An investor keen on green theme

Last Thursday, as his old company got sold again, for $925 million, Michael Golden sat back with a jungle-colored Mo'Green smoothie, as a resort-quality summer breeze cooled through the wide west windows of Bryn & Dane's restaurant in Plymouth Meeting, and talked about what he's investing in since his days as an e-commerce pioneer.

He saw the news: King of Prussia-based eBay Enterprise, based on the online-retail business Golden cofounded with Michael Rubin, will be taken over by Georgia rival Innotrac and its private-equity backers, for a fraction of the $2.4 billion eBay paid just four years ago, when the business was called GSI Commerce.

GSI was a rival to Amazon, filling online orders for retailers not ready to do their own. But times and valuations change, fast.

Digital fulfillment went from being an exotic specialty to the heart of retail, squeezing contractors as store chains brought online in-house.

Not Golden's problem. Like his old partner Rubin, who heads e-commerce holding company Kynetic, Golden says he's made "tons of investments alongside venture capitalists: real estate, tech companies, software, e-commerce. Things I know about. Also, things I get passionate about."

The things he knows about include start-ups such as CandiDate (a Philadelphia tech recruiting/matchmaking service), Yieldify (online "shopping-cart abandonment optimization"), Swirl Networks (mobile marketing), and funds like Metamorphic Ventures, a New York early-stage investor, and Vast Ventures, a Softbank spin-off. And business real estate; more on that below.

Among Golden's passions, you can count Bryn & Dane's, with its smoothies, salads, wraps, and fruit waters, its daytime crowds of clean-cut families and teens, and the mint and basil growing on the roof.

Green-themed restaurant chains are in: "People who have invested in technology and social media companies are now invested in this space. This has exactly the right profile," Golden told me.

Does he really expect this three-store chain to pull ahead of larger, venture-funded competitors? "There's not a single company I see as more likely to be $1 billion a year," scaled up to hundreds of locations, Golden insists.

He met founder Bryn Davis at a junior high business-incubator event at tony Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, where Golden's son and Davis' kid brother were schoolmates last year.

"As an investor, you like to see really big markets," Golden says. "I see the KFCs and McDonald's all being replaced by healthy, more socially responsible-type fast-food solutions."

I note there are still cars snaking from the take-out windows of the chain burger joints on nearby Germantown Avenue. Just watch the young folks, Golden says: "When I was a kid at [Plymouth-Whitemarsh] High School, me and my friends hung at Burger King on Ridge Pike. Now my kids (11 and 14) won't eat the things we grew up eating. Now all the kids in that school are at Bryn & Dane's."

"Our menu can change in real time," adds Davis, bald, intense, cheerful. "We source local ingredients" and update the list on order screens. "We don't have to print menus. We are known for our philosophy, not defined by burgers or burritos."

Yes, they serve meat. But it won't show up on your Bryn & Dane's ordering app if you've shown you are a vegan. There are baked sweet potato "fries," berry cups, and kegged iced tea, sparkling water, and even kale lemonade, instead of Pepsi. "We just partnered with La Colombe to start breakfast this month," Davis says.

The locations are suburban and car-friendly. Golden has city aspirations, too: restaurants, and a proposed "working farm" to supply them from the roof of a former public school in Grays Ferry, which he agreed to buy with real estate investor Davin Lamm to rent to social-service agencies. It's level with Schuylkill Expressway traffic, which "will make for great signage."

Davis started his first smoothie stand in Ocean City in a few years ago. Physical-therapy clinic founder Pat Croce - who also backed the old GSI - helped hook up Davis' early backers. The recession made equipment cheap.

For the bigger Horsham location, Davis hit up friends and family and, through the prep-school encounter, Golden. He hired the same touchscreen vendor that powers Wawa ordering apps, and a New York firm to do all marketing through social media (Bryn & Dane's Facebook page claims 30,000 friends).

"I'm absolutely going to participate in the next fund-raising round," Golden concludes. Fast food for the smartphone crowd: "This is what I imagine an Apple restaurant - an iRestaurant - would be."

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