Action sports brands woo investors at Capital Forum

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After the closure of Clark Foam in 2005 threw board shaping into chaos, nine friends got together to form Malama and find a way to produce a less-toxic foam for blanks, McMahon said. Malama uses different plant sources to create the foam, including soy, hemp, bamboo and silk, and replaces much of the resin with lint seed oil.

 

"We developed a better foam" that is stronger than polyurethane, and lighter, McMahon said. "And, it comes with no ‘green premium.' It's basically the same price as poly."

McMahon said the same qualities that make Malama's foam good for boards also make it excellent for a variety of industrial applications, from wind turbine blades to shipping containers to insulation in homes and airplanes. The U.S. market for polyurethane foam applications is $41 billion a year, he said.

Malama blanks are being shaped and soon to be sold by Gerry Lopez and Jack Shipley's Lightning Bolt Maui, CEO Leif Christofferson told me later in the day. McMahon told the room that surf boards would generate about 15 percent of the company's revenues.

The company is seeking $500,000 now and up to $5 million later to fund production and growth.

FrostByte Video

FrostByte developed software that produces customized videos of your day on the ski and snowboard runs.

Frost Byte founders Rick Korfin and Mike Sandler.

FrostByte sought capital to mount fixed cameras around snow resorts. Company software tracks boarders and skiers who rent a GPS armband for $30 a day. The company's software uses the GPS data to parse all the video shot during the day, then the software edits it to produce individual shows for each renter, burned on a DVD and set to music.

The company also thinks the software has applications for security and for insurance.

I later asked co-founders Rick Korfin and Mike Sandler if the idea would work for surf or skate.

Not really, they said. Surfing is too "straight line," they thought. And getting GPS armbands on a surfer? Then getting him to pay $30?

The all-over action of a skate park might work better, but skating is low-cost at its core, and being able to charge $30 a head seemed unlikely, the founders told me.

Loop'd Network

Tom Nelms, Loop'd Networks' VP for business development, walked the crowd through a pretty powerful sales pitch.