Daphne Preuss is co-founder and CEO of Chromatin, which makes hybrid sorghum planting seeds. She spun out the Chicago-based company in 2000 from the University of Chicago, where she developed DNA technology as a plant geneticist and professor of molecular genetics and cell biology. She was an adviser to Chromatin for its first five years and joined the company in 2006 when funding dried up. Preuss explains how the business is different today and what she learned about dealing with investors.
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Q. What was the original idea for this company?
A. I felt that the world was heading toward resource constraints as we saw population growing and quality land disappearing due to urbanization, deforestation and climate. The interest was in making crops yield more.
The initial technology was to improve several genetic traits in one step. Before that, the industry was doing changes one at a time. That’s not what we’re about today, but that is what got us started.
Q. What’s the opportunity for sorghum?
A. The only way to really solve the resource constraints we’re coming up against is to make sure we get more production on marginal land with less water. Sorghum takes about half the water of corn to produce a crop.
Q. Why did you join Chromatin in 2006?
A. The company had not made as much progress as we had hoped. The initial and follow-on money had been spent, and the company was nearly out of funds. The board asked me to see if any insight could be pulled together to monetize something or wind it up in a sensible way because no one wanted to put up additional capital unless they could see the light at end of the tunnel.
Licensing the DNA technology was a great way to bring in capital. That allowed us to start building a company around sorghum.
Q. Why did you change the focus from the DNA technology?
A. We still use that technology to develop our own products. But making gene additions into crops involves a lot of research and regulatory processes and can take more than seven years. What I was looking for in sorghum was a way to get significant revenue on a faster pace that wasn’t requiring a very long R&D and regulatory process.
Our products today don’t include any genetically engineered crops. That said, we’re leaving the option open for the future, but today all of our crops are made with conventional breeding.
Q. What got you on the sorghum seed path?
A. The way you get innovation and new technologies out to the agriculture community is through the vehicle of selling seeds. We didn’t have that vehicle. So we needed to find a seed crop that we could work in. We looked at 40 different crops and made the decision that sorghum was a good bet for us.
Q. What’s your revenue and your end game?
A. Our revenues are in the tens of millions of dollars. We’ve closed a round of financing recently for growth and expansion. We believe we’re going to be the leading global sorghum company.
Q. Did you face gender discrimination in the venture capital process?
A. I never experienced that. I did feel that academics have a stereotype to overcome. There is an assumption that they’re not good business people. I really disagree with that. It’s just that there’s different jargon and ways of negotiating.
In business, you typically ask for more than you want and negotiate to a midpoint. But amongst the academic people I know, where relationships are lifelong, you don’t want to ask for more than people can deliver. Each side can misinterpret that. It causes conflict.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.
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