Episode 10 - Chris Rawley (USN)

“The good thing was we didn’t know a lot about this field. The bad thing was we didn’t know a lot about this field.”

This from Chris Rawley, CEO for Harvest Returns, as he describes what it was like to start something as new as an equity crowdfunding company in an industry as disaggregated and specialized as agriculture.

Harvest Returns is an equity crowdfunding investment platform connecting both accredited and non-accredited investors with growers looking to raise capital. To date, they’ve raised over $10M for more than 20 different companies across the world – from livestock, specialty and permanent crops, indoor ag to row crops and artificial intelligence-driven ag technologies.

Chris and I have known each other for a number of years, in fact, we got started about the same time, both AGD Consulting and Harvest Returns, back in 2016. I had just returned from a 6-month, 6-country due diligence trip in Latin America and was keenly interested in what Harvest Returns was pursuing in the specialty crop space in Central America.

As we have supported and watched them grow over the years, I’m continually impressed with Chris’s vision for Harvest Returns – not just what they are doing now, but for the kinds of products they can create. I’ve never seen Chris static; he’s always thinking of new ways to innovate and solve increasingly complex problems within ag finance. The fact that they’ve nearly bootstrapped their entire company’s development, which for me as a veteran entrepreneur who has bootstrapped our own firm, gives me a tremendous sense of pride in what the veteran community is capable of.

Chris has been in the Navy for over 30 years now and in every clime and place he’s served, including the deserts of the Middle East and Afghanistan, he’s managed to see agriculture as an integral part of life, national security, and economic development.

Have a listen as Chris describes the veteran’s unique perspective around risk identification and management, distributed command and control, and remote work and what that means in today’s world.