Really great interview, thanks for posting. The whole thing is really interesting. I really like the way he speaks about it. I tried to annotate (roughly) the last five minutes or so the best I could
Q: As a potential investor when am I gonna see some growth and some monetizing on this tech?
Chris: Oh fair question. A year ago I would have had a harder time answering. In the last 6 months we’ve raised $3 mil. We have a healthy balance in our account, more $ coming in expected. For the first time in a long time we are fully funded for 2017 AND 2018. We just announced a $1mil R&D budget for 2017 and the first part of 2018. That too is gonna provide us with the foundation or framework to deliver on the licensing side of things.
A point I think I failed to make in the past is that we do have consumer products on the market, and they’re important because they are a good demonstration of our technology at work. But at our heart we are a technology licensing firm. And those relationships take some time, with corporate testing and fitting our recipes or tech into people’s existing recipes. So, I think in 2017 and early 2018, a pretty dramatic shift in our revenues. A shift upward. And since most of our revenues come from technology licensing. You have to understand our profit margins on those revenues are well north of 90%. A small amount of topline revenue growth will drive almost the equivalent amount of bottom-line earnings growth. So once our G&A is covered, which it is now from capital on hand, the bulk of that revenue, just like a software company, goes to the bottom line. So, I think we’re gonna see that shift later in 2017 and certainly in 2018.
I can’t go out much further than that, but I can tell you it’s been a real eye opener, even for me, to realize the stature of some of the companies that have approached us. Yea I mean I’m in my mid 50’s, I’ve been in the business world a long time, I’ve never experienced this in any company I’ve been in, that companies are so curious that they are calling us to set up meeting and see what we’re doing. So that doesn’t prove that anything major will happen with those companies but it’s certainly an indication of the level of their interest. And I can tell you we have quite a handful of PHDs on hand as consultants, or on the other side of those phone calls. The science works, its well understood and it works, the human physiology is well established.
I think what makes us really novel is that it’s just one of those really obvious things that no one ever really thought of before: it’s a marriage between biotech, physics, and food science.
We are planning and budgeting and fully funded for a tenfold increase in applied R&D this year. And that applied R&D is really gonna allow us to lever the science on to the bottom line. And I really think that by the end of 2017, we’re gonna have really piqued the interest of a lot of companies in a lot of sectors to want to partner with us to get our technology into their existing product lines and that will show dramatic revenue growth if we’re able to achieve that.
