Basil: Welcome to the Bee Dance CPA podcast! Today, I have a guest, Cian Robinson, from Robinson Ventures, and we got connected over the honey bees topic. So we have an interesting connection. He got into biomimicry. How did you get into biomimicry and just using the examples of nature and applying that to business?

Cian: Good morning Basil! So I was talking to a client of mine, and I was out in my garden, and I noticed there were plenty of flowers on the tomatoes and the peppers and cucumbers and squash and the zucchini and everything, but there were no vegetables and no fruit. And so immediately I thought, “Well, there's a lack of pollinators.” So I went to the local farmers market where there was a guy who's a beekeeper.

I always bought honey from him, and said, “Hey, this is my problem. I'd like to start being a beekeeper.” And so I did! He came to my house, helped me set it up, and away we went. And so, six beehives later, we have a solution. There seems to be a solution to every problem within biomimicry, right?

So, you don't have any fruit, you don't have any vegetables, but wait—there are pollinators out there in the world that can help with that. And so within biomimicry, for every problem, there seems to be some type of solution. There is this natural homeostasis and balance.

Look at a beehive—it really is a collective, and sometimes people think of it as a collective consciousness as well. In the hive, you have the queen, whose sole job is to lay eggs to create the new workers. So once they're done with their mating flight, they come in, and that's what they do and they have a good run for a few years. Every 90 to 120 days, there's a whole brand new set of bees that go, that pass, and then a whole brand new set of bees that come in and through their life cycle, every single bee has their own job because they're seeking to solve a problem. And so I really do think that we can take a lot from learning about bees or ecosystems as a whole.

Basil: So effectively, you know, like in business or in science, we need to construct a new system. We need to set up a set of constraints, we need to make sure that the system works. And then in nature, those systems already work. So we're like, well, if those systems already work, let's just copy it over rather than reinvent the wheel.

Cian: Look at the F-22 Raptor or something similar, and then look at it like a falcon—look at the way that the falcon is shaped in its dive, the way it has nostrils that it's able to breathe during the dive. All of these things inspire us as humans, in terms of biomimicry, to make what nature has perfected over millennia, part of our own world.

Basil: My fascination with the bee stems from my childhood years spent in the Carpathian foothills, and my great-great uncle had 40 beehives. Everybody in the village would go and buy honey from him. And I remember once my little sister and I went to visit him, and we got stung by a bee. I just had a little sting, but her face got stung, and that was really weird, because it's the first time we saw that level of reaction. But my great uncle was into treating different nervous system disorders, so you basically get into the box on top of the beehives, and then you hear this buzzing of the bees. And it really helps soothe your nervous system, especially with guys who came from Czechoslovakia and had PTSD. He was very effective using this.

Cian: There are studies out there that show beekeepers actually live longer. Part of it is because you're out and you're working on your hives and you're staying active, but part of it is also a harmonic that comes off the bees, and it's a proven harmonic that when you go there, all of a sudden, your nervous system and blood pressure come down.

I have an athletic background, and I have some injuries, specifically orthopedic ones. I was out beekeeping and took my gloves off to put the top on. I thought I had smoked the bees enough to calm them down. I didn't, and I got stung on my hand—not once, not twice, but like three times. So I got stung, and I obviously had a reaction, but the arthritis in my right hand that usually hurts went away for almost two weeks. We’re finding out that bee venom not only helps with folks who can withstand the treatment with these types of injuries, but they're also finding that bee venom can actually destroy breast cancer cells.

We can observe what has taken nature millennia to perfect. For example, everything with these GLP-1 drugs is based on the venom of a yellow monster. They sting their prey, they bite their prey, they subdue their prey, and they eat their prey. Because resources are so limited, the venom in their system slows down their digestion, so they're able to last a long time on a single meal. So I think biomimicry is something we need to look at in business as well.

I am all about entrepreneurship and wealth creation and starting companies and investing in companies. These two reside well together, like your uncle, who had 40 hives, who sold honey. So, I mean, that's an enterprise. That's an entrepreneurial enterprise that he was using to sustain his family and himself.

Basil: Yeah, so when we talk about, say, scraping the frame and, you know, beekeeping, practice of that cleanup, then I see the direct correlation to due diligence, because, say, the buyer wants to buy a company, and then we say, okay, I don't know what these other guys were doing over there. In auditing, it's called management assertions. They can assert multiple things, but let's scrape the frame and really see what we think the objective feel for that is. So you're working with investors and providing capital for startups. How do you see that “scraping the frame” process on your side of the business?

Cian: That's a great analogy. So anytime I get into a hive and I uncap the honey and spin the honey out, I scrape the frame, I clean up, and then sometimes I put it back—what’s called putting it back wet, right? So you just leave those open cells. You put them back in, but that's because I already know what was in there. I know what the underlying thesis and structure was, and so on and so forth. So I didn't have to scrape the frame. But I've gotten former beekeepers’ equipment where I'm like, “I need to know what the heck went on here.” We need to do our due diligence.

And so when we look at companies, you know what we're really looking at, especially in our area, which is pre-seed and seed, we come in early in the company. We very often invest in the problem that's being solved. We invest in the person who's solving that problem, and then we go in and see if that problem has a total addressable market, a service addressable market, and a service obtainable market (aka a TAM SAM SOM) to know that, yes, there is a market that they can grow into eventually if this company is successful.

Well, in order to understand all that, we have to go in, and we have to do that due diligence, and we get into intellectual property that they may have created. We get into their financials, of course, we get into corporate structures, people who would be advisors—there's a whole list of things we do. And much like getting in there and scraping that frame, we're getting in there and really understanding that company. We may look at 50–75 pre-seed or seed deals a year that are really hyper within our own, much like beekeeping. Just like we know beekeeping, we know digital health. And so we stay in our investment thesis. And so we may look at 50 to 75 companies, and some years over 100, and we only invest in 2–4. And we invest at the pre-seed or seed level. Folks who are in this process need to be persistent, much like the bees. They need to be out there, constantly collecting resources, pollen, etc.

Basil: So the honey bee’s life cycle is 30 days or so, and she has to be so active during those 30 days, but once that cycle is over, or if the bee doesn't produce enough of what the hive needs, back to the point of the eggs producing new bees in order to replace that function. So, you know, just making sure that it's the right hive, because if it's the wrong hive, there will be a higher probability of selecting the wrong site for winter.

Cian: As beekeepers, we are brought in or asked to come in, and we look at hives that have perhaps set themselves up in a location that's not so great, right? So we end up going in and we rescue those bees. That's something similar to what we do at Robinson Ventures—not only on the investment side of our house, but also on the management consulting side. We are often brought into companies that may have a great idea, they may just have a “bad location.” That’s the best way to say it, right? A great hive and a bad location. So what we do is we come in on the management consulting side of the house, we're brought in as a fractional C-suite advisor, or something along those lines, to help course-correct.

And the other 50% of the time, it's a situation where it's not only a bad location for the hive, but also that the queen and that hive themselves aren't that great either. So how do you then take that and merge it into something else? I don't know how many times I've had to combine hives—because you have a weak queen in one and a strong queen in the other. You bring those two together, and suddenly there's a whole new set of worker bees to make that strong hive even stronger.

What's really interesting is, you know, bees have bee wars, which is absolutely fascinating to me—that there will be one hive that will attack another hive to rob that hive's resources. And so these bees have guard bees as part of their duties. This past summer, there's a very large wild hive near where I have my six hives. We lost two of them because the two hives were weaker. That large wild hive attacked them. They tried to attack all of them; four of the six were strong enough to defend themselves, and the other two were weak. I happened to be overseas, and while I was gone the whole “bee war” happened.

Basil: I was thinking about the industries that you focus on, like healthcare and education, and I thought that's interesting for the bees too, because we think first of all that the colony has to be healthy to survive. So we have the health component. Then we talk about collective intelligence—that’s the education component, constantly acquiring new skills we’re equipping.

Cian: We also have one company that we are invested in that produces drone technology. What we're interested in is how this can be used in healthcare. And much like the bees in this instance, the drone is delivering—flying out and delivering resources.

The company is Blueflite. They’re based in Michigan, and their use cases in healthcare right now are pre-hospital blood administration. For example, if you're in a car crash and in need of blood quickly, that can be delivered with their drone, to give it to the EMS team for them to use. People don't realize the ambulance doesn't carry bags of blood behind it—it has to be resupplied. Another use is supply chain—they’re able to fly smaller, up-to-50-pound supplies out and back between places that aren’t part of the main hospital. So it might be an urgent care or another smaller hospital. And then the other one is they fly labs back and forth, which is really cool. Bringing that back around to bees, those bees have jobs assigned to them. This drone that we're talking about happens to have multiple use cases. These bees also have multiple use cases.

Basil: The word drone, you know, comes from the bee world, because Albert Einstein was studying the visual apparatus of the bee. He was studying flying objects.

Cian: Yes, you look at a bumblebee and you’re like—should it even be able to fly? I mean, it’s amazing. And yes, what's great is, when a bee is born, they come out of the hive and they fly a figure eight in front of the hive. And what they're doing is they're setting their GPS up. Because bees are amazing with their line of sight—they'll fly out, and they're able to, no matter where they go to collect, come back. And then the bees tell the other bees through what's called the waggle dance. They sit there and they do their waggle dance, and that’s communication to tell them where those resources are, so those other bees can go out and collect.

Basil: And then we see that interaction with the other bees. So one bee discovered the source of nectar. So she's trying to teach, but the other bees don't really know if that's true or not, so they have to believe that this bee is truly guiding them correctly. Sometimes a bee misperceives the directions and she misdirects the other bees so they end up coming to the wrong location and realize there is no nectar there. So it's known as the dance of the deceived bees. So I really like that metaphor, because I think if the consultant is working with a business, he'd better know what he's talking about. He doesn't want to take the clients on the dance with a deceived bee, so to speak.

Cian: Exactly! The dance of the deceiving bee—that’s great. And I totally forgot about that. Yes, as consultants, we do not want to be the deceiving bee dancing person, right? You know, especially when it's folks not in our network or that don't know us previously.

You have all your network of folks that you deliver. And I really do believe, the bigger the network of the human and the individual in the company, the more likelihood of survivability. But when we do go outside of our network and we're introduced to somebody, there is a pretty serious—and much like we come back to due diligence—process on us to make sure that we're not the deceiving bee that's dancing around trying to get the job.

Basil: Yes, and as a CPA, I see how there are so many promoters that peddle some strategies that were disqualified by the IRS. And then, you know, if somebody gets advice on those strategies and gets in trouble, then that puts a bad taste in people's mouths. “Oh, I'm not sure if this strategy that he is proposing is truly good or not.” So it goes back to your point of trust—having the people in the network whom you can really trust is so important. Thank you for coming and speaking with me, Cian!

Cian: Of course, thanks for having me.