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Transcript
Jack McCarthy:
I'm Jack McCarthy. I'm one of the co-founders of Gold Leaf Farming. I'm from Indiana, originally. Grew up there as the oldest of four boys. Not from an ag family, but as I got out of college at Indiana and then went to work, I had been in food, agriculture, and other types of heavy industry throughout my career. So I started at McKinsey, doing consulting for those types of companies, and ended up also working at TPG, a big private investment firm. I was either going to work my way up a big company at TPG or do something more entrepreneurial, and really liked the opportunity in agriculture and particularly the Central Valley specialty agriculture that we focus on. My wife and I have four kids. Just love having a big, crazy family. It keeps us busy and it keeps us entertained.
Brandon Rebiero:
My name's Brandon Rebiero. I'm Jack's co-founder here at Gold Leaf Farming, where I really focus on the farm strategy side of things. I grew up in Modesto, California on my grandfather's 30-acre almond orchard. Throughout college, I studied agronomy, and came back and really was a licensed agronomist and started doing that and then started a farm management company as well. During that time, I crossed paths with a large player who came to the valley and wanted to develop a bunch of acres, so we developed about 10,000 acres in eight years. I have a wife and two children, six and two years old. The McCarthy's are outpacing us, but we love our kids and any spare time I get, that's where my time is spent.
Jack McCarthy:
It's interesting because we have such different backgrounds, but we were both working on a similar concept.
Brandon Rebiero:
Most of my experience was working with a really large almond portfolio operator, and once there was an exit event, I was looking to continue on with something similar but just didn't have the right partner. But when I first met Jack, our skillsets, I discovered quickly, were quite complimentary. Jack having a really experienced background in finance and investing, which was a huge void that I had in my background really in operations, farm operations and agronomy. So I guess you could say it was sort of love at first sight. It's one thing to go through all the box checking, "Oh yes, you have these skills. You have these skills." Sometimes you got to just throw that out the window, and when the gut thing is there and it just clicks, you really can't ignore that.
Jack McCarthy:
The big mission we're on, our North Star, is leave the world better than we found it. Of course, that means we want to treat our people well so that they're better off working with us versus working somewhere else. We want our investors to be better off being partnered with us versus being partnered with somebody else, and we want our orchards to be better off, that we're taking care of them, converting them to organic, improving the water. We hope by doing things the right way and driving good results, that's ultimately going to not only change the way our company works, but maybe our industry too.
So we decided to focus on almonds and pistachios, partially because of operational reasons, partially because of investment reasons, so I'll talk about both. We believe in really focusing to become experts rather than being too broad and master of none. So on the ops side, it's really important that we focus, because we actually farm our orchards. We don't outsource that. On the investment side, it's the same thing. We got to have deep, deep expertise so that we're seeing any farms that come to market, we hear about them, because often we're farming down the street. Brandon's on the almond board. We're involved in the industry. We're a farming company, not an investment firm.
Brandon Rebiero:
Our values are lead by example, act like owners, family first, and be candid. I just enjoy the people we work with. I enjoy sharing in the success. We all have a stake in this company. As we grow and we become more successful, we all get to share in that.
Jack McCarthy:
We've been really, really intentional about building a strong culture that's super differentiated. And we always say our values are not meant to be just a poster in the office. They're really what you feel as you step onto one of our farms or interact with our people. Our partners really started as friends and family, and still to this day, some of our biggest investors are close personal friends or family members. We don't believe in fancy offices, fancy trucks, titles, dress codes, but we do care a lot about how we treat our team and our culture, the results we generate for our team and our farms and our investors, and ultimately building something great.
