[Hello World #1] Starting Up During Pandemic, Eyeing 2050!
World food production needs to increase by 70% to feed the world population in 2050, due to a combination of changes in dietary habits, increased economic growth, and income levels.
According to McKinsey Global Institute, nearly half of all the work we do today will be able to be automated by the year 2055. Of course, there will be new categories of jobs created, but many of the repetitive jobs will disappear and recession always accelerates the trends.
Essentially, we will have to produce more food with fewer humans, especially in an industry that is known to deploy a massive labor force for repetitive work. We will come back to this.
First, Some Trends
For over 2 decades in Silicon Valley, we have witnessed firsthand the IT trends. Infrastructure (networking, storage, processing) speeds have increased 100x in a commodity form factor. Leveraging the powerful commodity infrastructure, data platforms have become ubiquitous with open source, replacing proprietary solutions (shameless plug: I have been fortunate to be at the ground zero of open source Big Data, Storage, and Networking technologies). There is a generation of young kids now, used to advances in deep learning frameworks. These are still broadly in the IT bucket.
The next set of productivity gains that the world needs will come from a multi-domain set of technologies built for automation. Let us go back to the example of feeding the 10B population in 2050 with a fewer human workforce. The IT industry has primarily built horizontal platforms, without having to sprinkle vertical domain expertise. However, the next set of automation that the world needs will require a deeper vertical domain mixed with the underlying technology. I saw the power of a multi-domain technology from a tiny self-driving car project- a 20% side project that I did with my then partners in crime, as part of a keynote launch of one of the biggest Big Data products in 2018.
Starting Up During Pandemic
Borde (the Spanish word for Edge) was born during the pandemic to bring No-Code AI in a Box to industrial plants. Like the rest of the world, we have had many interesting moments- a deserted San Jose airport when the entire Bay Area closed down at the onset of the pandemic (almost like a World War Z scene); an Electric Vehicle that shut down in the middle of an Expressway after a long drive from a faraway California plant; mid-night install of our 1st production install in a very large plant with our engineering team working round the clock. We have done over 100 humbling trips to bridge the gap between the Central Valley and the Silicon Valley and learned what the food industry needs.
We soon realized that to really contribute to the larger objective of more food production with fewer humans, we need to do human-like inspection and removal enabled by AI, but turbocharge with a 3000x faster speed to change the game, leveraging our decades of IT background. We ran a tight ship and built a patented deep tech that is running 24x7 in production in some iconic plants in Central California. Absolutely grateful to Phu, Satyam, Bharadwaj, Luan, Jeff, Gautam, and the entire gang. And of course, Morgan, Pam, Alexi, and Mike from the venture team of my alma-mater Santa Clara University.
Takes a Bigger Village to Build a Company
Then, we got introduced to Brett@Techstars Farm to Fork (thank you Bradley for the introduction) and we are one of the 12 food tech companies around the globe to be in the program and given access to a large network of food experts. We met over 100 experts, covering the entire food supply chain, with many from Cargill (a global food corporation aka the world’s largest private company with over $114B in annual revenue) and Ecolab (a Fortune 500 company). Brett, Sarah, Pete, Jess, Elise, Jack, HT, and the rest of the Techstars network have been absolutely amazing! We are grateful to Reed and Emmet@Groove Capital, Techstars mentors and our personal network (you all know who you are : -)) for the successful closure of our SPV.
Our journey just started as we execute the next phase of our mission and we are incredibly lucky to work with some really smart folks as our lead mentors and mentors (so many that we cannot thank all here): Kyle Stahl (Senior Data Science Supervisor, Cargill), Lauren McNamara (Vice President & AGM, Sunopta), Jimmy Edgerton (Co-Founder/CEO, Watusee Foods (acquired by ArchPoint Group)), Liz Moskow (fractional Chief Strategy Officer & Food Futurist), Jose Quijada (Assistant Vice President, Corporate Accounts, Ecolab), Garrick van Buren (Internal Startup Coach, Digital Innovation Advisor, Cargill), Richard Cargill (Founder — Turas Mara LLC), John Guttery (Corporate and Business Development Leader, Ecolab), Adrian Ho (Co-founder & Chairman Zeus Jones), Greg Pearson (CEO at Pretzel’s Incorporated), Frank Alfano (CRO, Techstars), Allison Hohn (Executive Director at Grow North), Russ Loecken (Global Commercial Transformation Leader at Cargill), Donna Lin Niles (Business Development Advisor at Cargill), Jeff Thompson (Corporate Account Manager at Cargill Trade and Structured Finance), John McNamara (Senior Corporate Entrepreneur at 3M), Daren Cotter (Tech Entrepreneur & Investor), Lisbeth Kaufman (Entrepreneur & Startup Mentor, AWS), Montana (Long) Gordon (Founder in Residence at Cargill Horizons), Amol Dixit (Director, G-Works Venture Studio at General Mills), Ryan Backer (Innovation & Strategy Leader, Nestle Food+Tech Ventures), Lawrence Wang (Director of Digital Strategy Development, Cargill), Rachel Resek (Venture Capital @ Cargill), Peter McDonald (Founding Partner McDonald Strategy Partners LLC), Sherman Black (CEO, TruGrit360), Megan (McMichael) Hobbs (Vice President, Group R&D Leader at Cargill Aqua Nutrition), Jens Ingelstedt (Investment analyst & Program manager at Techstars Nordics & Baltics), Aaron Desatnik (Entrepreneur in sustainable food & ag), Nick Tietz (Founder + CEO, ILT Studios), Aaron Knewtson (VP Food and Agribusiness at Compeer Financial), Scott Peterson (Founder and President, True North Strategies, LLC), Kelly Roark (Co-Founder, StrateSpheric), Babak Kia (Adjunct Professor at Boston University), and many more.
If you have come this far, can I please ask you to virtually or physically join our Farm to Fork Demo Day on October 3rd in Minneapolis, ranked one of the best food cities in the world?
