Go unreasonably deep on complex problems and build with naivety — Bowery Farming’s Irving Fain

  I thought the place that we could start is at the beginning of the journey. And one of the things that I've been really fascinated with over a very long period of time is why certain founders, that approach an entirely new field, uh, why they sometimes have tremendous success and other times don't.

And I wanted to start at the, the early days of Bowery and learn more about how did you learn everything about the opportunity having very, very little. Knowledge of the space, certainly relative to your operating and company building career before then.

 And this is by no means the first time this thought has ever been shared, but you know, naivety and ignorance as an entrepreneur is an important quality and attribute for you to possess. So I think that you've got to acknowledge that the ability to not know what lives around every single corner of your headache towards strangely is actually an advantage because it forces you around corners and into crevices that you normally would never go into.

If you thought, at least you knew what was there. And so I think that there is always an, a healthy amount of that sort of lack of knowing and that naivety, that that should go into the evaluation of any idea in any business that said. You've got to pair that with, you know, I think real knowledge and understanding of the industry and the business that you're going into.

Um, and in my case, you know, I, I do not come from a long time farming family. I didn't work in agriculture specifically before Bowery. And so. Really much of my knowledge was self-taught, uh, you know, I, I grew up surrounded by fresh food and the importance of fresh food. I like to say my mother was well ahead of her time.

I think in hindsight, uh, you know, farmer's markets and the antioxidants and this vegetable, but, but I was nowhere near an expert in agriculture. And so when, when I started sort of wading into the waters, the first thing I did was just take a really broad lens towards agriculture. And I'm what I did was just, I talked to anybody.

I could talk to read anything I could read, watched anything I could watch. I went to farms, talk to people. There was not a, a ton of ag tech going on at the time. So climate Corp was sort of the company. People held up as the example of, of agriculture technology. So I talked to a few different people at climate Corp to try to get a sense of what they saw what's happening in the world.

And you start with a really wide aperture. And I think part of what you need to do is as you walk down the path, you have to further narrow and further narrow that aperture both against the idea and the ultimate business that you want to build, but also against the aspects of that business and idea that are actually most important and matter the most.

And so an example of that when I started, I look broadly at agriculture. So I was looking at SAS on the farm. I was looking at drones and satellite imagery for farming and precision agriculture, you know, in. All of those areas were potentially interesting for me. I really allowed myself to explore and understand everything and it was as time passed and I went further and further that my focus increasingly narrowed towards this question of urban agriculture.

And more specifically, how do you get fresh food to urban environments and how do you do that? More sustainably and more efficiently. And as I got further down the path, what I read, who I talked to, where I spent my time also became increasingly focused on that specific question versus on this notion of agriculture, for instance,

 So, there's a few things that I wanted to follow up on I guess we'll start at the top when you're talking to all sorts of different folks in, in, in sort of in this case in ag, but let's say you're interested in healthcare, the same metaphor or approach I think holds what are the types of things you're asking?

 Yeah. You know, I, I think that question is really specific to what you're working on. So I don't know that there is a general question that cuts across healthcare and construction and agriculture necessarily because each of those industries is sort of unique and different in, in, uh, you know, it has their own kind of nuances.

What, uh, what I, the way I'll answer it a little bit differently is like, who did I go ask? And I think that I really tried to focus on people first and foremost, when the aperture was widest, just people who had experience and expertise in the industry. And maybe this does cut across all these industries to understand like where the problems were.

Like, where did the challenges lie? Where did the problems actually come from? Where, where did the largest opera suit Trinity seem to be present? But to be fair, in this instance, like I had began to form a thesis around the importance of urban agriculture. The more time I spent both looking at agriculture and looking at sort of the global macro climate.

And so conversations helped move me down the path, but that thesis came from from more than just single conversations. What I do think is important, in terms of who you're talking to, is to be really cautious, not just to kind of fall victim to confirmation bias or happy ears. And what I mean by that is ensuring that you're talking to people who are both excited about what you're doing, and generally believe in what you're doing. But equally important is to talk to and find people who don't believe in what you're doing, think you're taking the wrong path and ultimately think you're making a mistake going about this business.

And the tack that I took at Bowery was not to believe this was possible and prove that wrong, but actually was the opposite. And to say, I'm going to go from a base level assumption that this isn't possible and try to prove that wrong. That is in fact, it is possible to do this in a viable way. And so I really sought out, at the time, the real naysayers in the industry, right alongside the folks who are the biggest evangelists. I mean, one of the stories that I remember fondly, uh, there's a guy named Dixon who is a professor up at Columbia and sort of thought of as is one of the really early evangelists and believers in, in indoor agriculture and in vertical farming specifically and Dixon, you know, I had reached out to him and gotten a hold of him and said, Hey, I'd love to come talk to you and just pick your brain.

And he, he said, sure, come on up. Like, let let's sit down. And so I, you know, went all the way up to, to the upper West side to Columbia and I get to his office and, uh, the woman's sitting there and says, Oh, he's not here. And I was kinda like, Ooh, yikes. And I said, do you know where he would be? And she said, Oh, he's eating lunch.

And he tends to like to go to this Irish pub around the corner. And so I said, okay, I picked up and went to the Irish pub and there was Dixon. Despommier eating Buffalo wings sitting there. Uh, fortunately I love buffaloing. So I sat down right next to him and, you know, we ended up having this great hour and a half long conversation about how inevitably vertical farming was going to be enormously successful and the next biggest and greatest thing.

And so you walk out of that conversation energized and excited and hearing the enthusiasm. But I paired that with a set of professors up at Cornell who had done a lot of research and worked extensively. And felt that it was impossible. And I spent an equal amount of time talking with them to understand why they believed what they believed, because it was really important to look at all sides of the equation to really make sure that I had thought through all the possibilities of the things that could go.

Right. But equally, and maybe more importantly, all the possibilities and the things that can go wrong. And I think if you haven't done that as an entrepreneur, you're not asking enough of the hard questions and you're not looking hard enough at your idea. There should be hundreds of reasons of why this can't work.

That's fine. It doesn't mean you don't do it better to know them at a time.

 That's great. Love that framework. Um, so I'm going to come back to that in a second. Um, one of the things you mentioned is you had a wide aperture and then you narrowed it around this sort of problem area of urban agriculture. Do you remember what the process was to narrow in on that and say, you're not going to do something drones.

You're not going to do some farm operating system for farmers in Idaho, or any other idea you were pursuing. Was it just following your own intuition? Or there was a way that over the course of this research in all these different formats, you decided that you were going to zoom in and focus in on, on this problem of urban ag.

 I think there's some of this comes down to just the notion of founder market fit, which people talk about. Right. So, so SAS on the farm is, is a great business. There's some great companies out there now being built on that concept, you know, granular is one of them and farmer's business network is another.

I mean, those are great businesses. Uh, precision agriculture is another great industry and drones and satellite imagery for farms. Those are all really good businesses. So it wasn't that I'd come to the point of saying. I didn't believe those were good areas of focus. No, I certainly looked at some areas that I said that's not a good area of focus per se.

Uh, but there were certainly some I looked at that were, they didn't however, capture my passion, my imagination, and my enthusiasm. And I think that component of the stew, if you would, is incredibly important when you're, when you're founding any business, really because of how long and hard of a journey building a company really is.

And so I've talked about this before, but one of the things, most importantly, I think I used to, to evaluate what I did next was actually the barometer of time. And what I mean by that is I sure you see this too. Like I've seen friends and folks, I know get incredibly excited about an idea. They go out and they raise some money and then very quickly the excitement sort of evaporates.

And you're now stuck building this thing and building this company that you're actually only sort of moderately interested and excited about. And so I forced myself as I was looking at and evaluating different ideas to even when I got more and more excited, not prevent myself from continuing to look in other areas in other industries and other opportunities to make sure most importantly, that the excitement for what I ultimately have built at Bowery.

That that grew and grew over time that the slope of the line had resiliency. And I think that time that I allowed to elapse gave me that much more conviction and confidence when I really was ready to say, okay, now, now this is what I want to do. It gave me confidence that in the great times, and in the difficult times, the passion, the enthusiasm, the real love of the problem and the business would persist

 So are you basically asking yourself, like, can I imagine working on this for a decade plus.

 in essence. Yes. I mean, I would say that's sort of the core of the question you're getting to is, is am I going to be excited about this in three years, in five years in seven years? Because I knew. The journey that I was about to embark on was not a shorter journey. This was a, a long-term journey.

And what we're building at Bowery is a generational business. It is the next great food and agriculture company. And that's not something that happens over the course of a few years. And certainly, you know, the road is windy and one never knows where it's going to take you. But my anticipation was I wanted to do something that was a long-term play.

And so I wanted to do the best I could in a short amount of time to evaluate and sort of play forward. What would my enthusiasm and passion look like over time?

 So a few minutes ago, you talked about this approach that you had of seeking out, basically, maybe what might be seen as like optimists and pessimists about the specific thing that you were working on as you began to narrow around this opportunity and urban agriculture and indoor farming.

If you can remember back, I'm really curious, how do you go from all of these different conversations, these sort of learning conversations with people, sharing all sorts of different things about why it'll work, why it won't work. To actually landing on like what V1 to, where we're starting, what we're doing in what order?

I mean, do you have like a spreadsheet where you're organizing things? Is it intuition based? What sort of the process to land on be one of, of Bowery?

 Yeah. You know, I I'd say there's sort of two parts to the question you're asking. I think the first part is more universal and what I mean by that, and I guess there's, there's universal frameworks in the second part as well, but, but what I mean by that, and the first part is. There is a point where all the conversations, all the research, all the evaluation, all the skeptics and optimists collectively, and those discussions hit diminishing returns.

So it sort of becomes as some topic, if you would, and you have to jump. And I had this conversation recently with someone, you never avoid building a company that moment where you have to jump off the cliff. It is an unavoidable moment. And I think in some respects, what you want to do is try to make the cliff to ground ratio as close and small as you can.

So you limit the amount the height by which you're jumping from. But it is impossible to avoid, or extremely difficult. Maybe there's some examples of this, to avoid the fact that at some point you're jumping off into the abyss. And I think you can do so much work to get there, but there is no amount of work and research that will allow you to step off.

And, I think that I learned from actually much earlier in my career you know, before I started my first company, when I went, you know, spent enormous amounts of time evaluating, evaluating, evaluating, saying no, and evaluating, evaluating, evaluating, and saying no. And in hindsight, I looked back and said, wow.

I said, no, some great ideas, actually, that, that I spent way too much time getting to the wrong answer, arguably. And you know, I think, yeah, you've got to also be disciplined to get to that place for yourself and say, Hey, okay, like now's the time it's fish or cut bait. That's that's the first piece to the second question you asked around, you know, how do we decide.

What was V1 at Bowery? You know, I, I think that Bowery is a particularly interesting case study because we are building a really complex business. And so there is a lot of different components to our business. And so the MVP of a software company is ultimately going to be a lot simpler in some respects than what we built as our sort of equivalent MVP at Bowery.

And what I did do though, and I think any entrepreneur needs to do early on, is determined what matters most at that very early stage. What are the most important things for you to prove to yourself, to prove to the market, to prove to the investing community, if you're going to be fundraising? And once you've identified what those most important things to prove are, the next question is how can you most efficiently get to those proof points?

What do you need to build? What needs to be created? Who do you need to hire to actually achieve those proof points? Not too much more, but not less. That's sort of where you need to go. That's your first step. And, you know, to the extent that it's a fundraising driven question, and it can't only be a fundraising driven question, it has to also be about customer development and market development.

But you know, one of the things I talk a lot about is just that fundraising is milestone management. And so understanding what you need to do and what you need to prove to get to that next milestone and being judicious and efficient in that exercise is really important.

 So before you move on, can you sort of share what the answer to that sort of framing is for Bowery in the early days? Like how did you break it down into what are the milestones? What do we have to do in what order? 

 Yeah. You know, we, we did a lot of work early on, even before we raised a dollar of capital. Trying to do the best we could to understand whether the critics were right or the optimists were right. And the, the point that with, at which we decided to raise capital and to move from a call it research phase to, to building was that point where we hit diminishing returns, research, all the testing, all the building of growth systems and analysis and spreadsheets, wasn't going to yield equivalent value.

And the next step for us was we needed to build a farm of, some substance and size. And we had gotten comfortable that a number of the critics desertions were not accurate at that point, but we didn't know. And there were certainly very large open questions for us, but we did get to a place of saying.

Sitting ourselves and testing in a very small scale and iterating. That's not going to get us much further to answer those questions. and, you know, I remember talking to you guys at first round, early on. I mean, I have talked about this deck many a time because the, in some ways, the framework that we created was incredibly simple.

Yet the execution underneath it was immensely complex, it was build it, grow it, sell it. And so what does that mean? It meant, could we in fact build an indoor farm with the technology and the approach that we had created? Could we, in fact then grow food in the way that we expected, we would be able to grow food.

And once we grew that produce. Would it be any good and would anybody actually want to buy it from a retailer perspective? And then would consumers want to buy it from the retailers themselves? And those seem like such simple concepts when you lay them out this way. But the work in execution underneath each layer was immense.

And that framework at least gave us guiding posts to focus our efforts and our energy to determine what we do and don't do in those early days and to build and grow in a efficient and effective way as possible.

 So I have a couple of questions about that specifically, but just to sort of close out the ideas you were sharing about talking, uh, to critics and then translating that into experiments. Can, can you give a couple examples of, a given naysayer said X, and then in this pre-funding before you raised any capital, this research and testing phase, how you took that and then tried to sort of validate if it was true, because my sense from, from how you were describing it was, there was a series of these pre-war building the first farm tests that were rooted in both what, some of the optimists, their ideas and, and, double-checking the pessimists.

 Yeah. I mean, part of the early testing for us as well though is, and I think one of the mistakes sometimes people make, when they look at it, Indoor farming broadly is grouping the category into what and sure. Everything sort of ultimately falls under the umbrella of controlled environmental agriculture, whether it's a greenhouse or hydroponic growing in a vertical farm or aeroponic growing in a vertical farm or container farming, it does all fall into that umbrella.

But the truth of it is every one of these growing methods is very different from one another. And I think one of the decisions and realizations actually is a better word that, that we had early on was that the. System itself that you choose and the way you build your farm has an extraordinarily large impact on what you ultimately can grow in terms of your varieties, the efficiency by which you can grow those crops and ultimately how economic of a model you actually can build.

And so that decision really early on in terms of your base level technology was clear to me to be a very, very important decision. And so we actually took a very, a first principle approach looking at the problem, meaning. I had no horse in the race. It didn't matter to me which system we built. I had no preference for hydroponics versus aeroponics or aquaponics or building a greenhouse or having a container farm.

It didn't matter to me at all. What I was really in search of was the answer to what is the most scalable and efficient way to tackle this problem and included in the answer set for us was there is no scalable and efficient way to do this because I felt like if there was a way for us to figure that out early on, I much rather would have done it.

Then, then spend X number of years in dollars to get it to an answer I could have found out much earlier. And that effort of evaluating these systems and understanding the approach and testing and learning was at sort of a metal level, looking at the critics broadly, who were, you know, again broadly, saying, this is impossible.

This can't be done. This can't be achieved in an economically viable way. And so the question was, is that right? Or is that wrong? And the way to answer it was to take that first principle view of the industry and to us very clearly the place to start there was what is the system you use to, to grow your crops?

 So sort of building on that, where did you go from? You landed on this insight that the system is the single most important thing. And so then, how did you figure out which system or what bet you were going to make.

 Yeah. I mean, that was year and a half plus of testing and learning and building different systems and understanding economic, uh, components of, of the model, you know, understanding the cost implications, understanding the productivity implications of each system, understanding the pros and the cons of each system and doing that by doing, not just by theorizing, wherever possible.

And that endeavor was what led us to the system and the technology that we've built today at Bowery. You know, it also is what led us to the recognition that a lot of people early on, you know, when I was building Valerie. Put a lot of stock and focus on the trend around Ellie led lighting and the importance that the cost of lights had come down and that the efficiency of lights had gone up.

And there's no question that that trend was critical to what we do today about right, without it, you, you wouldn't be here, but that trend in lighting makes indoor farming viable. It doesn't actually make it scalable. And the way we have always defined scalable is large volumes of crops, large varieties of crops grown consistently at a high quality and ultimately at a price point that opens up a large market

 so while the lighting trend easy, inevitably important, what. I realized was lights alone. Don't make this scalable, that we had an opportunity to leverage innovation that was happening in robotics and automation.

 You could do more with robotics and automation at cheaper pricing really than ever before. Innovation that was happening around controls and sensors, innovation around computer vision and artificial intelligence. And then generally just the ability to store and process large amounts of data. And it was really the ability to take those trends coupled with the trend in led lighting and put all of that together into a model that will change the way we grow food moving forward and that realization and that analysis.

Also was a very important part of the early determination about how we built the company, because it isn't just for us at Bowery about the grow system. That's incredibly important, the growth system and the automation, the robotics inside of it matter a lot, but we've also built what we call the Bowery operating system, which is the brains of our whole operation in our farms.

And it's a combination of software and hardware and AI and computer vision, which not only controls the agricultural components of the business, but also the whole supply chain and the operations inside of the farm. And that component of our business is as important as the growth system itself. And it was that early analysis that early understanding that early evaluation and both the optimists and the naysayers that push the thinking to that point and help to really structure what we define as sort of the early framework of it.

 So on that point, can, can you talk into any detail or just give an example of kind of how you figure it out? Like even what to test given? It just seems like this multifaceted problem. That is almost mind. Bendingly complicated when you start to have all these different puzzle pieces, you have to fit together. And so like, what an experiment look like? Or how did you roadmap something that seems so complicated with basically what I would think about as like these nested bets, these things that kind of have to click together. And if there's a weak link, anywhere along the way, at the end of the day, the thing doesn't work.

 You know, I think it's, it's interesting because you know, this is goes back to the beginning of our conversation where we talked about the importance of naivety is non-entrepreneurial sure. I mean, this was ambitious. There's no question about it now. Fortunately, I've been doing this for, you know, almost 20 years now.

And so I knew enough to look this down the line and realize This is not a simple problem. This is not a simple business and company to build. I think like anything else, the complexity just continues to unfold. As you walk the path, one of the analogies I always like to give in building a company is, you know, those video games where you walk around the map and the video game and the map around you illuminates as you walk into it. It's all dark, and it doesn't get illuminated until the character actually gets into that region of the map. And I think building a startup in some ways is like staring down this map, which is slightly illuminated, but mostly dark.

And you have to steer your character through this map and illuminate different areas. And some illumination may give you a sense of what's to come further on, but then easily, sometimes you can illuminate your way right off a cliff potentially. Right? I mean, that's kind of the way it goes. And, and so, you know, I understood enough about the complexity that was in front of us.

I, you know, had built an enterprise software business before Bowery. I knew, how to build the software or side of this generally. I mean, I'm, I am not a software engineer, so I certainly wasn't the one, you know, writing the code. But I, I knew that part of this was possible. I, we had done enough work to really clearly understand the opportunity as it related to the growth system and the technology there and land on a system that we felt was the best answer to this.

And that's what we started with. And I had, uh, you know, as much understanding as I could at the time about the, the cultural side of this and how the plant science piece fit into it, everything. But this is sort of where, as we talked about, you had to jump off a cliff. I mean, I could sit on a chair and think my way around this problem for other decade.

And it wouldn't have gotten me to an answer the only way to get to the answers and the things I know today is to follow the path that we followed, you know, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. But, but, but it, it really, you know, one of the things we say in power is getting ahead means getting started.

And at some point you just have to get started.

 So going back to, what you were sharing a few minutes ago, you ended up raising seed capital from us and had to take this 10 or 20 plus year vision of a company and chunk it down into what you had to get done in those first 18 months. There are certain types of companies that are very well understood. And so thus this idea of executing against milestones is relatively easy. Going back to your SAS experience before we have a general sense of what a company has to look like to get a bunch of capital to come in post initial investment, I would assume the trick in your business is a lot of people that are looking at your business have not looked at 150 similar businesses.

And so this milestone or what we need to get done in the next couple of years seems incredibly hard to figure out. And so I'm curious how that kind of all fits together for you.

 you're exactly right. That there is no playbook for what we're doing here. And I think that's both what makes it incredibly exciting and exhilarating. And it's also what makes it very difficult at times. And there is no. Crib sheet that somebody can pull out to say, here are the eight questions I've asked the other hundred companies that do what you do in the past.

 To help me understand how to think about what you're doing, your progress and your opportunity, and what that means is two things. Number one, one of the important jobs that I had then, and I had to today is being not only an effective evangelist for what we're building and why it's important at Bowery, but equally, and importantly, is, is being a very effective teacher to others, not just about why, what we're doing matters and is important, but even more importantly, why, how we are doing it at Bowery.

Is the most efficient and effective way to tackle this problem and why we've taken the path we've taken. And chunked it out in the way that we have sort of created these milestones and these phases of the business and what we've hoped to achieve in each phase where we've fallen short or done even better, and what we're going to achieve in the next phases and why those next phases make sense against the phases that have come before them.

And I think what is sort of assumed in what I just said is because you're not just an evangelist, but you're equally a teacher. It is really important for me to understand the core material. Incredibly well, because I need to not just be able to tell somebody the story at a high surface level, why are we doing what we're doing?

Why is it exciting? Why is it interesting? And in some ways that part of the story of Bauer is not particularly difficult to tell, but then when you get into the, why are we tackling this problem and the way that we're tackling it, and why should one believe that this can become a very large successful company?

You have to be able to double and triple click down. And that not only allows me to make sure we, as a company are focusing on the right areas, but it also enables me to instill confidence in people. I'm talking to that. The analysis that we have a team as a team have done is sapped and what's been fun and exciting is as our team grows and we bring incredible experts around the table that isn't now just me doing analysis and.

Double and triple and quadruple clicking, but it's many other people with vastly more experience and expertise in their areas than I have sitting alongside me doing those deep dives as well. And that helps people who don't know a ton about agriculture, let alone urban agriculture get comfortable and confident in what we're building and how we're building it and why we're built.

 going back to this, um, build, grow, sell sort of framework, you ultimately you had to figure out how to chunk this whole thing down into what you're going to do in what order over that first 12 or 18 months. We'd love you to sort of share what you ended up doing, how you figured out that that was the right thing to work on.

 Yeah, I think we, we broke the core business down. Like I, I thought about the business in a three legged stool, which is what I've, I've said many times. And, and it is kind of three core components. It's the farm itself. Which is, you know, warehouse scale indoor farms, where we stack our crops from the floor all the way to the ceiling.

We grow under lights, the mimic, the spectrum of the sun. We grow 365 days of the year, independent of weather in seasonality. It is completely pesticide-free protected. Produce no herbicides, no fungicides, no insecticides. We're a hundred times plus more productive than a square foot of farm land. And we use a small fraction of the water.

So building that farm model that was critical. The second part was the technology layer in the farm. It was the Bowery operating system. And so I talked about it before, but that's the central nervous system or the brains, not only of our grow room and the growing side of the business, but now the entire operations and supply chain itself.

And that was such a core belief of mine that that was going to generate maximum scalability and efficiency. And it was at that time, just a hypothesis at this point today, my view is you cannot scale this business without the system we've built. And so building that from the start I knew was key. And the third.

Leg of our stool was our brand itself and selling produce under the Bowery name that stands for, of course taste and flavor and quality, but transparency and honesty and trust for sustainability and responsibility in the way we grow. And so if you double-click into a brand means brand means a fantastic product that people love and are excited about.

And so that those key pieces I knew were important. And so knowing they were important, it made sense that we've got to build a farm because we are a farming company. We need to begin to build the operating system in the software because the thesis was, this is going to be important to our scale. Now you can, double-click in each one of these.

Brett because the operating system that we built years ago is a fraction of what we have today, of course. Right? So even with each of these buckets, you have to focus, right? The farm today looks drastically different than the farm we built back then. So even narrowing down within the buckets or the pillars, what we were going to do was an important effort.

And so focusing on what mattered most in the software was important. Focusing on what mattered most in the farm was important and focusing on what mattered most in the brand was important. And it was interesting because I had people saying, why would you build a brand that's silly. You don't need to build a brand yet.

Nobody knows you guys are. You're not even growing anything. Do that later. Don't spend that money. And I was really convinced that each of these pillars of the business was critical. And so I invested time and resources in every one of those areas now focused, but in each of these areas, and that helped us validate the totality of the model that we were going after.

When we saw we could in fact build an efficient and effective farm. Now, plenty of learnings that we would ultimately take forward into future farms to make them better, more efficient, plenty of learnings around the operating system, around future roadmapping and what we would add and how we would change it.

And plenty of learnings as our brand has evolved, but we were able to successfully build a farm, grow fantastic pros that people didn't just love, but. But amazing chefs and people like Tom Colicchio. This is one of my favorite stories is, and I'm a top chef fan. So I'd been watching Tom on TV for years and I've watched him just eviscerate chefs bringing him food.

He did not like. And so if there was, if anyone watches Tom cliquey, you know, he does not hold back his opinion. So I remember going to him and, and we talked about the business and he, wow. You know, I love the mission. I love the idea, but I just want you to know I've tried every bit of product grown indoors.

Today’s episode is with Irving Fain, founder and CEO of Bowery Farming. Bowery’s efficient indoor farms grow produce free from pollutants and using significantly less water — democratizing access to fresh, local food. It’s an incredibly complex system, and Fain opens up about the arduous process it took to hone in on his idea and get Bowery off the ground, including seeking out the doubters, going unreasonably deep on a problem, and hiring his earliest employees.

Go unreasonably deep on complex problems and build with naivety — Bowery Farming’s Irving Fain

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