One of the youngest and most dynamic executives in the mining industry today is Nolan Watson, 34, founder and CEO of Sandstorm Gold (ARCA:SAND), a publicly traded streaming company with an approximate $860 million market capitalization.
Earlier this week Sandstorm added Marry Little to its board of directors. Ms. Little is the founder of Mirasol Resources Ltd. (TO:MRZ), a highly successful explorer focused on Latin America.
Watson explained the rationale for adding a new board member to its team by phone earlier today.
“Mary is a truly nice person and that doesn’t come very often with someone with exceptional skill, like she has,” he said.
Watson explained that Sandstorm has strengthened its board and recently acquired its sister company, Sandstorm Metals and Energy, because the firm is taking very seriously its next phase of growth.
The six year old company has already grown from nothing to nearly a billion dollars in market capitalization, but Watson has always envisioned building Sandstorm into a mega-market cap publicly traded natural resources financier.
“Our goal is to make project banks obsolete,” Watson told me, also commenting that Sandstorm will be more competitive and creative in dealmaking in the future.
He said his firm provides a “holistic one stop solution to mining companies. Friendly capital, at reasonable to lower cost.”
Sandstorm may pursue outright acquisitions of more companies in the current depressed resource environment, Watson said.
“We obviously want to continue to do streams and royalties as in the past but now it’s about finding good assets and finding a way to get deals done and we would even consider buying out entire companies and financing the assets into production with a stream and building the right team and spinning it out again,” Watson said.
“Our focus is now on good assets and finding a way to add value and get streams and royalties on those assets.”