The Top 20: #9 Kiersten Stead, venture principal, Monsanto Growth Ventures
A review of her biography shows it is a suitably frank assessment of her competitive drive. Hired by Monsanto initially as a consultant, Stead’s manager, John Hamer, said her consultancy tenure sparked requests from other business units about whether they could hire her. He politely turned them all down to hire her himself.
The other units had been made aware of her “exceptional” networking and business analysis skills after Hamer asked Stead to come up with fresh insights into the internal Monsanto culture and organisation in the first six months of her consulting. Hamer said giving her this task enabled him to overturn managers’ views that it was better to hire internal staff for Monsanto Growth Ventures than look outside for venture experts.
Stead took on the challenge of finding deals and getting to grips with learning about a company’s power structures and strategic interests.
Since joining in 2014, she has completed a quarter of the team’s 12 corporate venture capital (CVC) deals completed during the unit’s history, spanning 2012 to November 2015.
Stead sits on the board of three private technology companies. She is chairwoman of Plant Response Biotech, a Spain-based agriculture company that protects crops without using chemicals. It raised €5.7m ($6.2) in its series A round in November. She is a director at Vital Fields – previously known as WeatherMe – an Estonia-based software and artificial intelligence agriculture company. She is also a board observer at California, US-based Blue River Technologies, an agriculture robotics company developed by Stanford University graduates, which was originally backed by Khosla Ventures.
She also serves on the scientific advisory board of the Keystone Science Board, the selection board of the Genomic Applications Partnership Programme at Genome Canada and on the board of an undisclosed non-profit firm.
Stead takes the need to build internal links seriously. She said: “Our CVC is too new to measure its metrics in internal rate of return or return on investment, but this looks good so far.
“However, we are doing well on the strategic picture and have enthusiastic support from the company executives. This takes effort. Team members do a good job of communicating and maintaining credibility.”
Her experience at Monsanto has helped her develop a view that for the industry to develop, corporations need to “hire more dedicated, permanent venture investors into the team from institutional venture capital”.
She said: “People are the most important factor in building CVC teams with longevity.”
She said there were three main reasons for joining Monsanto. There was the team and the surrounding people in the rest of the organisation and the opportunity to help found and shape a new CVC to be successful. The ability to focus on a vertical such as agriculture was an excellent fit with her expertise and, to her, it was an area of investment neglect for many years. Finally, there was the kudos of Monsanto: “If you are going to build a venture capital portfolio in agriculture, there is no better company to do it with.”
Stead had previously worked for two years until 2013 on the merchant bank Burrill & Company’s venture capital team, which invested broadly in life sciences and industrial biotechnology with $1.2bn under management from limited partners, including Monsanto.
Monsanto, which had also recruited Hamer from Burrill in 2012, had been among Burrill’s LPs that had removed the founder, Steven Burrill, from managing a $283m VC fund in early 2014 over his alleged misconduct.
For Stead, joining Monsanto has enabled her to concentrate on agriculture again, having been born in Harare, Zimbabwe, which had once been called the “breadbasket of Africa” owing to its exports of wheat, tobacco, and corn.
After leaving Zimbabwe, Stead lived in South Africa and Ireland before her family migrated to Toronto, Canada, where she studied biology at the universities of Calgary and Alberta, completing her PhD at the latter in 2006.
She stayed on for post-doctoral research and her MBA and helped Alberta win the Queen’s Cup at the MBA Games in 2011.
Alberta also won the Sprit Award, selected by their peers, that year, with Stead receiving accolades in newspaper Financial Post for leading “a top-notch ultimate frisbee win,” after previously representing Canada in the world championships the year before.
She retired from ultimate frisbee that year, having retired from competitive alpine skiing in the 1990s, but her retirement from venture investing looks as though it is a great deal more far off.
