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

IRVING FAIN

Brett Berson:  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.

Irving Fain: 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,

Brett Berson: 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?

Irving Fain: 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.

Brett Berson: 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.

Irving Fain: 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

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

Irving Fain: 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?

Brett Berson: 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?

Irving Fain: 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.

Brett Berson: 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? 

Irving Fain: 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.

Brett Berson: 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.

Irving Fain: 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?

Brett Berson: 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.

Irving Fain: 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.

Irving Fain: 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.

Bowery.

Brett Berson: 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.

Irving Fain: 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.

Brett Berson: 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.

Irving Fain: 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.

Brett Berson: 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.

Given limited time and limited capital.

Irving Fain: 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.

I've never tried anything that meets my bar as a chef. So I kind of sat there. I was, Ooh, okay. Uh, that's that's a red line. And we had, we had brought this like cooler case. Like it was like an Amazon fresh cooler case down, you know, they delivered your food to do with clam shells of volume, clam shells of produce.

And so I take it out on the table that being my warm welcome, kind of sitting there saying yikes, uh, and, uh, took it out. And I think the first thing we gave him was our Bazell and handed it to him. And if you watch top chef, he serve as this sort of inquisitive, thoughtful look as he's trying things. And he had the same look there and to kind of waiting with bated breath and he starts nodding his head and smile, and he's like, this is great.

This is great. And we give them something else. And he tries that, wow, this, this is fantastic. And he stopped. He says, this is as good as this is what I got out of my garden. This is the best produce I've ever chased it in doors, any right there said, I want to put this in mind restaurant and, and actually took our clamshells and walked them into the kitchen and put those in the service that night, which for us was such a moment of pride because here's this incredible artisan taking what we've grown and worked so hard.

I mean, in this case years of time to get to and saying, you know, this is good enough for me to serve to my customers, which from a chef is the highest form of praise and. All of those processes, building the far, developing the technology and growing a product that stands for something that really resonated with people.

We were able to prove all three of those things, and it was the ability to prove that which, and the ability to explain to people why proving that matter, that really set us forward in building the company to the next phase. This is beyond.

Brett Berson: Another thing you mentioned is that it was abundantly clear to you that one of the few bets for this company was to create a brand and create a relationship with the end consumer. And I wonder why that was so clear to you because obviously this, this is a business that you could easily have built as like an infrastructure play and let other people build brands on top of, or you just ended up being, you know, a classic infrastructure supplier of some sort, but it was clear that you wanted to build sort of a household name.

W w why was that? I'm so curious as to why you were so convicted so early that the path of the company was a relationship with the end consumer.

 you, you asked a while ago about, you know, the researching and the learning and the talking and how much of that helped to shape the vision of the business. And this is a great example of it, and you didn't have to talk to that many people. You didn't have to read that much and look some too much at the world though.

Irving Fain: The world today is different than it was six years ago. When I really got started, food was changing. Food is changing. People are asking the question, where's my food come from. How has it grown? How has it made, what are the ingredients in it? What are the chemicals that are grown in my product? Where is it actually coming from?

Who's growing it. These kinds of questions are being asked with more intensity and vigor than ever before. And they are causing a real structural shift in the food system. And they're creating an enormous amount of challenges for the biggest stablish food companies and brands and the enormous challenges for the biggest Dalgleish agricultural companies and systems, which just aren't set up to answer these questions.

And they're simultaneously opening the door for an incredible. Amount of new innovative food brands and ingredients and ways of thinking about the food system, which were historically shut out by these huge companies, which just benefited from their scale. And it sort of also combined with, you know, what, what has made first round, what you are today, this democratization that the internet provides of information and people can discover new brands and also discover information about old brands that maybe they don't like that causes people to search and explore in a whole new way.

And that's why I'm so excited working in food and agriculture is food is it's it's, that's a massive, you know, I think the opportunity in food and innovation in food and agriculture is just getting started and we're going to see an enormous number of. Very very large companies being built in this space because the system has been a certain way for such a long period of time and consumers, as they have said in so many other areas are saying, that's not the way I want it to be any longer.

And in many cases, structurally the system isn't set up to, to adapt that change and produce is a great example of that. you've got a very complex supply chain. That's driven by the fundamental reality that certain crops grow at certain times of the year and certain places. And so to get those crops from those places at that time in the year to us, so that we have what we want on the store shelf and on our table 365 days of the year requires a complex, very broad and convoluted supply chain.

That involves many, many different players. And therefore, to answer the question, like where's my food come from, who grew it? What did they grow with? It's very difficult to impossible. I mean, that's why, when you look at some of the recalls that have happened in produce, if you look in the last couple of years, some of the recalls in romaine.

They've recalled every product in the entire country, because they don't know where the problem came from. It is almost impossible to trace back, certainly impossible to do it quickly. And the benefit that we can provide at Bowery is we control the entire process from seed to store. And so we can tell you everything about the product that you hold in your hand.

From the moment we planted the seed to the moment we delivered it to the retailer, where you picked it up and that level of transparency and the sustainable way that we can grow produce with no pesticides or herbicides or fungicides or insecticides, and only using a fraction of the water. And the ability to tell that story to consumers and to deliver also a higher quality product that's a day or two old versus weeks or months of time and the existing supply chain, that was clearly a completely different way of operating as a supply chain than it ever been done before.

And you could build there for a completely different brand in produce than it had ever been built before. And that was why I was convinced.

Brett Berson: Um, so one of the areas that we haven't yet discussed in our time together is, is the team piece. And I'm super curious, and maybe we can talk about it in a couple of different chapters over boundaries life. But when you think about the cross-disciplinary team that you brought together, like the first four people and the balance between subject matter expertise and to your point at the very beginning naiveté and curiosity, can you tell us a story about the early hires, why you hired them, how you thought about what the first, like for people who are going to work on this with you need to look like or what they need to bring.

Irving Fain: absolutely. And I think, you know there's a couple of things interesting about the earliest of days and the first being, we were a small team of five to start, and that was actually very intentional. And part of the reason that we did that was, this was such a vast problem, that there were so many rabbit holes, one could fall down that were just interesting and exciting and felt important that when there was essentially one person responsible for each area of the business, it forced each individual to only focus on the things that mattered most.

And, you know, I'm a big believer that focus wins the day when building a business. And certainly focus is critically important in the earliest stages because you have limited resources, limited time and lots to prove. And so I think one of your jobs really early on as a founder is to evaluate what matters most to the business on building.

 Where am I strong, openly and honestly, where am I strong? Where am I not strong? And where do I then overlap with what matters most? And in the areas that I don't overlap, then it's your job to go find people who can cover off on those areas. So I'm certainly not an agricultural scientists, nor am I a mechanical engineer, and I'm not a software engineer.

Irving Fain: And so those are three key places where we brought folks in early on, who had experience in those areas to help lend their expertise. And then the last piece was the sort of financial component of our, of our business, because we have had a real focus on unit economics from the earliest of days. And that's because when you're building a software business, nobody has a question of, can you make money building software?

I think that's a pretty tried and true principle. And you, you sort of talked about this earlier, right? The question though, is will anybody want to buy the software that you make. In our instance at Bowery, it's actually opposite. There's no question that producing a better quality, better tasting, more sustainable product.

In our case produce, there was enormous demand. The question was, could you do it in a way that was economically viable? And that was really where we spent all of the effort and energy early on, which we've talked a lot about today and that's where we needed to make sure we had an intense focus from the early days.

And so it was that team of five of us that. Set off to go out and prove that we could build it, that we could grow it and that we could sell it. And we had obviously the agricultural science side, there's a relevancy to that part of the business. And, you know, Brian, who was our mechanical engineer had actually interestingly worked in and around indoor agriculture and greenhouses for awhile.

So that sort of relevancy was really valuable. He had some domain knowledge understanding and expertise, and his knowledge was really valuable, but you couldn't look at us and say, Oh wow, they have a bunch of experts. You know, we didn't have a 20 year greenhouse grower or a person who built greenhouses for 35 years.

And that was really purposeful. That was where the naivety component of the equation came in. And that was where I felt it was very, very important to have. Enough working knowledge to be valuable, but not so much knowledge that it would send us down the line. Long-term prescribed path that many before us had followed.

And I think the other part of this, that, that is equally important, right? And that we've carried forward with us at Bowery since the earliest days is to augment the understanding and expertise or lack thereof with the team, from the team with really strong, the wrong advisors who surround us, who oftentimes do come with decades of experience with incumbent food companies or with, you know, indoor growing or with operations or with grocery and retail.

And that provides enormous leverage for myself and for the team and actually a very efficient way.

Brett Berson: So, can you give a little example of maybe some of these folks that you kept around you with deep expertise, but that was different than sort of the full-time folks, which it seems like you really focused on excellence in the function versus excellence in a knowledge base of, of ag and maybe like how this kind of group of five with sort of these surrounding advisors kind of work together.

Irving Fain: Yeah. You know, I think the truth of it is that in many of the areas, you know, Henry who's now our chief science officer, who early on ran both the science side and our software side. There was not going to be anybody who was going to tell Henry how to build the barrier less. You know, that is, that goes right back to the video game.

 with Henry trotting through the Blackboard illuminating it as, as he went and as we went, there was no playbook on that front. And in some ways the, the building of our growth system, there wasn't really a playbook. Now we were fortunate to have very early on a fantastic partner who did have a lot of experience in growth systems in general, who helped sort of augment what we didn't know.

Irving Fain: And that was really valuable, but because there is no playbook in, in indoor vertical farming, even historical knowledge in adjacent areas was not directly relevant to what we were doing. So a lot of the early days too, to be fair, was really discovery. And was pioneering and, and getting things wrong and getting things right now.

One area where we were fortunate to be able to leverage incredible expertise was on the, the sort of the salad component of the model, the, the, the ability to build a brand, but even more so to, to be effective in retail. And I really believe that what we're building at Bowery, I always believed it's more than just a CPG brands.

It it's something larger and broader, uh, as an organization. And so I was reticent to. Seek or bring somebody on with a deep amount of CPG experience alone. However, I also knew that like it or not, we were selling a consumer product in a retail store. And so there are elements of what we're doing that mimic what traditional CPG has been doing for decades and decades and to ignore that would be foolish as well.

And so I was really lucky. I was introduced to a woman named Sally Roebling very early on. I mean, she was a, you know, an advisor from the earliest days of the company and the investor from the earliest days of the company. And she had been building and running food businesses for much of her entire career.

And. She was a fantastic thought partner and advisor to me into the business who was able to help us understand the way it had always been done and why, but also had the willingness to recognize that we weren't going to just do it a certain way because it had always been done that way. And she was willing to challenge the way the status quo and the quote unquote, normal with us, but also to help us do that with the back pocket understanding of at least why that incumbent way of doing things was the way it was.

 is that sort of, um, open-mindedness and, and curiosity, or willingness to say it's been done this way, but maybe we should do it in another way. Is that a thread that ties all the more senior experienced folks that you've now hired on the team?

Irving Fain: you can't come to work at Bowery. If you want to run a traditional playbook that you've run a hundred times before. It just won't work. Because as I've said, a couple of times in our conversation, there is no playbook for what we're doing. There's playbooks for part of what we're doing or are components of it Navy.

But there, there is no roadmap that lays out what one is supposed to do to create a vertical in their pharma company. They're just as, and so. The people who are most successful are those that come with a tried and true set of principles, experiences, and frameworks, which they can apply to the problems that we're solving at Bowery, but with an equal part, willingness and openness to adapting adjusting, or in some cases completely throwing out those very frameworks because they just may not be applicable to our problems.

Brett Berson: So for you when you're interviewing, let's just as a hypothetical you're hiring or, you know, certainly you've hired a CMO and given this as kind of a P zero criteria for you, what are you asking or what are you looking for in the time you're spending together that gives you conviction that they operate in the way you just outlined.

Irving Fain: You know, I, I think the, the competency piece is, is, you know, really reasonably well known in terms of understanding what someone has done and how they've executed and what kind of results they've driven. You know, I think some of this is a little bit subjective in terms of understanding the environment someone comes from and where they've spent time and, and what they've actually built.

And so, so Katie, who is our chief commercial officer today, you know, she was at Starbucks for 15 years, years, and, you know, ran many of their product categories over the years and grew with them and built the whole roastery business, you know, that you have in New York and Milan and Tokyo. And, and she was a part of a dynamic fast growing, fast changing organization where brand and values mattered enormously and where.

While as they got larger, they had built their own playbook. They were at least reinventing themselves enough for Katie to have some experience and exposure to that idea of taking sort of an understanding of the path ahead and then modifying and adjusting and modifying and adjusting. And, you know, I think you've got to really in any conversation with anyone in the organization, but particularly at the senior levels is you asked about it.

Look for examples that people can share where they have had to invent, where they have had to create, where they have had to respond to the unknown or the unquantifiable and, and have able to have been successful. And in other cases, maybe not have been successful, but willing to try.

Because you can't ask someone for a, nor do I want a hundred percent success rate, because if we're doing that, that means we're not trying enough. And that means we're not taking enough risk. And so I think that willingness to take risk as well, Brett actually is really an important part of this equation because that risk taking mentality is directly correlated with someone's ability to take that framework.

Like we talked about and apply it to a place that isn't going to fit over perfectly in a hundred percent.

Brett Berson: Another related talent question that I had that just popped up from a few minutes ago is, is he used a lovely word? You said the early days were all about pioneering. It wasn't about, you know, taking a bunch of ag best practices and implementing, implementing, and it Bowery. And so I was interested when you think about that first group of five that we're building in the early days, did you specifically look for pioneering types or were you focused much more on just the functional execution?

This person has world-class in ax, in mechanical engineering, in software engineering.

Irving Fain: Yeah. So I'd say C both because we needed to find and have people who had those experiences and expertise, but it was self-selecting It was undeniably pioneering. So anybody who didn't have a genuine attraction and interest to walking into the unknown, essentially the Lewis and Clark exploration across the U S anybody who wasn't drawn to the fact that they were about to walk into the woods and they had no idea what they were going to encounter, where they were going to encounter it.

And what was on the other side, like that was obviously the journey we were on. And if that wasn't attractive to someone, and I talked to plenty of people who that was without a question not attractive to, and I made no hesitation to be very clear with people about what this was and what it wasn't, because somebody has to be comfortable with that.

And so by being incredibly explicit, About the journey we were going on. We self-selected, in some ways, once you had that core expertise for the people who looked at that and they didn't kind of go, Ooh, that sounds terrible. Or that sounds scary. That sounds concerning. But people said fantastic. I'm in, let's go.

When can we leave?

Brett Berson: To wrap up Irv had a couple of final questions. The first is when you look back on the journey thus far, what what's been most surprising for you or unexpected?

 what's been most surprising, You know, I think in some ways, Brett, this was a journey that I stared down from the very start that I knew was going to be rife with surprise.

Irving Fain: And, and I think it has lived up to that billing and more, um, if any place I guess is maybe surprising, but shouldn't be so it's that, you know, coming from a world before this, that was bits and bytes and, and code. In some ways acts the way you expect it to act, and you can sometimes have bugs and problems, but you can fix them and find them plants don't always act the way you expect them to act.

And so we always will live with a little bit of variability that comes from, from life itself, because life itself is a core component of what we actually grow and provide at Bowery. And I think there's something fun, but innately challenging about that sort of instability and uncertainty that will always be there.

Brett Berson: Very well, articulated reality is much more complicated than, than we would ever believe is something that I often think about.

Irving Fain: that is very true and nothing is more real than, than things that grow from the ground or in our case that grow vertically, uh, around the country.

Brett Berson: So to wrap up, I like to end by just hearing, are there any people or books or things that you've read that had, that have now had an out-sized impact on the way that you think about company building and entrepreneurship? 

Irving Fain: it's a, it's a tricky question. And I, I guess I never want to point to a single individual or a single text or a single article, because I think my job is an entrepreneur and as a founder and a CEO is to continuously be building a pyramid and by building a pyramid. You are allowing the vision and the company to go higher and higher and higher.

And as anybody knows in building a pyramid, as you get higher and higher, you actually have to then build a larger base and a larger foundation to support a structure that gets higher and higher and larger and larger. And I think that means that I try to take every interaction and I try to take everything I read and I try to take everything I learn, you know, along the way, and put those blocks into different parts of the pyramid.

Some are foundational, some are at the top of the pyramid. Some are right there in the middle. Some of those conversations with people provide many, many blocks. Some of them provide just a single block, but, but I look at the pyramid that is Bowery or for that matter, when I look at the pyramid, that's my entrepreneurial career.

I don't know if it's a disappointing answer, but, but I actually don't point to, Oh, I read this one time and that changed everything. Or I had this conversation or there's this person in my life that changed everything. There's many people who've had incredibly important influence in me and what I'm creating, you know, Rob from first round, who sits on our board has been, you know, invaluably, influential and an extraordinary partner from the very early days of Valerie.

I mean, I can list so many different people. Who've had such an important impact on this journey. And so many things I've read and learned and done, but it's hard for me to say, Oh, bread, it's this one thing I read this one time or this one person I know, because I think it's actually about amalgamating all of these lessons and understandings together.

And that's what builds the most durable and resilient pyramid that can actually reach the highest Heights.

Brett Berson: I like that. And I, I hope that our conversation could be that one of those little things that somebody else listens to that's building a company that is kind of part of their tapestry or their pyramid. And so I think that's a great place to end. Thank you so much.

Irving Fain: if that was the case. So yeah. Thank you. This was a really fun conversation.