Neil Cohen

Today Neil Cohen splits his attention between two enterprises that have almost nothing in common. One pulls a 350-million-year-old mineral out of the ground near Mount Morris, New York, by the trainload. The other writes early checks to scientists trying to build the future - digital pathology, nanoparticles, diagnostics, fuel cells. He is Founder, Co-CEO and Vice Chairman of American Rock Salt Company, and Founder and Chairman of Emerald Development Managers LP, the venture firm he started in 1994. Most people pick a lane. Cohen kept both.

The salt is the part that surprises people. American Rock Salt is the largest-producing salt mine in the United States. On a good winter day it can move 20,000 tons of rock salt - the gritty stuff that keeps northeastern highways from turning into skating rinks. The seam it mines formed when an ancient ocean covered New York's Genesee Valley and slowly evaporated, leaving a layer of halite roughly 1,200 feet down. Cohen, a Manhattan investment banker by training, ended up running it.

How a Wall Street financier becomes a salt miner is the kind of origin story that sounds invented. It is not.

Start with the disaster. For nearly 110 years, the Retsof Salt Mine operated in Livingston County, producing more than 134 million tons of salt and supporting four generations of miners. In 1994 part of it collapsed and the mine began to flood. Akzo Nobel, the operator, fought the water and lost, eventually abandoning the mine. Roughly 275 miners were out of work or scraping by at a fraction of their old wages. A century of industry, gone underwater.

Most people read that as an ending. A local real estate broker named Joe Bucci and a Rochester attorney, Gunther Buerman, read it as an opening. They brought in Charles "Bud" VanArsdale at the Small Business Development Center, and VanArsdale brought in a Manhattan investment banker who knew how to assemble money for hard things: Neil Cohen. On January 31, 1997, the four of them signed a $4 million asset purchasing agreement with Akzo Nobel Salt Inc. for the developmental rights to a brand-new mine at Hampton Corners. American Rock Salt was born on paper. It still had to be dug.

Construction began in November 1998. The first truckload of rock salt sold on January 25, 2000, before the mine was even finished. The build wrapped on December 14, 2001. The detail worth holding onto: it was the first successful salt mine built in the United States in over 40 years. Nobody had pulled this off in four decades. Cohen and his partners did it in a valley where everyone assumed the salt business had drowned.

There is something almost stubborn in that. The easy money in 1996 was anywhere but a collapsed mine in upstate New York. The financing was complicated, the engineering was unforgiving, and the cautionary tale was sitting right there, full of water. Cohen put the capital structure together anyway. The company now employs hundreds of people in a region that had written off the industry, and the trains still roll out loaded with salt every winter.

By day he funds the very new.

Rewind a few years and you find the part of Cohen that explains the salt mine. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering Sciences in mathematical sciences from Johns Hopkins, then a master's in management from MIT's Sloan School. Engineer first, manager second. He started his finance career at Dillon, Read & Co. in 1986 as a Vice President, and in 1992 moved to AmBase Corporation as Executive Vice President, CFO and board member. He is a numbers person who can also read a blueprint - which turns out to be the exact profile you want when you are financing a hole in the ground.

In 1994, before the salt, he founded Emerald Development Managers LP, an early-stage venture firm. Three decades later it is still going. The portfolio reads like a tour of hard science: he has served as a director at Babson Diagnostics, Proscia (digital pathology), Sustained Nano Systems and TBT Pharma, and as a board observer at companies working on regenerative medicine and fuel cells. These are not app-store bets. They are companies where the risk lives in a laboratory and the payoff is years out.

He stays close to the institutions that shaped him. Cohen sits on the advisory board of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins and the Board of Advisors of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center - engineering and medicine, the two poles his venture work swings between. It is a tidy through-line for someone whose career looks chaotic from the outside: he keeps betting on people who build difficult, physical, useful things.

Put the two halves side by side and the contradiction dissolves. A salt mine and a nanotechnology startup are the same kind of problem wearing different clothes. Both demand patient capital. Both reward people who understand the engineering and the spreadsheet. Both punish the impatient. Cohen has spent his career at exactly that intersection - where the technical and the financial meet and somebody has to decide whether the thing is worth building. Usually he decides yes.

Salt does not go out of style.

There is a quiet wisdom in the salt business that fits the man. Deicing salt is gloriously unglamorous and completely recession-proof. Winter comes, roads ice over, and somebody has to keep the trucks moving. While the venture world chases whatever is hot this quarter, American Rock Salt sells a product whose demand is set by the weather and whose supply took an ocean and 350 million years to create. It is the ultimate long-horizon asset, and Cohen - a long-horizon thinker by temperament - landed on it almost by accident, through a flood.

That tension is the most interesting thing about him. The venture side is all optionality and upside and the future. The salt side is all bedrock, literally. He needs both. The mine is the ballast; the venture fund is the sail. One funds patience, the other funds curiosity. A lot of investors talk about diversification. Cohen lives a version so extreme it sounds like a riddle: he is exposed to both the oldest mineral economy on earth and the newest science labs in the country, and the two could not be less correlated.

He is not a man who courts the spotlight. There are no viral keynotes, no manifesto, no carefully managed personal brand. What there is instead is a track record: a mine that should not have been built and got built, a venture firm that has outlasted three decades of cycles, and a habit of showing up for the unglamorous, capital-intensive, decade-long projects that most people avoid. In an industry addicted to the quick flip, Cohen's whole career is an argument for staying.

The salt seam under Mount Morris will outlast all of us. So, probably, will the highways it keeps clear and the companies Cohen quietly helped get off the ground. He started with a flooded mine and a complicated cap table. He ended up with a town's industry, a winter's worth of safe roads, and a portfolio of science that might pay off long after the ice melts. Not a bad trade for a banker who was willing to go underground.