The agrifoodtech community has lost one of its most dedicated builders. Rob Trice, founding partner of Better Food Ventures and The Mixing Bowl, passed away last month after a short illness. He is survived by his wife and family.
Rob came to food and agriculture from Silicon Valley telecom and mobile venture capital–Nokia, Swisscom, SK Telecom–and brought that systems-thinking discipline with him when he founded Better Food Ventures in 2013. Over the years, he backed more than 25 founders applying digital technology across the food and agriculture value chain, including Afresh, Breedr, and Farm-ng.
His influence ran well beyond his portfolio. The Mixing Bowl, which he co-founded with Michael Rose, brought together farmers, technologists, investors, and corporates at a time when agrifoodtech was barely a category. Rob was even instrumental in the coining of the term “agrifoodtech” during a long drive down to the San Joaquin Valley in spring 2017.
Much of our industry’s early identity was shaped through conversations with him; he was the kindest and most thoughtful sounding board, as many have attested over the past couple of days.
Over the years, the community also came to rely on Rob and The Mixing Bowl’s comprehensive insights and market maps as a signal of where the industry is headed.
“Rob was a super-connector,” Eve Turrow-Paul wrote this week. “He made introductions generously. So many careers, collaborations, partnerships, startups, and friendships exist because of him.”
An early champion of AgFunderNews, Rob would often email us to share his thoughts on articles we’d written, whether praise or a pointed critique; his direct, honest feedback was always encouraging, especially if we were posting opinions that didn’t conform to the hype of the times.
“To know Rob was to know there was not a microphone he didn’t love. He always had an insightful perspective to voice, and questions to ask that pushed others to think deeper,” wrote his colleagues in a LinkedIn post yesterday.
He also wrote for us. A 2016 piece on design thinking and lean startup methodology in agtech showed the depth of his thinking and his impatience with investors who assumed farmers would pay for any shiny new technology. He warned against what a friend of his from the Midwest called “Silicon Valley agtech,” rooted in the arrogant assumption that farmers and ranchers are desperate for, or can easily afford, all kinds of new technologies. For 2016, this proved very prescient thinking.
He was equally clear-eyed about why food and agriculture demanded a different approach from other sectors. Unlike a social media app, he wrote, food and agriculture are comprised of living organisms bounded by incontrovertible laws of nature, and if you make a mistake with a food or agricultural product, the consequences can be deadly. That grounded realism, rare in Silicon Valley, was one of the things that made him so valuable to this space.
His sense of humor was often on show, including in what may be one of his last interviews, published by AgTechNavigator in mid-February, when he called the agtech market “constipated” and described Better Food Ventures as “fundamentally digital monkeys.”
Asked how he ended up in food and agriculture after a career in telecom VC, he recalled watching his wife struggle to use Square at a farmers’ market and thinking: “This is 5-10% of the world’s economy. How hard could it be to digitize food and agriculture?” Harder than social media, he admitted: “Tweeting is not like eating.”
That was Rob: serious intentions, zero pretension.
His colleagues described him as someone who could see both the high-level vision and the detailed steps required to enact change, and who was impatient with delay. He did not want to change the world in 2050; he wanted impact now. They wrote that his favourite quote was from Teddy Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” speech:
“It is not the critic who counts…the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again…who spends himself in a worthy cause…”
Rob was always in the arena.
The agrifoodtech community he helped build is a better, more connected place because of him. He will be sorely missed by all of us at AgFunder.
Those wishing to share memories and photos for his family can email [email protected].
