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Sky Kurtz, founder and CEO of Pure Harvest Smart Farms: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Sky Kurtz (LinkedIn), founder and CEO of Pure Harvest Smart Farms. Edited excerpts from our conversation:
I’m the cofounder and CEO of Pure Harvest Smart Farms, which we set up in Abu Dhabi in 2017. It is a technology-enabled agribusiness — a vertically integrated, controlled environmental agriculture platform. We design, procure, construct, and then operate farms, and then we market, sell, and distribute the produce that we farm within them across the region.
We started in the UAE, but we’ve expanded into Saudi Arabia. We export into markets like Kuwait and Oman, and we’re expanding into new markets like Singapore and Morocco, serving the European market. We distribute our produce under our flagship brand, Pure Harvest, and we also offer products like sauces made from our fresh produce.
I’m now, I guess, a serial agripreneur. I started my career in finance, where I worked in private equity and as an investment banker prior to that, but then I decided to become an entrepreneur and ended up leading three different companies, two of which are in the agtech space. One was a company called vence, which is like a Fitbit for cows and sheep. We scaled that business and eventually sold it to Merck Animal Health.
When I was still an investment professional, I was looking at areas where there was white space, where technology had not been adopted in the way it could be. [Agriculture] is a global industry — over 50% of people directly or indirectly work in food, and I thought it’s a technology that could touch a lot of people’s lives and do a lot of good.
When I was living in Dubai, I was building a different company — a composite materials business — and while I lived here, I experienced the problem. When you’re living in this region that’s heavily import dependent, you identify there’s really two families of product. There’s either air freighted — or sometimes sea freighted — fresh produce of a certain quality and variety level that’s available, or there’s more local or regional seasonal production, which is often perceived as being low-quality, and virtually nothing in between.
I thought, what if you could use technology to control the climate? Could you produce a much higher quality product analogous or better than the stuff you can import from markets like Europe — and at a much lower cost, creating a new affordable, premium local offering? That’s how the idea for Pure Harvest came along.
As CEO, I’m ultimately responsible for the company’s strategy and its performance. I am enabled by a really wonderful team of individuals. I always like to say it’s a rule of thumb that you spend 10% of your time planning the other 90%. I have a lot of internal meetings that are about coordination, planning, and resource allocation.
We have quarterly board meetings, which everybody does, but we also do two special meetings a year. One is a strategy offsite where we lock everyone in a room for three days to chart a three-year vision, talking about big things in the industry, competitive forces, technological changes, government and non-government forces that are shaping the market, etc. We also do an annual planning meeting that is a rigorous focus on the year-ahead business plan — it’s my job throughout the year to drive that plan forward and support its execution. Finally, I have a big role in things like capital raising, acquisitions, opening in new markets and entering new land partnerships.
I’m an early riser. I’m a big believer in waking up early, especially because farming starts quite early in the day, and I cannot be a bottleneck or slow the organizational speed of the company. I often wake up between 4:30 and 5:30am, and have a couple of hours of uninterrupted time that I call desk time, where I’m reviewing documents, preparing for a strategy session or a negotiation, and also returning communications internally so that when people wake up and hit the office, they already have all of my instructions, my support, and my feedback to continue their days.
Mornings are quite special to me because I have a four year old girl, and I make sure that as long as I’m not traveling, I can see her as much as possible. I’m usually up a couple hours before she’s up. I wake her and get her ready for school, and that’s a special time for us. I have breakfast with her and my wife, and often I’ll drive her to school, so it’s a chance to [spend time with her,] because sometimes I’m getting home after she’s already in bed.
To wind down in the evening, my wife and I sometimes have a Netflix show that we binge. She’s also a prolific reader and a writer, so sometimes we’ll engage on something in her writing, which for me, is fun because I get to be part of something creative and interesting that’s totally different from what I do, while helping and supporting her. We try to from time to time to have a social life and go out for dinner with another couple.
I also make fitness a priority, at least to some extent, for my health, so I go to the gym at least two times a week. I would like to go three to four times a week, but sometimes I find that challenging. I’m having to make compromises between spending more time with my daughter or going to the gym. I usually choose my daughter and my waistline reflects it [laughs].
I would like to be better when it comes to balance. I believe life is like a sundial where you’re supposed to have three things at any given time that you’re focused on. Right now, I would say that’s my business, my family, and my health, but I’m hoping over time to have a bit more time for leisure, engaging in things like further learning, more travel, more culture, etc.
The second goal I have is a little more long-term, but one day, I’d like to teach. I’ve led three companies now, and I’ve been approached by some universities and graduate schools, so I would really love to be a lecturer one day, whether it was while I was continuing to practice as a CEO or doing it full time for a period of time. But for me, some of the most impactful people in my life have been professors, and they were often business practitioners who later went on to teach and pass on their learnings and their passions.
I recently read Multipliers, and my human capital head, Natalie, is deploying a program now inspired by and leveraging the learnings of that book. It’s a book about how certain leaders multiply their capacity through their organization by getting the most out of their people. The book has some really interesting insights that’s driven by good research.
Another one I’m enjoying is called Mission in a Bottle. It’s about Seth Goldman, who built what was at the time called Honest Tea, the ethically-made tea brand that was sold to Coca Cola. Coca Cola struggled with the brand and shut it down and then he relaunched the exact company again, renaming it Just Ice Tea. The book is written like a comic book, and tells the story of how he achieved the successes he had with Honest Tea in 10 years again in just a year, showing that he could repeat the success of building a mission-driven brand. It’s a really powerful guide on how to build an authentic brand, which is something we’re striving to do at Pure Harvest.
The best piece of advice I received was from one of my professors, who unfortunately recently passed. His name is Herb Groesbeck. He famously said: strive to be wealthy, not rich. He said rich people have money, but wealthy people have money and time, so make sure that you make time in your life because otherwise, you’ll end up with a lot of regrets.
