Scott Massey is the Founder and CEO of Heliponix, an organization that provides consumers with the GroPod, an aeroponic appliance that can yield a full head of leafy greens on a daily basis, or sizable harvests of dwarf varieties of larger plants. Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he and Scott discuss the business model of GroPods, challenges Scott had to overcome as an entrepreneur and pivots Scott had to make in order to scale and sustain his business amidst a global pandemic.

Special thanks to our Season 1 Sponsor

IGS – https://intelligentgrowthsolutions.com/

Key Takeaways

00:01 – Scott expounds on his education and background, how he got involved in AgTech and hydroponics and the origin story of GroPod, his rotary-aeroponics appliance

15:41 – Scott speaks to the importance of understanding consumer habits and breaks down his business model

25:32 – Scott talks about the vital role that form, function, design and aesthetic play in vertical farming

31:51 – Scott dissects the impact the global pandemic has had on his business, his thoughts on scaling up and sustainability 

38:27 – Challenges and obstacles Scott has had to overcome as an entrepreneur

46:08 – Scott talks about what excites him the most about the future of AgTech and a tough question he had to ask himself recently

50:18 – Scott speaks to what the future holds for GroPod 

54:53 – Harry thanks Scott for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can follow and connect with Scott and GroPod

Tweetables:

“As a young person, I realized that it’s a lot easier to build one small thing than to try and convince someone to give me funding for one big thing.” (08:22)

“I firmly believe that no amount of capital will resolve fundamental flaws in business models. Those need to be and have to be addressed before you talk to those investors because it creates expectations of liquidity and profitability that if you’re anything but delivering on those deadlines, you have failed your fiduciary commitment to the investors who bought into that company.” (11:15)

“I have a lot of respect for vertical farms, but I would also make the comment that grocers are the primary beneficiary in most vertical farming models.” (23:14)

“I’m not gonna pretend that we made this decision to go directly to consumers in anticipation of any global pandemic happening. But I’m really glad we made the decision we did because I’m not interrupted. In fact, we’re having increased demand because more people want contactless food.” (31:51)

“I think there was a statistic I read in the National Resource Defense Council doing a food waste analysis in the U.S. that twenty people touched your head of lettuce before you ate it. I hope none of those people had Covid along the way or were transmissible, but that’s a real and valid concern that a consumer is going to have.” (46:40)

Links Mentioned:

Scott’s LinkedIn

GroPodOfficial Website

GroPodOfficial Twitter

GroPodOfficial Instagram

GroPodOfficial YouTube Channel

Intelligent Growth Solutions

Website | Twitter | YouTube

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mentioned in this episode:

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We are now in this advanced IoT automation age. Why can't we make the point

of consumption the point

Welcome to the Vertical Farming Podcast, weekly conversations

with fascinating CEOs, founders, and agtech

visionaries. Join us every week as we dive deep into the

world of vertical farming with your host, Harry Duran.

Vertical Farming Podcast, welcome back, episode 10. If you're new to the show, this

is the podcast where we interview fascinating CEOs and

founders of some of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world.

In case you missed last week's episode, I had a great conversation

with Andrew Carter of Smallhold, diving deep into the world of

fungi, specifically mushrooms. If you haven't listened to it, I

highly recommend you check it out, episode 9. This week I have the

privilege of speaking with Scott Massey. Scott is the founder and

CEO of Heliponics, an organization that provides consumers

with the GrowPod. It's an aeroponic appliance that can yield a full

head of leafy greens on a daily basis, or sizable harvests of

dwarf varieties of larger We discussed the business model of

GrowPods, challenges Scott has had to overcome as an entrepreneur,

and pivots Scott made in order to scale and sustain his business

amidst what's happening with the global pandemic. It's fascinating

for me to have a discussion with Scott as he is a first-time CEO,

and we talk about some of the challenges of growing the company and some of

the things he's had to learn along the way. One of the new reviews we

received recently was from Dr. EVS. He or

she says, from Sweden, a new podcast addressing a rising

industry, a nice balance of facts and people. Thank you so much for

that kind review. If you're enjoying this episode or past

episodes, I'd love it if you leave a rating and review at

ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

Okay, so let's get into this conversation with Scott. So Scott

Massey, co-founder and CEO of GrowPod, thank you for

joining us on the Vertical Farming Podcast. Thank you for having me. Huge fan of

the show. Thank you so much. I know we were connected

through, uh, was it— no, I'm trying to remember now. Who was it that connected

us through email? I want to say it was Herb Kliegerman at iGrow

News. Yes, that's right. He's— yeah, he's a great guy.

Yeah. And so I thought it would be helpful, as always, this

show has grown out of my interest and fascination with all things vertical

farming, so just finding out what people are doing in the space has been

fascinating and interesting. And one of the episodes we have coming up with

is with Virginia Amory of Beta Hatch, and she's doing insect farming. So it's

just when you just think about the idea of vertical farming, it's not a

one-size-fits-all, and it's something I'm sure that you've seen as well. So

maybe just start with your interest in vertical

farming. You know, can you trace that back to a specific time when that happened

for you? Yeah, it was kind of a series of events that I think

ultimately brought me to the private industry side, because I originally began in the

research realm. I was a student at Purdue University. I

graduated in 2017, that spring semester.

But for those 4 years beginning in 2013, I studied mechanical

engineering technology with an entrepreneurship minor. I worked actually

in the oil industry for 2 of those years as an intern working on

fluid control systems and really just optimization of

mechanical designs of large industrial equipment. And the

purpose of this equipment was to get liquids from point point A to point B,

regardless if it was kerosene, diesel, biofuels, it just moved the liquid.

And, you know, that translated really well into hydroponics, particularly

my junior year at Purdue University. Dr. Cary Mitchell,

which is a renowned lighting horticultural expert within the indoor

agriculture space, he was awarded

several grants from USDA, NASA, one of the agencies among

others, to further research isolated spectrum of

light and its effect using plants. So the full

spectrum, kind of like the fluorescent light bulbs ahead of us that appear white, that

is the entire visible spectrum or most of it. And so what we were

doing was specifically isolating individual wavelengths and

analyzing how that affected photosynthetic rates by monitoring the amount

of CO2 going into the chamber and oxygen leaving it. So

if you ever heard of the McCree curve, or sometimes what's used to

describe PAR, photosynthetic active radiation, or kind of the

ideal wavelengths of light that plants need. We were essentially

challenging kind of those statutes and understanding how

wavelength and intensity affects plant growth and using those

insights to ultimately contribute towards the decisions on lighting

and irrigation and other aspects of growth chambers on the space

station and actual— in human colonies that will in

our lifetime be established on the moon and Mars, which is a really,

really exciting thing to think about. in the future. But I wanted to

find a way to apply vertical farming now on the short term.

And that's basically the hand I had dealt with me. I was a student,

I was at Purdue, I had maybe $5,000

in my bank account at most earned from my internship. I was

not primed to start a business by any means. But what I did gain

from that research study was just a complete fascination, much

like your own experience in reading the chapter in the book, in Abundance, about this,

it's really opened my eyes to the industry. And I started applying to

a lot of vertical farms. And I didn't hear back, or I would get

responses that, you know, we're not really looking to hire, you know, structural

mechanical engineers just yet. The industry is just early.

Bottom line, there wasn't a whole lot of activity happening at that time in

2016, '17. And I was also 21 years old

too. So, I saw the likelihood of me just starting up a vertical

farm out of nowhere as being close to zero or even getting

funding for that. And that's when I think my kind of

recognition of the limitations in the industry started becoming really apparent. I

started thinking, okay, these guys aren't hiring, so the

business probably isn't super successful yet.

What are the limitations? And those more often than not came down to be

yields, power efficiency, and maintenance. If you can

resolve those 3 things, which pretty much defines your overhead,

you know, profitability of your system, then that will tell you what works and

doesn't. And so what we had came up with as students— when I

say we, my co-founder Ivan Ball, who was my coworker on the study, he was

the electrical computer engineer— we devised a system called rotary

aeroponics that allowed us to increase our yields while reducing

power consumption. And instead of thinking, what's the biggest

form factor that this could be viable in? What's the biggest factory that we

could get the best economies of scale? We instead asked ourselves,

what's the smallest this can be and still be viable? So pausing

there for a second, can you talk a little bit about the thought process? Because

I think a lot of people initially coming into space and seeing the opportunities

that exist at the industrial level

and That possibility for growth for a small company is

really exciting. I'm wondering what was going through your mind when you're thinking

about almost like the opposite, about how do we make this smaller? One

analogy I love, I love to make because it's, it's got

similarities out the wazoo if you, if you really dig into it, is the

ice industry. The ice historically, prior to like

1900 roughly, when refrigeration was invented in the Industrial

Revolution, you got ice once a year when it was cold enough outside.

Climate dependency. And to me, that's not too different from the

way agriculture is now. Of course, you can find Mediterranean climates that have those ideal

climates year-round, but we are dependent on climate. Climate

decides how much food there is. Climate decides how much food we can distribute.

We are really slaves to climate. And the big breakthrough in the

ice industry was refrigeration, but they put it in these massive warehouses, the

bigger the better, bigger economies of scale. And what happens? They send

out a perishable good. It melts along the way. People had ice

chests. That was the precursor to the refrigerator, a box I would

put a perishable good in to try and limit the perishability of the other

things I put in the box. It was kind of this redundant cycle.

There was a lot of people that thought, could it be a household level? There

was a lot of people that said, no, that will never work. It's too expensive.

It's too complicated. It's not feasible. All of those

arguments at first were valid. They were absolutely Right. The first refrigerators were

$20,000, adjusting for inflation. If you

looked at the existing supply chain, why do I need a $20,000 machine when I

could get a block of ice for a dollar? The economics don't make sense. But

where did you get your ice this week? Did you go to the ice factory

or did you go to the refrigerator? To me, all of the reasons why there

were people who were skeptical about the in-home decentralized model,

it's very easy to apply these over. I mean, You're simulating a

climate. You're making it cold enough for water to freeze, right? And that was

cutting edge in that industrial revolution, but we're in a biological age now.

These LED lighting is so efficient. We can dial in the

fertilization exactly what the nutrition needs to be. We can really

eliminate a lot of these variables. So the technology of

hydroponics is inherently portable. And when I make my— this next

comment, I want to first lead with, I have immense respect for the vertical farms

in the world. They're doing a lot of cutting-edge research that, you know, my

introduction to the technology wouldn't have been possible had, you know, the work of

others been done before us. But if you put it in a

stationary facility, you limit its potential to scale. That was

my observation on the industry. If we are now in this

advanced IoT automation age, we have technologies

that can replicate these environments decentralized without a skilled operator,

present, why can't that be an appliance? Why

can't we make the point of consumption the point of production? And I think just

thinking about those points logically, if you can't tell, I like

appliances. My hometown, I'm in Evansville, Indiana. At one point, this

was known as the refrigerator capital of the USA. Whirlpool

had its plant here, employed, I think, over 50,000 people at its

peak. Louisville's only a few miles away. And that had

GE's appliance manufacturing capital. So that obviously

played a heavy influence on this. But I also, you know, as a young

person realized it's a lot easier to build one small thing than to try and

convince someone to give me funding for one big thing. And when it came

down to getting funding, that was another critical aspect too.

You know, I was young and had no capital to start the business. Well,

universities have pitch competitions and they're amazing.

They are the best thing I think a young person can ever engage in. It's

like Shark Tank. You go up there, you give a pitch. Yeah, there needs to

be some showmanship. You need to be able to woo people. I mean, if you're

not making the audience interested, what are you doing? You're boring them. So

we would compete at university-level pitch competitions to get grants, and

these would be small, $5,000 to $10,000, sometimes even $20,000

grants. But, you know, if you make that your job for a year as a

young person when you're exclusively eligible, A lot of times these students are

only for students. I mean, you can get like up to

$100,000 in a year if you're aggressive enough and go after these different

universities. So that's what we did. And we had to bring

the prototype with us. You find that at these events, talking about

something, that's great. Can you show it? That's better. So

walking in with a prototype, no matter how crude it looks, but just to

demonstrate the base functionality, it would win competition.

So it had to be portable on that nature. Really, we

just kind of adapted to the situation that we were in and, and

developed a method that was able to obtain the resources that we identified as being

critical for us to pay for patents and other foundational

expenses that have much longer returns on investments.

That's fascinating. And I think it sort of turns the model a little

bit on its ear. When you think about startup companies, they initially think that I

have to create an MVP, and then I have to go after angel investors, and

I have to raise my first round. And, and the beauty of what you do

is sort of boots on the ground. You know, you have to put a little

bit more elbow grease in than a typical startup founder, but, you know, the

beauty of that, of that approach is that everything that you— all the grants that

you collect, you know, at the end of the day or at the end of

the year, you're still left with full control of the company, which I think is,

is something that's very important and something a lot of founders overlook.

Absolutely. And a lot of founders, what I find is they put

preconceived notations that entirely Artificially,

it's self-manufactured why they can't be successful. You

ask them, why aren't you moving prototype development along? Why don't you at the

very least have one pilot customer? I mean, you can afford to put the

prototype in a house and not charge them and just ask, do you

like this? Is it terrible? These aren't horribly

complicated things. I mean, even if it's your own home and your parents, I mean,

that's at least at a minimum a starting point. Point to learn. But

there's this strange misconception, and I'm not sure if it's this kind of

social media era where we see the Facebooks of the world become, you know,

unicorns almost overnight when they have those funding rounds. But companies

like that had years of hardship where they had to refine their prototype before

it was ever possible to do that. I firmly believe that no

amount of capital will resolve fundamental flaws in business models.

Those need to be and have addressed before you talk to those

investors, because it creates expectations of liquidity events and

profitability that if you're anything but delivering on those

deadlines, I mean, you have failed your fiduciary commitment to the

investors who bought into that company. That's a great comment.

The way we actually were able to move to sales without having to raise that

round. Now, I will say we're incredibly fortunate. The Purdue Research

Foundation did make multiple investments into our company in the form of a

convertible note. The first was a $25,000, and then second was a

$50,000 later through their agriculture venture fund. But those

were structured very similar as the other pitch competitions.

But what I found out, and this might have been the most useful asset we

had at the time— well, number one, I was broke. So paying for the

prototypes, that was me. I was working night shifts delivering newspapers

for the Exponent, which is the newspaper on Well, while I was

working that 1 AM to 4 AM shift, I got to be pretty good friends

with the managing editor of the newspaper. Every time we won, I made

sure our article was in there. I didn't care if someone else wrote— they

authored it. I don't care. That's not what I'm worried about. I just want the

exposure. Please include mention of this accomplishment. And you'll

find out the press copies each other like crazy. If you get one

newspaper, you've pretty much got 5 or 10 because they just replicate it. That's great.

And people start emailing you saying, hey, I know this is an early product. You

educated them. They read the article. It's exciting. There's an experience happening,

a bigger disruption. They feel like they're taking part in a revolution. People will start

emailing you out of the blue and say, when this is ready, I want one.

And we already had a list of 20, 30 customers before we

graduated of just the people emailing me from that constant

exposure. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back on it,

That was everything because then I was able— once we finally

had an MVP working in our lab, I called these people up and it was

just revenue. Give me a $500 deposit. It was a

$2,000 appliance. Don't get me wrong, it's high priced at low

volumes like this. It's very much a luxury appliance, but they put $500 down in

deposit. You know, we built the trust in the publications. They knew we were

legit. They were okay putting money into a business that had no cash flow history.

Then I went and got a loan from Evansville

Vectran. Actually, it's our utility company. They had a nonprofit

that focuses on giving loans to innovative companies that would

create high-growth jobs in the area. And so we were able to

get a loan after that to finance the remaining inventory.

And then we built everything ourselves in a garage and delivered the

product to the consumers, collected the remaining $1,500 balance. And paid

off the loan before interest was due. Only after we actually had

paying users of the technology, we were able to listen what sucked, what was

great, what was left to be desired on it. That

feedback then set us up in discussions with investors. It was

so much easier. I mean, you just speak to uncertainties unless

you have actually put it in consumers' hands. So that's

kind of how we started. And then from there, we were able to raise some

capital. But basically that whole year of 2017

was spent just competing at pitch competitions and refining the MVP to where

it just worked, right? You can grow plants once, that's

not really hard. Can you grow it 3 times in a row, 4 times in

a row? Can you manage pathogen outbreaks? That's hard. Being able

to get at least that replicatable success that you could do

outside the lab, that was kind of the 2017 focus.

August 2018 was then executing on those unit deliverables

to those super early beta early adopters. So

that's really how it started. Yeah, those early adopters are so important

in any business. They're almost like helping you fund the business

because they're taking a chance on you because it's something— it's a lot what we

see in like the Indiegogo model and people— there's a

bit of a roll of the dice because you're saying there's a chance that this

product A, as promised, may not be delivered at all. And

B, if it is delivered, then it may not be what was

advertised. And, you know, I took a chance, but I think there's something to

be said for those folks early on who believe in you and believe in your

vision and are willing to take a chance on you because they can help validate

and also give you that productive feedback that you mentioned on what's working

and what's not, and which I think is so valuable, especially in those early cycles.

I mean, I'm an engineer. So I think in functions, right?

And to me, it seems obvious. Does the function improve the growing performance?

Therefore, it improves the overall experience for the consumer. But until you

understand that consumers buy emotions, not functions, you

can just spin your wheels in place all day. So being able to actually ask,

well, why did you buy this? You don't even know who I am. In fact,

I had a funny story. There was one guy that lived in a neighborhood in

Indianapolis. It's a little rougher. And I get there to deliver the device out of

the back of my car. I didn't have a delivery vehicle. I had a very

sorry-looking trailer on the back, dented up. And, you

know, I pull this, you know, big appliance out. I actually called my

co-founder and said, if you don't hear from me in an hour, call someone.

And I knock on this guy's door and this guy's like, who are you? I'm

like, oh, I'm Scott. I got your GrowPod. He's like, great. Just put it right

there on my porch. Just put it there. I'm like, sir, Early adopter, white

glove delivery experience. I'll do everything. I don't want it. Just put it on the

porch. Like, huh, okay, well, I'm not gonna fight you, but

here's my card. He sees the card and goes, oh, founder. I just thought you're

an intern. And, uh, the guy tells me, let me tell you why

I bought this. I'm diabetic and my doctor said I need

to start eating better or I'm probably gonna die sooner.

Pick one. And he had family members that were vegans. that were also— I don't

know if they were diabetic, but indicated that there were similar health things going on,

and that since they switched to mostly plant-based diet, they were a lot

healthier. So this individual wasn't looking at it from the gardening

experience or the better tasting food. It was

borderline a medically influenced— I'll say it, it was a medically influenced

decision to have higher quality food. When you start looking at this as an

ROI as to investing into your health, It's a really

immediate sell to the individual, and I think that's a

really important branding consideration to take into account as

volumes are small and productions are low and things are more expensive in their

earlier stage. So can you talk a little bit about the model you

decided on when trying to figure out what exactly the unit was going to

be able to grow? You know, there's variations of what you can grow, and

obviously the listener can see the examples on the website and see the video that

you've created there as well. But how were you thinking about how much variety

you were going to allow Given the constraints that you had and the space that

you had to work with? Us, you know, we oftentimes use the phrase

Keurig or Nespresso for food, kind of describe the

platform. And that's the goal— have a platform and a

database, an encyclopedia of different types of crops that you

don't even know what they taste like. You're not in this climate, you've never even

had these plants in your estate before, and now you can have it in your

kitchen grown autonomously. So We knew early on that

a big aspect of the value proposition was varieties, and keeping

ourselves as open-ended and configurable as possible was

critical. And there's actually lots of instances of that in agriculture. If you look

back to like the John Deere plow or the very first tractors that were unveiled

in the field, having variable spacing tire tracks to

accommodate different types of crops was a huge, huge aspect

for farmers because Really, the only thing you can do is just listen to the

individuals. And I would hear everything. I would hear expats that maybe came from

Korea and they wanted bok choy and specific types of herbs that they missed from

their diet. Multiple instances of like that. Some people wanted ornamental

flowers, things like marigolds, to get primed for their gardens. So we just learned

early on that the system needed to be configurable, that we could ask the

user, what do you want to grow? And then build our offering around

that. But really our main limitations are what we can't grow. We don't do

trees, so anything that takes a really long time, I mean,

you can, but it probably isn't feasible or financially

viable to do so whatsoever. Anything with a woody stem gets

tricky. Vine crops or anything that's just massive and isn't

compact doesn't really do well. So what grows in a greenhouse is

usually a good indication as to what can grow well inside of a grow pod.

And did you Did you find that you were looking to partner

with either the folks who were creating the seeds or

working on new variations of hybrids? You know, there's a new generation of

crops that are being created that can actually— are made to fit in, you know,

smaller batches of tomatoes, for example, cherry tomatoes that are more

closely dense together. So did you have to go out and see what was

happening in the world of small produce, I guess, so to speak? You know,

now, yes. That's something we're very much so focusing on

now. And that's, I got to tell you, an exciting area as a whole, because

what is possible to grow in a greenhouse today will be very

different 4 years from now. I'm not sure if it might even have been on

one of your podcasts. Someone said, you know, we've had, what, 10,000,

12,000 years to perfect agriculture in the soil. And it's like the last

15 to 30 years we've been going indoors. There's— we haven't

even scratched the surface of what's possible as far as selective breeding on

crops. But early on, no, I wasn't. In fact, I'll tell you on

some of the mistakes I made, you're gonna laugh. You're gonna think, wow, this is

an engineering mistake. When we started supplying the seed pods initially,

I gave people links to Amazon accounts to buy their fertilizer and

said, hey, here's your vendor, buy it from them. And everyone's like, whoa, whoa,

what is this? Another purchase? And I was like, yeah, it's cheaper

there. If I buy it, I'm small volumes, I'm just gonna put them in small

bottles, raise the price to get my margin, and then send it to you.

Is that what you want? The answer was yes. The answer was, I want

one box, and I don't want anything outside of this one box,

and I don't want to have to even know what's really in the box. I

don't want to know about macro and micronutrients. I don't want to know about

calcium. I don't want to know about any of that stuff. I just want it

to work. And that's when I realized this is a really unique

experience because by enabling a non-expert on the technology,

you're also making them dependent on your subscription offering. The likelihood

of them branching out from that when they don't know how to is essentially

zero. So it took those learning experiences to learn what my

customers wanted to start then looking at the varieties. And then

eventually, you know, we learned that a huge value proposition was getting seeds that they

would have never had access to, some of those cutting-edge varieties that

the general public as a whole doesn't have access to, that you sometimes need

special relationships and licenses to even access some of those

varieties. So it's been a learning experience for us, and it's, it's really

exciting to see what direction that's moving towards. That's fascinating.

It just speaks to what we were touching on earlier, the fact that you're getting

this feedback and you think you have a preconceived notion about what it is that

they want, and in your mind you thought you were doing something beneficial for them.

But it also speaks to something we see, for example, on our podcast

production side, like people want a done-for-you service. Like, they want to

know like all the different aspects of it. They want to know what's

involved, but they don't want to do it. So it sounds like a lot like

for these folks, the whole allure of an

offering like this is the fact that, to that gentleman's

point, literally like he felt like if he— even if he left it on the

porch, he could just plug it in and it would just do its thing, which

is, which is I imagine the expectation for a lot of folks and the selling

point too, because sort of like know that they don't have to Continuously

maintain it, which is something that, you know, not everyone— most people do not

have the green thumb, right? Yeah, and, and this is actually another reason why

we go direct to consumer. If the value proposition of indoor agriculture is

better tasting, more nutritious food, has, you know, essentially no

supply chain to get there, then we need to be hearing consumers'

feedback on that to actually validate those claims. Are they actually saying, yeah,

this tastes better, I would like to buy more of this? Again, I have a

lot of respect for vertical farms, but I would also make the comment that

grocers are the primary beneficiary in most vertical farming

models. Unless that grocer is just selling lettuce off the

shelf, which hasn't really been seen yet,

or to the best of my knowledge, I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

Unless that happens, the grocer is going to do what's predictably in their best

interest and just let the produce sit on the shelf a little bit longer. It's

just lettuce that lasts longer, has, you know, longer shelf life.

Until that consumer knows it's coming from a vertical farm,

there's a severe disconnect between the two. You know, one company

that I think is interesting is Infarm. You know, they've been expanding pretty quickly.

I haven't actually met any of the founders in that company. They're based in Europe.

But in just the past year, they've— you know, I'm just kind of

saying what I've read in these articles. None of this has been validated, but it

looks like they've raised upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, yet they're also

scaling with major food retailers. Now, Infarm's not

the first company to do remotely deployed container growing system.

There's been a few of those companies out there. Now, what they do differently though

is the consumers can see it, and it's, it's like a rotisserie chicken.

Rotisserie chickens are sold at a loss in grocery stores, but you hear it

sizzling. Oh yeah. You see it. Oh, the smell. You can taste

it before you've even eaten it, and suddenly you're buying twice as much food as

you came in to get before because you're hungry. It induces that just,

you know, human reaction. It's really innate in us. Watching a plant

grow, something beautiful happens in that, how an individual can

associate themselves to it. And I think companies that understand

that well are like IKEA. You know, there's examples of IKEA

giving people crates and they're like, how much is this worth? Like, I don't know,

a dollar? Yeah. And then they give them a few wood slats, a hammer and

nails, they make it themselves, and suddenly it's a $5 crate. When you

imprint your mark on it, you have that maker

experience. You really drive the value of it being custom

to you. Yeah. And I had a conversation with Andrew

Carter of Smallhold, and they're doing mushrooms, and they're doing the displays

in the retail stores and in the units and in the restaurants. And, you know,

they're beautiful and they're nice to look at, and They're definitely like a selling

point, because people come in and they see that and they're just like— it also

educates people as well. And I think, you know, obviously, there's a huge window on

your unit as well. So can you talk a little bit about how you started

thinking about form and function and design and aesthetics

as well? Because it seems to be an important part of the product. Thank you.

Thank you for asking that. Because that's a conversation I think that does not happen

enough in this space. There's a whole suite

There's countertop models, which are

largely decorative, but, you know, there is instances of them producing enough

that it could be considered maybe useful in some circumstances.

But when you don't control the environment around it, you're not regulating humidity,

temperature, and other factors, you're going to get limited yields, and you're also going to

be subject to low humidities in the winter. Like, that's going to

adversely affect your plant growth. So being able to actually have a

sealed environment, that is a huge distinction of a

self-contained device. Can it regulate climate inside of its chamber?

Check. That kind of separates, in my mind, systems that can

operate uninterrupted throughout the year from the ones who cannot. Now, the

ones that actually have the self-contained environmental control

function, look at refrigerators. Perfect example.

There's the under-the-counter model, so it's going to abide by the footprint of a dishwasher.

It's going to fit under, meaning it's 34.5 inches tall, typically a

24-inch width and depth. You're going to see some variability in

that in different markets, just like how Europeans would have a different outlet size. They're

going to have different counter heights and depths. But still, you know, it's

constant throughout Europe. These things, like, once you understand these standards,

they're unchanging. For whatever reason, I can't really understand it, there's a

lot of people who've gone really close to those dimensions. But

not exactly there. For whatever reason, there's been a disconnect

with the appliance industry. Well, I say for whatever reason, it's difficult,

you know, working with those sort of manufacturing supply chains. A lot of it's

in Asia, especially right now. It's, you know, July 23rd, there's a

pandemic ongoing, and that's disrupted many businesses,

ourselves included, in some of our supply chain dependencies. But what we wanted to

do was make it like an appliance. You already

referred Yeah. And think of like a Thermador wine cooler. It's

beautiful stainless steel, it's sleek, it matches the kick

plate, it's uninterrupted, it's continuous, it's, it's just

seamless in your kitchen. It matches the stove, right?

That's the commonality here. You grow your food, then what? You prepare it on

what appliance? And then maybe that food gets stored in a

refrigerator or something, whatever it is, you know, there's a continuation in the

kitchen where it It needs to look cohesive. And I mean, that's a fundamental tenet

of any design perspective at all. So that was kind of

our focus. We looked at existing appliance manufacturers, found ways to

retrofit their design, and then build our product around

the way appliances are designed. Someone explained this to me

recently because, you know, the appliance companies, they're now looking at this industry. I don't

know why this isn't getting more notice, but this is like potentially a monumental

thing. If refrigerators or appliances start having the function

of growing your food, the global implications of this

supply chain disruption, it's almost incomprehensible. Of

course, we're not going to be growing corn, soybean, or any other row crops in

these. It will at most be a good complement to

industrial agriculture for those things. But for your really

highly perishable crops, there's no reason this can't be grown on the household level.

Can you talk to what might be obvious for some folks who kind of look

at the unit and then think about, you know, their own home? Obviously there's challenges

in terms of a limited amount of real estate that you do have, so

it might behoove you, if you haven't done so already, to start working

with home development companies, right, who are building out

units from scratch. And have you thought about that relationship? And

can you speak to like that idea of people thinking it's beautiful, but I

I literally don't know where I could put it. Right. Yeah. So we've had

people, as its own under-the-counter appliance

in its current embodiment right now, being standalone, we've seen

people put it where they have available space. So sometimes that's the maid's

closet next to the washing machine, where it's a little less out of

sight than we would have preferred. Other times it's been in basements and garages

and pretty far out of sight. But, you know, they're still growing. operating

from it and having a great user experience. And other times it's in the kitchen

and it's in that under-the-counter spot. We've had people actually make those

modifications or luckily had available space that we could kind of

go into. And to your point, it's, it's a challenge. You have to convince a

user that this 4 square foot in your home would be

better used cultivating plants than serving any other purpose.

And if you look at our demographic, people in high

urban densities and climates where they cannot grow, that can

be a hard challenge to get across sometimes to explain

that, hey, in this apartment, that's maybe 1,000 square feet, you're paying how many thousand

dollars per month, right? The opportunity cost goes up. But

what I can say now is, you know, kind of back to the appliance companies,

we're aware of who the stakeholders are that are necessary in our industry. And,

and what I foresee is a merger of sorts, that I think will

consolidate some of these appliances and help eliminate the need to have a

standalone device. I think that is a critical adoption

factor for this to reach a mass market and really kind of diverge from its

current niche status. Do you see an opportunity or is there any

interest in using all the work that you've done? Because when you think of

refrigerator, you can think of maybe a small leap to commercial refrigerator. So

do you think about that sometimes, maybe smaller restaurants who could see A

double-sized unit of this or something that would fit in their space? That's a few

points there. So we have been in at least a restaurant owner's home

before and also several schools. So those beta models, we actually

donate them all once they've kind of reached their lifecycle. Most of those were hobbyist-grade

components on the sensors and stuff, so they weren't really even designed to work this

far, but they still worked to limited capacity. So we gave them to schools

so they could just kind of have the charitable learning experience associated with it. There

are some in the space that focused only on schools, and their value

proposition is very different. It's not necessarily yield data. It's

more so maybe like interaction, visibility,

maybe if there's enough plants for everyone to hold and kind of dissect sort of

thing. It's a slightly different performance grade. Now, the

pandemic shut those down. Those who had schools and

restaurants and businesses as their clients are having a really Really

hard time right now. And I'm not going to pretend that, you know, we

made this decision to go directly to consumers in anticipation of any, you know,

global pandemic happening. But I'm really glad we made the decision

we did because I'm not uninterrupted. In fact, we're having increased demand

because more people want contactless food. I mean,

just China is a perfect example. The amount of people that use meal

deliveries there prior to the pandemic This is an anecdotal

assumption. I haven't done the research in depth yet, but I understand it to be

maybe 1 in 4 people used food delivery there, and now it's like

90%. Wow. That's like 1.5 billion people. What

percentage of the world just switched to virtual food deliveries? And what's

the one food item that's really hard to ship because it's perishable? It's produce.

So, I mean, if growing produce in the home can close that gap and we're

going in this irreversible and inevitable transition to

food digital fulfillment. To me, I think it complements that model

really well. To your point about scaling up, something interesting

about the ice industry analogy is that there was never a

single ice factory that sold a refrigerator, and there wasn't a single

ice harvester that made an ice factory. They sometimes call that

entrepreneurial Darwinism. I've heard that term before. They have a really

hard time understanding how this existing infrastructure doesn't

fit into this new model that's being proposed. It's— they just aren't

compatible. So could we scale up? Absolutely.

But we're really content with where our margins are now. There hasn't really been a

need to do so. Now, that being said, are we opposed

to licensing intellectual property and working with partners in commercial

productions? Absolutely. I think it would be a great relationship.

And that's actually a larger system is something that we've built internally

and experimented with. So we could very well move into that B2B

segment very soon. It's just a matter of ordering a little bit more

material to make it taller, and that's it. The architecture,

if anything, is overbuilt for a business because you

have to be so much more autonomous and so much more robust and branded in

your packaging to deal with consumers than you would to even do it in a

business setting. How self-sustainable is it

And what's the lifecycle? And is it

sustainable in a way so that whatever software drives it or whatever maintenance would be

required to keep it going year over year, is that some thought that's gone

into like these later iterations of the models that it can actually run on its

own and actually grow as you learn new things about how to

improve the process? Yeah, absolutely. And I think we just got to thank the

timing. Right when I was learning about the technology, LEDs were taking

off and it was clear that they were just having such rapid leaps in efficiency

that LED lighting was the future of indoor ag at the same

time as cloud computing becoming widely available and

obtainable to small companies. I mean, anyone, you don't have

to be a computer scientist, can buy a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, you know,

find an open source library and start hosting something on AWS and having

low-level cloud-based IoT functionality. We were lucky that the

stars kind of aligned right when we needed them to, to start implementing those

sort of procedures on the system. So I'm sorry, if I can remember that

question, it was maintenance and efficiency for sustainability? Yeah. And

also when you think about software, it's typically driven

by updates. So like every time my Mac, there's new updates for the Mac, you

know, you can just run a new update on the Mac and you get the

latest and greatest improvements. So we're cloud-based. So the device is

constantly sucking in data, compressing that, sending it to the cloud

algorithm executes stuff and then we're able to learn from there. So it's a

continuous process. I mean, we're on the consumer's Wi-Fi just like their Nest

thermostat is. And there's ways you can compress data over periods of

time and minimize the amount of times that's pinged. But we're on home Wi-Fi.

So, you know, data usage isn't really a concern as long as you're not reducing

their bandwidth speed or anything like that. But as far as

sustainability, that is a great question because that is A

very legitimate criticism of this industry. If your power bill

to grow your vegetables is bigger than the grocery bill for those same

vegetables, you're not helping anyone. I mean, you're, you're arguably

contributing to climate change. You're probably making the situation worse

by finding this really energy-intensive way to obtain your vegetables.

And that was a core aspect of our design for rotary

aeroponics. We discovered that if you rotate Right. When you elevate plants on a

vertical tower, you number one get cylindrical growth. The

plants radiate out in every direction, which means the surface area— if you

think of the surface area of a cylinder, it's expanding as the plants grow.

The canopies aren't competing for space like they are on

2-dimensional tiers. They're irradiating out. They're

encouraging mutual growth among one another. And then you have

the issue of lighting. Okay. 360-degree

tower, how are you going to illuminate that? Are you going to put lights on

all 4 sides? We tried that. It doesn't work because it's

really bright and consumers don't like staring into the sun. It

hurts your corneas. Yeah, you're going to see black spots. So taking in those

kind of soft consumer points like light pollution and noise are very

important when designing your lighting system. And then

if you're only going to illuminate half of it, how do you get light on

the back part of that tower, you rotate it. Hence the birth of rotary

aeroponics. So for us, it was optimizing that power efficiency

and also optimizing that yield to overall improve that system.

So what we've seen is a pretty substantial increase in the overall

grams of produce per kilowatts of hour going in. Note that I'm using

kilowatts of hour of total power for the entire system.

That means lights, that means your pump, your irrigation. Don't

look at just the photons, like the lights. That's—

you could say the HVAC probably consumes more power on most

systems than a lot of even just the lighting does. You have to look at

the complete system's power consumption. A lot of vertical

farms I've seen will use what they pay per

kilowatt-hour to say we use, you know, $2,000 worth of

power per month. Well, okay, that— I need to

know what you're paying per kilowatt hour, because

citizens in the United States on average pay about 13 cents per kilowatt

hour of energy coming through. Farms can get reduced

agricultural energy subsidies and pay a 10th of a cent per

kilowatt hour. So you have to be really careful to look at how

these performance variables are being quantified to truly understand

a comparative efficiency across systems. Yeah, it's an important distinction to

make. And I don't know if it was intentional, but your comparison to

rotisserie chickens sort of came full circle again. Yeah. With the

rotating tower, I think. So Scott, can you talk a little bit

about the challenges as an organization and as a

young CEO? You know, what are some of the things that you've had to

deal with? Because again, this is not only are you building a company, but you're

also now you're responsible for growing a team. And so I'm curious as an entrepreneur

myself, like what are some of the things you think about, about, you know, You

did have your co-founder, but then who were the first people you need to bring

on the team and maybe some of the bumps along the way? You know, there's

a good book called Good to Great, and there's kind of

those 3 variables: humble, hungry, and smart, and in that

order. And that's what I try and practice as much as I

can myself, and then also look for individuals that try and do

that. So, I mean, humble, number one. I have gone to

pitches, you know, I had I had to stand up and speak if we're going

to compete for funding. We would have had no money otherwise. When you're in

that early concept stage, you're going to find out that some of these

research reports you may have even read from a university and scholarly source are

wrong. You might find out that certain

ranges of pH that plants grow in might be completely different than what you've

read because what you're practicing is different than what was done in a

laboratory or there's other variables What I'm getting at is you're going to find out

that a lot of your assumptions were wrong early on. And the worst thing

you can do is marry yourself to one of these things, to think that a

certain technology is better than one another for some

preconceived reason, or present a statistic that's

outdated, or you might find out later is wrong. You just need to be

accepting that you will absolutely be wrong. The only

question is just how and what was it. That you were wrong about and then

correcting it as you go and being able to admit that. I think that can

sometimes be a hard thing for some people when they're also trying to

prove they have to stay relevant and they're trying to stay

competitive in that element, but you need to be realistic that

if the results you're seeing are different than what you've been reading and have studied,

then you need to identify the solution to that and you also need to enlist

expertise. I mean, we're talking about chemistry Biological processes. This

isn't subjective. This is a science that needs to be researched.

You know, after humility, just being able to put your ego aside and focus on

the bigger goal, hunger. You know, I've met a lot of

people that were really established in their careers. Some we've worked with, some we haven't.

But I mean, is this just another project? Is this a leapfrog from one

startup to the other? Or do you really want to put a dent in food

insecurity? Like, do you want to be a part of the solution that's going going

to feed our grandchildren, if you genuinely believe that the food system

could be greatly improved to better the world, then welcome

aboard. We'd love to have you. Otherwise, if you don't have that fundamental

passion, and passion cannot be taught, it's born,

it's in the individual, then I can't influence you.

If that passion is financial, if it's a monetary thing, if you're in it

to get rich, I mean, there's money to be made, but it's not be

quick. I mean, that's what I think has been a learning experience as a young

person, that sometimes there's a preconceived notation along with any

business industry that someone's going to get rich quick when that's not the case. It's

going to be years of heartache and hardship before you ever

even build something that remotely resembles value. And then the

last thing is smart, and that's often the last thing I'm looking at.

Are you tactically capable of doing what I need you to do.

If you are, then great. You can be a contractor and you can do

specific jobs. If you go beyond that and you're humble and

hungry, then we could talk about employment. And I've made

mistakes. You know, I think I brought on individuals that didn't fit that and we've

had to make corrections along the way. But I've also learned that a

small team of people who fit this mold can

achieve more than a large team can. Because kind of going back

to those preconceptions, like those notations where I can't do this, I haven't been funded

yet. Yes, you can. You probably just haven't found a

cost-effective sponsor. You haven't looked for other methods to do it.

So just finding a small team that's very agile and

quick, they're not afraid to make mistakes, but they learn from them even

faster. I mean, that's what makes a small team as productive as what a

team of 50 individuals or or hundreds of individuals can even do.

Oftentimes, some of the bureaucracies I see surrounding hardware

manufacturing, it's kind of shocking that they're able to make products at all.

That's just me though. My experience is working with startups. I haven't really been in

big corporate companies very much, but there's nothing

wrong with being small if I can get to that. You don't need a big

team. Automated financial tools exist. You don't really even know—

you should be able to read a spreadsheet, but you don't have to know tax

There's so many tools. It's easier to start a business now than it

ever was before. Yeah. What was it like preparing for the

TEDx talk and delivering it? You know, that was again, I think, another kind of

cultural change for me because I was used to, hi

sharks, here's my product sort of thing, to be a part of our

mission. This is the revolution we're going after. And I would say the

biggest word, if I could summarize it, is segmentation. You know, before,

you know, people ask, what's good about it? I go, well, in the indoor ag

industry, the power efficiencies aren't great and we're going to improve. I already lost them,

right? No one cares about that unless you're an engineer in this

space, right? But the ice analogy, you probably had a glass of ice

with water this morning with your lunch that you get. And most people had

no idea that there was such an evolutionary process that had to happen

for them to have a refrigerator that just works, something that is, you know, a

robot in the home. It just works. There's no emotional thing to it. It just

works. It does what you need it to do. And framing ourselves

as that same user experience and also making the audience aware

of the greater inefficiencies of agriculture were things that maybe seemed a little

obvious to me that I needed to segment ourselves in that

same analogy. And that TED Talk, you know, it's, it's a lot more work than

people realize. They really go through the iterative steps. Shout out to

Wabash College for having me there. The, the gentlemen at that university were

incredibly professional and made it very seamless and easy to get through.

But it does require, I think, a little bit of self-discovery to figure out

how you fit into this bigger scheme of things.

Because, you know, again, if you're not creating a movement or a bigger platform that,

you know, other things can be branched off, you're selling a widget, you know, a

thing that, that kind of starts and stops there. Not a commodity,

And it seems like it's an experience for you that

would help you understand the power of storytelling.

Absolutely. You know, one thing that I think kind of helped me early on learn

a key aspect of public speaking was in my hometown here in Evansville.

They have a cool program called Teen Court. So if a juvenile under the age

of 18 commits a crime, they can go to juvie court or Teen Court.

Teen Court, the jury is made up of all local high school volunteers,

and prosecution and defense attorneys are actually high school students too. It's a real

courtroom, a real trial, a real judge, up to 6 months house arrest and

retribution. A number of other punishments can be thrown on. I think I lied

about my age when I joined. I started as an 8th grader. But

I was on the jury a few times, and then I was in the prosecution

and defense. And another thing I realized kind of talking to the audience is,

you know, when you hold up a piece of paper and it You're hiding behind

it giving your speech, you know, you're talking at people, right?

There's a difference between talking to people like what we're doing right now. I'm looking

for feedback, like what you're not saying is just as important as what you are

saying, your facial reactions. I mean, that is everything. And being able to actually

look an audience in the eye and stop, maybe that person in the

first row kind of squinted, they didn't hear what you said, you know, just those

soft little touches can make the difference

between That's awesome. What has you

excited about the industry itself? And are there

companies that you currently admire in the space also?

Yeah, I think I already talked about a little bit, Infarm. You know, I think

that's an interesting group. You know, again, I have never met them. I just kind

of admire what I've seen watching from the United States, seeing this group

solidify a lot of partnerships with grocers and actually

benefit from the pandemic. And I don't mean that in an insensitive way, but

people want locally sourced, fresh, clean food that they don't have to worry

about exposure to an unnecessary amount of people.

I think there was a statistic I read in like the National Resource Defense Council

doing like a food waste analysis in the US that 20 people

touched your head of lettuce before you ate it. I hope none of those people

had COVID along the way or were transmissible, but that's a real and

valid concern. That a consumer is going to have. And it seems like that group

is talking the talk and actually walking it and showing that they can

scale beyond that. And it's because, number one, they're decentralized.

I believe they probably have an operator. I don't know the details of their system,

but it's remotely deployed. There's not a full-time person

just watching it. There's probably cameras in it. It has an

IoT aspect that's inherently decentralized. A lot of the warehouses are

having a hard time replicating it because it's not really a

decentralized approach. It was very smart of them to invest in

the aesthetics. And that's a new thing in the agriculture space.

Your agricultural equipment needs to look good. People want to have it there. You don't

want to be an eyesore. Think of like feng shui design requirements. If I

can't see this growing, you know, it's just, it's a piece of plant

in a clamshell. That's a good point. It's like, I heard another

statistic statistic, like less than 1% of consumers know what hydroponics

is. So, I mean, there's— that could be wrong, but it's

not a lot, right? If you have to educate them on some branding on this

thing, like that's a lot of time that people probably aren't gonna spend

reading the label trying to understand. And on top of all that, those

claims are highly regulated by the USDA on what you

can and can't say, claiming that your produce is more nutritious or vice versa.

I think those guys just do a great job not even having to explain it.

It's obvious. I mean, it's freshness on demand. It's there.

There's no question where it came from. There's no doubt in my mind. It

can even be more expensive, but man, this whole thing, whatever it is, it's

cool. I'm at least going to try this out of it. Yeah. They're selling the

experience. Yeah. I mean, you're talking a $2, $3 head of

greens or herbs. Like, consumers will buy that to understand what that

experience is. And I think it has a lot to do with color. I think,

you know, we're a very artistic people, like just animal. I mean, we see

colors, you remember that. And I think the colors of the grow lights just

does something psychologically that makes people really remember it. What's a

hard question you've had to ask yourself recently? You know, I've rethought

some of our supply chain's dependency on Asia. It's not that I, you know,

really wanted to go to Asia, it's that a lot of industries have left the

United States or the industries that remain are vertically integrated.

I would have loved to have found an appliance factory here.

This was it. I'm in Evansville. This building I'm in right now, this is an

appliance engineering laboratory owned by old Whirlpool engineers.

And GE, their Haier appliance research engineering office is right across

the road there. So it's really close. These industries are vertically integrated. You

can't just call up an appliance company and ask them to make 100 prototypes. It

doesn't work like that. You have to go overseas to find a contract

manufacturer that was in the business of manufacturing stuff,

not a company that was in the business of distributing branded finished products, but

someone that's willing to work with you at the earliest of stages.

That was difficult, and we had to go overseas to find some of those sources.

And to be honest with you, it's not that I regret that decision,

but It would have been nice if I could have found closer, more

domestic, and in hindsight, I would have been willing to pay a little bit

more had I known that these sort of disruptions were going

to happen. The good news is these are components, right? They're largely

commodities. You can buy them from other people. There's no reason these things

can't be corrected along the way. Well, Scott, thank you

so much for sharing your story. It's really inspirational both as an

entrepreneur and also as someone in you know, who's just getting their start in the

vertical farming industry. I think the fact that you showed that even at a young

age, you had the wherewithal to figure out how to bootstrap this yourself

for that first year using the grants that you were receiving. And I think it's

helpful for new entrepreneurs to realize that there's not one path in terms of

getting funded and making those dreams that you have a reality. And

so, I applaud you on that, and I'm wishing you like all the greatest

success for GrowPod. And so, I'm wondering if just in closing, if you had a

couple of thoughts about what the future holds for you and what you're excited about.

You know, we've been able to identify some key stakeholders in this industry.

You know, there's appliance companies, there's hardware. Hardware needs to be done

right and it needs to be supported, and you need to have great expertise

and an established brand that consumers will trust. So I see us

having continued focus and hopefully some involvement with the appliance

companies to work with that hardware element. We hope to continue working with

seed suppliers, you know, the big agriculture companies. Companies have been

pretty silent in a lot of cases as to what they're going to plan for

vertical farms, yet we have this wildly massive potential

market segment. So we're going to continue some of those relationship

building and continue to have seeds brought in that aren't available to the

larger public to drive a better user experience. And software,

software, software, automating that experience. You don't want to get

your hands dirty, you just want it to work like your Refrigerator. So automating that,

that, that's everything from vision. We're talking even blockchain.

You know, I sell you a pod, how's it grow? You know, it goes really

deep into how sophisticated some of these algorithms can be.

And I would say we're just on the cusp of some

supervised machine learning. I would say the future is probably going to be

outright artificial intelligence, probably looking at

you as a whole, asking, Tell me about yourself.

What's your culinary cuisine that you like?

Do you like sweet things, bitter things? Learning about you,

the individual, Harry, and then customizing the farm to what you

want to eat before it's even grown. I really think that's the

direction it's going to go. I foresee that data companies, tech companies like

Google, Facebook, Amazon, who, by the way, are largely already

in the indoor ag space will probably only become increasingly more involved

to help facilitate all of those items I just mentioned. Yeah, and you

can see increasingly in the hires of these companies, it's not

just, you know, the standard roles of finance and

marketing, but it's also machine learning, artificial intelligence, data

scientists. You know, there's a lot of data to be crunched now. And I

imagine there's no shortage of data getting returned back to you at

HQ in Then how do you parse it? How do you analyze it?

What do you do with it? I imagine those are questions you ask yourself on

an ongoing basis. If I can add one thing though, you said in spite of

being young. I would say thanks to being young. I could

not imagine doing this if I had a family. If I had a wife and

kid I had to support, I mean having gone 2 years without a

payment, living at my parents' house, I wasn't just not making money, I was

losing money. I was also putting personal money into it, right? In that time, I

have so much respect for founders who have families and manage to do both.

How they do it, I don't really know. But when you're young and you

don't have these obligations and you can stay up till 2, 4 AM working on

something you love, do it. Do it. The

only person telling you you can't do it's yourself, and your university

wants you to do it. Most of these universities have IP policies particularly

towards undergrad students, you own what you create. It's not always the

case. You should research that. But a lot of times that's the way it is

and they'll give you cash. And it's not like they're just looking for a startup.

It's marketing for them. This is their proof like, hey, here's an entrepreneur, come here

to study business. It's not just an engineering school, right? They're missing out on

a massive marketing opportunity to promote themselves as being, you know, kind of

facilitating the entrepreneurial environment. So if you're young, now is the

time to Act. Waiting until you're out of school is foolish. The resources are

exclusively available to you in that timeframe. Take it while you can.

Yeah, that's a great point and really a motivational point to close on

to anyone that's listening and that is a young entrepreneur, whether in this

space or any other space. Just kind of take advantage of this unique environment that

we find ourselves in. And like you said, it's never been easier to start a

company. And, you know, obviously you have to come in with some unique skill sets.

And a drive, which is clear that you have, Scott, and I see nothing

but good things for you ahead. So again, congratulations on everything

you've done so far. Where's the best place for folks to stay connected with you

and to learn more about GrowPod? Social media would probably be our primary channel.

We're really active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

It is GrowPod Official. That's

G-R-O-P-O-D Official,

O-F-F-I-C-I-A-L. Look that up and you'll be able to find our

company. The company name's actually Heliponics, but we really just

focus on the product branded name GrowPod, hence the social media handle

GrowPodOfficial. So give us a follow and you can see what we're growing.

Thanks again, Scott, and we'll make sure all those links are available in the show

notes. Have a great day. Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening. To read the full show notes for this episode, which include a

summary, timestamps, and any links mentioned in this episode, please

visit verticalfarmingpodcast.com. There you'll find the

information from this episode and any past episodes. And once again, if

you're enjoying this show, please leave us a rating and a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

We'll be sure to read those out on future episodes. Until we meet again next

week, here's to your health. Thanks for listening. To hear all

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