The Sacramento Inno Awards recognize some of the year's most talented and successful players in the tech and startup community. This year, the Business Journal recognized companies, products, and leaders in the innovation space. John Selep is this year's Innovation Leader of the Year.
John Selep has long been a quiet force in the local innovation community, as an investor, mentor, connector and innovator.
His innovations have largely been in finding novel ways to support a local life-sciences startup community that faces high costs in bringing innovations out of the laboratory toward commercialization.
He’s been working, often behind the scenes, to support local startups with everything from office space, and then lab space, and most recently with national connections.
In 2016, Selep was part of the team that started AgStart, a business incubator in Woodland for agricultural technology startups. Selep is president of AgStart.
Recently, AgStart was awarded $150,000 from the Small Business Administration to build out its national AgTech Nation network to a national level, connecting agricultural technology and food technology entrepreneurship programs across the country.
AgTech Nation connects partners coast-to-coast that are themselves networks in their local regions for providing support to ag-tech, seed and food company entrepreneurs.
"American agriculture is globally competitive and an important part of the economy of many states, particularly in rural communities,” Selep said. "Technology innovation is essential to keep American agriculture competitive, and much of this innovation is emerging from innovative startups."
AgTech Nation will connect entrepreneurs and startups across the country with other local networks for support, collaboration and funding.
Selep is working on a model that will make the AgTech Nation model self-sustaining with sponsorships from companies and groups that are interested in seeing the success of its startup to bring new technologies to life.
In 2016, Selep co-founded the non-profit AgTech Innovation Alliance. The alliance is the non-profit sponsor of the AgStart program. The program supports startups in agriculture, life sciences and food technology. AgStart started by offering support and connections, but it quickly moved to creating office space in Woodland for startups.
Then, listening to the needs of science and food startups, AgStart launched its campaign to create The Lab@AgStart, a wet-lab space in Woodland for startup companies in food and ag.
Wet labs — equipped for testing and analysis of chemicals and biological matter — are necessary for life sciences, medical, pharma and agricultural research and experiments.
The region for years has had two small wet labs, UC Davis-HM.Clause Life Science Innovation Center south of Davis and Inventopia in Davis.
The newest and largest space for startup science companies to prove their mettle is The Lab@AgStart. It opened in 2021 in 5,000 square feet and then added another 8,000 square feet of space last year. It now has 52 benches for rent to startups.
In addition to space, Lab@AgStart is outfitted with shared equipment that would be difficult for startups to otherwise get access to, such as autoclaves, storage, cryogenic storage, centrifuges, precision balances and multiple chemical and biological safety cabinets. It has a commercial kitchen, so companies can develop and sell products.
The expansion also added a tissue-culture lab and a fermentation lab.
All the lab equipment is an expensive high hurdle for startups to furnish, but the tissue culture lab and fermentation labs are exorbitantly expensive for a startup to build from scratch.
Under the shared model of Lab@AgStart, companies get access to equipment which they might need desperately, but which they might only need a few times a week or month.
Local interests, partners, governments and sponsors contributed the more than $1.5 million to outfit the original Lab@AgStart in 2021 and then another $2.5 million last year to open, outfit and expand Lab@AgStart.
The lab was set up to be self-sustaining, with new companies moving in as older renters either fail fast or succeed and expand into their own larger spaces. And under the local economic development model, those companies hopefully expand somewhere in the region. Multiple companies have already expanded out of Lab@AgStart, making room for new startups to take shared space.
Selep earned Master of Science in systems engineering degree from Boston University, went on to get a Master of Science from Stanford University and then an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.
He started out working as a systems engineer with the storied AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He then made the move to Palo Alto to work at a software startup in 1981. He worked more than 25 years, though in two stints, for at Hewlett-Packard in Roseville, ending his career there working in research and development for network technology.
Selep has been a member of the Sacramento Angels angel investing group since 2010. He co-founded AgTech Innovation Partners, an early stage advisory firm, in 2013.
