Jeffery: Welcome to Supporters Fund Ask An Investor. I’m your host, Jeffery Potvin and let’s please welcome Jessica Karr, the GP partner at Toyota Ventures as our investor today. Welcome Jessica. It’s a real pleasure to have you joining us today.
Karr: Thank you. Excited to be here.
Jeffery: Oh. We’re super excited to have you today for many reasons. The biggest one is because you’re doing some really exciting things with your fund. And then to pull back the layers, we’re super interested to learn about your experience in the startup world all the way up. And you’ve got some pretty cool things that not a lot of people have had the opportunity to build inside of and I’m sure you get these questions all the time. But we’re excited to dive in and learn a lot more about you and what you guys are doing today. So, the best way we like to start is if you can share a little bit of insight about your past, where you are today and then one thing about you that nobody would know.
Karr: amazing. So, how I got here today. I’m originally from West Texas. My dad is a dentist and I started working in my dad’s dentist office as a receptionist, filing charts and doing admin things. And I loved helping patients. So, I started college as pre-med. My mom’s also an Ob-Gyne nurse. So, that definitely comes full circle later. And I started college pre-med. I went to Texas State. It’s outside of Austin, Texas. It’s a really nice little college town with a river running through it and that was the main thing everybody did for fun is just go float the river. And it was really nice. And throughout my undergrad, I started out as Bio Major, but I really enjoyed Chemistry. I’ve been very fortunate. I had some good professors and changed my major to Biochemistry, then I also actually majored in Philosophy and I definitely had an interest in a lot of philosophical questions. And one course that really influenced me was Environmental Ethics. So, learning about how you can live sustainably and how that also ties in with the food choices that you make, and if you don’t know anything about Amarillo, Texas, you might know that there’s just a lot of cows around. So, I think just like learning more about climate change and how factory farming plays a role, I ended up not deciding to go to Med School. it wasn’t really my path. I had done some undergraduate research and just figured out that I was good at research, maybe enjoyed aspects of it though who enjoys being in a lab all the time like that’s not always the most fun. But I decided to go to graduate school for Biochemistry and I went to UC San Diego. I was in a PhD program and I ended up leaving with a masters. After two years again, I just decided it wasn’t totally my course to spend 80 hours a week in a lab where maybe I’ll publish some papers and not know exactly where the end result is at the end. So, I wanted to do something more tangible and also tie in some of my passion for sustainability. So, it was very fortunate that I got contacted by Impossible Foods when it was less than a year old. So, I moved up to San Francisco, started working on Impossible Foods. There were only 12. I was number 12. So, really fun times, a lot of building, a lot of everybody just like jumping in to get things done, definitely a lot of good stories behind that. So, I was working in the research and development side. There were a lot of Biochemists. It’s founded by a Biochemist from Stanford and basically, he realized that to make people want to eat less meat, you basically can just give them a substitute that doesn’t sacrifice the experience of eating meat. So, our whole goal was to understand first what meat is. And I was especially on the flavor side. So, there are lots of interesting flavor, chemistry challenges there. And we are using analytical chemistry to actually look at the compounds that make up flavor. So, we were basically understanding meat and then also at the same time how to recreate it. And partly what gives Impossible Foods its distinction as a protein that is similar to the protein and the muscle. So, it took about five years from Impossible Food’s inception up through the launch. So, I was there for four of those years helping develop and scale and launch. And once that happened, I realized that I wanted to move into a business role and have the ability to make business decisions. So, I left Impossible Foods. I stayed actually part-time as a consultant but my main focus was, I was doing an MBA. And that took two years and I started consulting with other early-stage startups. I just really love the early days where it’s forming a team figuring out what the product is, product market fit and it’s just I think a really exciting time. So, I consulted for about two years with startups globally. a lot of them were in the plant-based meat sector but then a couple other tech related or food tech related projects. And I wanted to take that skill set into making investment decisions. So, I started working with a fund focused on impact. So, they had a few different sustainable development goals that they wanted to focus on and one of them I did use some of my food tech knowledge. And then there is another sustainable development goal for gender equality. So, I started seeing women’s health and sexual wellness deals with that and I just realized like this is really the only thing that I want to focus on. Now I think of food technology, it’s like Impossible Food just at the bar so high and there’s a lot of copycats. And I just started feeling bored of the space. But then when it comes to women’s health, it’s like there’s just a huge market size. huge needs amazing innovations. And also, just like a very collaborative feel for the most part, so I fell in love with it and knew that I wanted to start a fund. So, I guess we’ll get more into the fun side in a minute. But a fun fact that a lot of people don’t know is that I swim in San Francisco Bay and I’ve done Alcatraz Swim twice now.
Jeffery: Well, it’s an amazing story. The background was awesome. Thank you very much for sharing that. And then bam right into the Alcatraz Swim. you’ve done that twice. That’s incredible. How far is it?
Karr: It depends on where you are. So, one of them is two miles if you get a little further west towards Golden Gate Bridge. And then there’s also a Swim Club at Aquatic Park that I’m part of. So, the nice swim is like going to Alcatraz to the Swim Club and then going straight to the sauna. They talk about it in the movie and all of the articles. you read how impossible it was to swim this and the water is terrible. It’s super cold.
Jeffery: You’ve done it twice. I’m thinking that they were trying to make it like this was a really bad place to go. And they didn’t want anybody to escape. So, they had to carry this rumor. But it sounds like, and I’ve seen something my brother’s been there. I’ve seen some footage. It is crazy. So, I’m assuming there’s certain times when you can swim where it’s better, a little safer and a little bit warmer.
Karr: The water temperature fluctuates through the year so it could get warmer in the summer and then I think you need to understand the tides. So, I think that the inmates who escaped must have known that. So, it’s very doable. I think it’s more just like where do you get out where people are not going to see you. So, I don’t I don’t know what happened to those inmates but I like to think they made it. I’m going to guess they did too since it sounds like a pretty exciting fun swim.
Jeffery: So, that’s pretty awesome. Well, I want to go back to your earlier days. And what is pretty cool is that you’ve had this real entrepreneuria