Before a board meeting early in the history of Descartes Labs, I sat looking at my deck, realizing that it lacked a narrative. I sat down and penned my first board memo and produced one every quarter thereafter. I named it “Meditations” after Descartes’ most famous book, in which he…

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (henceforth: GEB), the Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 1978 by Douglas Hofstadter, is described in its cryptic tagline as “a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.” I recently reread GEB and got fired up by how…

Today is my first week as the inaugural CTO of Stand Together, where I’ll be on a mission to operationalize the idea that “our principles are our product.” Stand Together is a philanthropic community tackling the root causes of the biggest problems facing humanity. How do we do this? Our…

Plus thoughts on FBN and Growmark+CHS — While I was in Los Angeles, soaking up some sun and visiting with space companies (plus clocking my millionth mile on United), AgTech was having a big week. Bayer+Microsoft announced that they would partner up to build “digital solutions” for agriculture. My instinct, like Louisa Burwood Taylor at AgFunderNews, is…

Agriculture is the biggest industry that Silicon Valley has failed to disrupt. Despite billions of dollars going into high-flying AgTech software startups like Farmer’s Business Network (FBN) and Indigo Ag, there hasn’t been a single industry-changing success since Climate Corp a decade ago. A favorite model of the biggest AgTech…

Farmers have a tough job. Not only do they spend time in their fields maximizing the output of their crops, but they also need to pay attention to commodities markets, figuring out when to sell their crop. At GrainBridge, our job is to…

When I joined GrainBridge as CEO in April 2020, I was excited about our vision. As a joint-venture between ADM and Cargill, we had the financial backing, expertise, and data to help farmers become more profitable by building data-driven grain marketing software. Of course, visions need to be translated into…

Agriculture is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Given the scope of the general problem of sustainability in agriculture, I’ve been researching how to address carbon emissions at the farm level. Since the market is focused on carbon sequestration, that’s where I’ve focused my attention. Why…

On Clubhouse, there are plenty of conversations you might hear in a Palo Alto coffeehouse (product management, VC, bitcoin, Gamestop, the nature of consciousness, and the role of media), but virtually nothing about the most important industry on earth: agriculture. …