Barrood: Well,
Tom Mastrobuoni: it was mine. It can be yours too. You can share.
Steven Finn: I've always made money on
Jay Bhatti: yours. We both made money on
Tom Mastrobuoni: that.
Tyson kept all of
Jim Barrood: it. Don't digress too much. There's questions.
Jay Bhatti: I had mentioned Freshly, which was, our first hit. And we were lucky because in 2014 when we had done about fifteen food investments fourteen that went under, Freshly was the one that didn't go under.
It returned sixty X for us plus, and then nearly five, six X for the fund. So that was a great win for us and allowed us to continue doing, but if that didn't happen, then there'd be no fund for us going forward, right? But I'd like to talk about the most recent one we had, and we sold Wonder Belly to Procter & Gamble recently.
And that was an interesting story. It's a very a lean team which is basically they went down the aisle at the pharmacy and said, "Tums, that sounds like something my dad would take from the seventies or eighties, right? Why is no one competing against Tums?" And they were like, "We're competing against Tums, but all we're going to do is going to take away all the bad stuff that's in Tums and keep the good stuff."
So that was their formulation. And when they sold to P&G, and we talked to P&G about "Hey, why'd you do this acquisition so quickly?" And we were very happy with the acquisition. It was a great return for us because we were such an early investor and helped operation on a bunch of stuff. But they said, "Your ingredients were so clean that our formulation team didn't have to do anything over here.
We didn't have to say 'Hey, will this pass muster? Won't we scale this to a billion dollar a year brand for us over here?'" So that's a thing for you guys, is think about, like, when you're formulating stuff, you don't have to go crazy. Sometimes it's just taking away stuff that was, built on products from the seventies and eighties might be the winning strategy over here.
Robert Grey: I'll talk about a few. We haven't had maybe that unicorn yet. Technically, Rappi is one that's a food delivery down in Latin America. They're part of our portfolio, but not traditional food tech in the way that we think about it and where we're mostly investing. So I'll name a couple.
One would be Bond Pet Foods. It's a very kind of fermenta-fermentation-based pet food company based regulatory. Out of our first accelerator batch in speaking against an animal health focus, we partnered them up with Hill's Pet Nutrition, and they've had a long pipeline of R&D product development roadmap.
I think AM's also been that round, so they're doing pretty well. Every one Oobli does have good multiples. Oobli's a superfood company. They had a big partnership last year with Ingredion. They got announced, that'd be another one. And then we have some newer ones that are not there yet.
I would say SportBio is another one from previous vintage. They're out in Europe, so they do kind of food quality, food safety. They're having good multiples. I think they just raised forty million or something. So they're doing really well. But one of the other ones that we're excited about would be, like, Keoga.
They're Justin Whitely's company. Cool. So they're, like, a novel postbiotic that one's hopefully coming to market soon. They're going to have some clinical information coming out shortly. But that's one we're really big on, and the other one would be Nellixyme, which is the founders of-- the CTO of gosh, I don't remember Ah, Perfect Day.
So they, raised almost a billion dollars. Okay. Kels like in here a million or something. So if we're banking on founders who have shown that they can scale technology companies, like that's the space that we're in because we're such early stage investors. We're not really going off of a lot of, market traction things.
It would be those kind of companies. So founders who've been there, done that, and again, are in this kind of like second wave. So those are some of those we're really excited about.
Jim Barrood: Thank you. Steve?
Steven Finn: We also got out of Beyond Meat alive. Yeah, sold the day of launch.
Robert Grey: Yeah.
Steven Finn: Did pretty good. Nice.
Robert Grey: Open it up for this guy. Who knows? No pressure. This'll be a big
Steven Finn: one. No,
Robert Grey: no pressure though.
Steven Finn: Another one in our portfolio that, that's doing really well, successfully both raising money and being commercial is a company called Plantable Foods in San Diego and mostly West Texas, where they have a big facility with a bunch of above ground greenhouses growing duckweed to extract rubisco protein.
Wow, does this industry care about rubisco protein, and we can deliver it functionally at scale and not green.
Jim Barrood: All right. All right. Thank you for those. All right. Questions, just why don't you just call it out, make it short and sweet, and they'll make their answer very short and sweet. So go ahead.
Tom Mastrobuoni: There's microphones for you right. If you could
Robert Grey: raise your hand quickly we'll try
Jim Barrood: and- Right up
Robert Grey: here.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Hi, first, thank-- First of all, thanks for your time. This was a great session to be in. For an early stage CPG food brand, we pay the better for you category, great margin structures and unit economics.
We have great farmer-smarts test velocity. So how would you think about the right moment to raise versus bootstrapping it for more proof points? Where does that land?
Steven Finn: I always say you raise when you have a clear demonstrated fire with a core fuel on, not to find the fire, right? So if you know exactly what that use of funds is going to be and how it's going to grow because you're basically putting it into things that you've already proven at smaller scale, that's a story you should be able to sell to investors with the right margin profile.
Jay Bhatti: Yeah, I don't... one thing I find is if you raise out of desperation, you're not going to get funded. That's just what it is. From if you look at it from the investor point of view, I want to invest in something that the engine has started to work, and I'm putting fire on that gas on that engine, not fire.
Like gas into that engine to keep growing it over here. And a lot of people I invest in super early, when they go out for an A round, I tell them, some I say, "You're not ready for the A round because you're just going to go for weeks and months and get nos. Let's get the right unit economics going.
Let's get the right momentum going, and then go out, and then surprisingly the raise becomes a lot easier."
Jim Barrood: Okay, one more quick question and then we can step back. With the small direct that you threw- ... at me one time with the small caps. I see what you mean.
Sorry.
Speaker 7: Good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for being here. This is a great panel. Dave Ashenbrenner with Newmark. I'm hyper-focused on industrial assets that facilitate the storage and distribution of goods, specifically temperature-controlled facilities. The fever for the post-COVID development of cold storage nationally has cooled off, as you guys have talked about.
How important is that to you guys as investment groups? Are you looking at supply chain brick-and-mortar? Is that part of the investment thesis? Obviously, earlier on, that is going to be more co-packing and third party, but just generally your thoughts on the brick-and-mortar cold s- cold storage supply chain.
Jay Bhatti: I think, if we were in a lot of cold we had a lot of companies that had to be frozen in like dry ice, for example, at Freshly, Daily Harvest, PetPlate, ChestPlate, a couple of others as well, too. And we actually did look at the industrial side of it, saying, "Should we get involved in that on the investment level?"
And we looked at a couple things. The reason we didn't do it is we didn't think... They could be great businesses, but we didn't think that we'd get a venture type of outcome out of it, that like the multiple and exit that we would get there. And we're not experts in that space, right? So like I'm like, "Hey, we're getting into an area we're not experts in, and we're not going to get venture type of scale potentially.
We'll stick to what we know best over here."
Jim Barrood: Okay. That's it. Thanks everybody.
