Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope (Part 3)

SM: What did you do after BizGenics?

DC: I took four years off. I love to surf and fly fish, so I did a lot of both of those. We have a house in Montana, and I surfed all over the world. I also did some consulting. What I enjoy and think I am good at is extracting what a company is good at. I help them reposition themselves or work in interim executive management. I did a lot of work for various VCs, but primarily with Foundation Capital.

After two to three years working with Foundation, they approached me and indicated there were four opportunities they would like me to look at. I did, and most of them were classic Silicon Valley startups. It was another shade of gray of a supply chain optimization project, or yet another information analytics play. I literally felt I was walking into a morgue in all of those businesses. That is not a reflection on the companies Foundation chooses to work with; it is a reflection of the Valley at that time.

I really wanted to do something different. Foundation had just invested in a small company called NovaZone which was an ozone equipment company. By itself it was not very exciting. They were just a capital equipment manufacturer.

SM: What does ozone equipment do?

DC: It takes oxygen from the air around us and electrifies it into an active form of oxygen. At the highest level, it is a very strong oxidizer that instantly goes away and turns back into pure oxygen. Any place the uses oxidizers, such as pools, laundromats, cooling towers on commercial buildings, pharmaceutical water, and bottled water was a place NovaZone could apply its technology. We rapidly transformed the company from a capital equipment company to focusing on ozone solutions strictly for food and water. That was really the first transformational point of NovaZone.

SM: What did you see in the company that made you want to take it on?

DC: On a personal level I am good at growing a technology-based company and all the pieces and parts required to do it. My degrees are in chemistry and biochemistry, yet I had never used them in my entire life. I really do enjoy it though; I have a passion for it. I saw an interesting intersection between my background and my domain expertise.

From a business perspective, I saw an entire food industry that was going to undergo definite transformation. The company was not selling to the food industry yet, but they had a couple of tests going on. I thought it was extremely relevant. I am not a foodie so I did not know the industry intimately, but I knew it was a $7.5 trillion industry. If I could do a little bit of a lot, I could build a great business. With the Food Service Act coming up this summer, and traceability requirements coming to the industry, we are on the cusp of a large transformation.

SM: Did you join the company as the CEO?

DC: I joined the company as the chief marketing officer in 2005. About a year later there was a change in CEOs and I was asked to run the company. Most of Silicon Valley is product companies. With our focus on food and water, we are a market company. I learned that when you work on a market, not a product, you identify other problems you can solve.

As we started selling to growers all over the world, we started seeing the challenges they were facing with solar and water stress on crops. We stepped back and tried to dissect the problems with different types of light causing photosynthesis sunburn. We developed a product called PurShade, an optically activated mineral which is SPF for plants.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope
1 2 3 4 5 6 7