367: The "Tom Sawyer" Approach in AgTech Venture Capital with Carter Williams, CEO of iSelect Fund

The Modern Acre

Carter Williams is the CEO and Managing Director at iSelect Fund, who invests at the convergence of agtech and human health.

Carter has spent his entire career working on innovation. First as a young engineer at McDonnell Douglas, next in his leadership roles at Boeing managing R&D and starting Boeing Ventures. Later as a successful entrepreneur and venture investor. Throughout his career, he has directly managed investments of over $600 million in early-stage ventures and corporate research, resulting in several billion dollars of new product revenues. As part of Boeing Phantom Works, Carter led Boeing’s technology planning process, involving all aspects of internal and external technology development and manufacturing research. This eventually led to his role in founding and managing Boeing Ventures. After Boeing, he was President of Gridlogix, initially a small 4-person startup that grew over 3 years, exiting successfully to Johnson Controls in October 2008. Gridlogix became Johnson Controls Panopics system.

Before leading iSelect, Carter was Senior Managing Director at Progress Partners, an energy and technology investment banking firm. He was a Managing Partner at Open Innovation Ventures and a Director at Clayton Capital Partners. Carter is the past President and Founder of the MIT Corporate Venturing Consortium and Co-founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Society. He has an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also writes about innovation at the substack Creative Destruction.

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This episode is presented by American AgCredit. Learn more HERE. Check out Matt Woolf's episode on the California ag market HERE.

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Links

• iSelect Fund - https://www.iselectfund.com
• Carter on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carter/
• Carter's Substack - https://creativedestruction.substack.com
• Join the Co-op - https://themodernacre.supercast.com