Thank you.
I'm a psychiatrist. I admit that I'm over-educated, and I thank the Canadian taxpayer for paying for all of that. I have an M.D., am a psychiatrist, and for a period of time worked as an MRC commission scientist.
I was working in Stratford many years ago and wanted to find a way of treating people with chronic insomnia, which is a very common complaint. I didn't really want to use medications; I wanted to try to do it in a natural way that would fit within the chemistry of the brain, the way we're supposed to do it.
I worked with the Guelph Food Technology Centre—a centre that is now being sold off—and discovered that the pumpkin seeds in southwestern Ontario are the highest source of tryptophan. One gram of pumpkin seed protein from southwestern Ontario pumpkin seeds is equivalent to a full glass of milk. If your mother told you to have a full glass of milk, just a few little grams of the pumpkin seed would have done it.
I had to cross over the valley of death that Dr. Tyrrell has talked about: how to go from an idea to a product. I had a clever idea: I knew I had to combine it with dextrose—and that made it a patentable idea—in order to get it across the blood-brain barrier. And I had a clever wife. Those are the two attributes I had.
With that, we have grown, not to the degree of the companies you've heard about so far, but we're doubling our revenues every year. We'll be hitting $1 million this year and hopefully $2 million the year after. Most of our sales are in Europe, not so much in Canada and the U.S.
There are a few things I can share with you about the struggle I had. There really is this valley of death. You have to go from an idea to getting a product out there immediately. The first patent costs $10,000, and it's almost like gambling. You put the first $10,000 down and think, okay, I'm in. But it's then an exponential crisis of cash flow that you have entered into. Once you have that in your mind, you have to log on to revenue as quickly as possible.
That's what I did with our little thing. We took our pumpkin seeds, we found a way very quickly to develop it into a product made into a functional food, and then I hopped on a plane and buses and got it into distribution in Europe. Without that, we would not have survived.
I'd like to make a few points, if I can.
There's something wrong with the fact that I buy my pumpkin seeds in Wisconsin, and yet the original seeds came from Ontario. It's not that people don't want to cooperate; I'm working with the local farmers now to find some organic spaces in order to procure them. We need to think more clearly about manufacturers who can manufacture at a pharmaceutical level and yet have an organic, functional food. That's what I have to find, and it's really tough to find in Canada.
Then, I want to echo what Dr. Friesen said: you have to learn to be an entrepreneur. I learned the hard way, probably too late. It would be good, if we could, to teach that in medical school a little bit.
I know that this is socialized medicine. I'm not opposed to socialized medicine; I want to be very clear about that. I'm happy to have gone through a socialized university. I assure you, my bank loans would have been huge. I favour people being able to receive health care based on need rather than on ability to pay.
At the same time, doctors have to become entrepreneurial, if we're to take the ideas we have into the marketplace. There Is really not a great fit right now, in many cases, between the way doctors are trained and the way venture capitalists are trained. They are two very different and competitive ideas. Venture capital, by and large, is not patient capital, and academics are perhaps too patient, and so you have a kind of collision of cultures.
I'll leave you with that: if you could, focus on “Canadian farm” brand as really a huge brand out there—people love it in Europe. Doctors should become a little more entrepreneurial. I'll leave it at that.
Thank you.