Episode Summary

Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show, CEO at Fluence, David Cohen. Fluence is a horticultural lighting company owned by OSRAM. They explore physiological plant development under various levels of photosynthetically active radiation and custom spectra compositions. Today, Harry and David talk about David’s eclectic background in the LED lighting industry and the circuitous route that led him to Fluence. David reflects on the learning curve he experienced transitioning into his role as CEO of Fluence, highlights from his earlier career and best practices for scaling quickly in the fast-paced industry of vertical farming.

Episode Sponsor

CULTIVATD

Key Takeaways

• 
  
• 02:37 – Harry welcomes to the show David Cohen, who talks about his fervor for health and wellness, what leadership means to him and mentors who have impacted him
• 
  
• 
  
• 16:52 – David recalls highlights and lessons he learned during his time at Fraen
• 
  
• 
  
• 23:42 – David talks about how he got involved in the controlled environment agriculture market and the circuitous route that brought him to Fluence
• 
  
• 
  
• 28:45 – David reflects on the learning curve he experienced moving into his role at Fluence
• 
  
• 
  
• 37:02 – David provides best practices for scaling extremely quickly
• 
  
• 
  
• 42:25 – David discusses the pivoting he and his organization needed to do in the midst of the global pandemic
• 
  
• 
  
• 43:31 – David describes the current offerings that Fluence offers
• 
  
• 
  
• 47:51 – David talks about where he’s seeing the most innovation in the LED industry
• 
  
• 
  
• 51:04 – A tough question David has had to ask himself recently
• 
  
• 
  
• 55:23 – Harry thanks David for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can learn more about Fluence and connect with David
• 
  

Tweetable Quotes

“Over all the different jobs I’ve had that you do your best to keep customers happy, but it’s not always gonna work out. There are times when customers are just going to be furious. That’s a great opportunity to get closer to a customer. Don’t be afraid of negativity and don’t be afraid of aggression. Absorb it and do something with it rather than let it intimidate you.” (14:24)

“Failure is part of success as far as I view it. There’s no such thing as perfection.” (16:46)

“Scaling is scaling. When you want to go from slow to fast, from small to big, from Texas to Canada to Europe to Asia, you need to follow the same footprint. And I’m lucky my experiences were really well suited to help [Fluence] do what it wanted to do.” (27:42)

“I think that the capital to effect this type of change globally is available, but you need really great people to step in and say ‘I’m gonna take a chance here. I wanna do something that’s right. I don’t know if it’ll be successful or not, but we’re gonna go do it anyway.’” (32:55)

“What we’re [Fluence] trying to do is make sure that we base everything that we do on research and science. We want to be able to go to growers and say, ‘Either talk to our customers or talk to our Research partners.’” (45:51)

“In an industry and a market like this, I think that if you’re not prepared to pivot, to be flexible and to adapt to what’s happening, you’re gonna have a tough time.” (51:49)

Links Mentioned

David’s LinkedIn

Fluence Website

Sponsor Info:

Cultivatd Website

Cultivatd Instagram

Cultivatd’s Twitter

Cultivatd’s Facebook

🎙️🎙️🎙️

Podcast Production and Marketing by FullCast: https://bit.ly/3sxZ34y

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mentioned in this episode:

2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews

2025 Precision Ag Report

2025 Precision Ag Report by iGrowNews

2025 Precision Ag Report

$680 million poured into precision ag last year.

Autonomous weeding robots dominated, and John Deere made 2 acquisitions in 3

months. A food company, not an equipment maker, bought a

robotics startup to protect its own supply chain. The deals are

accelerating, the money is moving, and the winners are already separating from the

pack. If you're investing, building, or buying in this space,

you need the full picture before your competitors get it. The 2025

Precision Agriculture Intelligence Report From iGrow News is now

available. Get your copy today at

igrownews.com/precision. If you are starting a vertical

farm and don't know where to begin or which technology would suit your needs,

then reach out to the experts at Cultivated. As indoor farm brokers, they

help connect you to the right technology and ensure your project is successful.

Best of all, their service is free because they work on behalf of their

partners. Visit cultivated.com to learn more. And

that's spelled C-U-L-T-I-V-A-T-D.com,

or click the link in the show notes. Over all the different jobs I've had

that, look, you do your best to always keep customers happy, but it's not always

going to work out. There are times when customers are just going to be furious.

That's a great opportunity to get closer to a customer. That's what he would always

say to me. You know, don't be afraid of negativity and don't be

afraid of, you know, aggression. You know, absorb it.

and do something with it rather than let it intimidate you.

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, Season 3. Welcome back. If this is your first time listening, you're

in the right place. This is the show where we interview fascinating CEOs and founders

of the leading vertical farming companies from around the world. I'm your

host, Harry Duran. In case you missed last week's episode, we had a really

fascinating conversation with Hiroki Koga. He's the

co-founder and CEO at Oishi Berry, and they've been

making a big splash in the vertical farming world, Recently,

having recently come out of stealth mode. So lots of fascinating topics

specifically around the strawberry

and the intricacies with the prefectures in Japan, a

whole bunch of things that are really fascinating that I didn't expect to

learn during this episode, but I was really impressed

with Hiroki's takeaways and how he ended up with

Oishi. Fascinating stuff. This week I welcome to the show David

Cohen. He is the CEO of Fluence by Osram. We

talk a bit about David's eclectic background in the LED lighting

industry and the circuitous route that led him to Fluence. David

reflects on the learning curve he experienced, best practices for scaling

extremely quickly, which is something that he's now a subject matter

expert in, how Fluence was able to pivot to the things his

organization needed to do in the midst of COVID And we learn a little bit

more about Fluence and what's driving David's recent

thoughts about innovation in the LED industry. Special thanks to our episode

sponsor, Indoor AgCon. Whether you're starting up or scaling up, Indoor

AgCon can help you grow your vertical farming business. Live

and in person this year, the premier trade show and conference for vertical farming

and controlled environment agriculture heads to Hilton Orlando, October 4th through

5th. Explore an expo floor filled with new product

resources and business solutions, attend idea-packed educational

sessions led by top CEOs and thought leaders, and connect with peers at

great networking events. Learn more and take advantage of early bird registration

discounts at indoor.ag, and you can save an additional $100

off registration with our promo code VFPOD2021,

and we'll list that in the show notes as well. Don't forget to sign up

for our weekly newsletter at verticalfarmingweekly.com. Each

week, our team member Daniel is bringing you the latest and greatest in the world

of vertical farming. We've got a new review in this week

from Norway, and it's from Cam B88. And

Cam says, a very interesting podcast, quality interviews, and

understandable also for people like me with limited background knowledge about vertical

farming. Thank you for your review titled Quality Work, Cam.

I appreciate you taking the time to write one in and for being a

listener of the show. Don't forget, if you'd like your review read

out, head on over to ratethispodcast.com

for I'd love to read yours out next. Okay,

let's get into this conversation with David. So David Cohen, CEO of Fluence, thank you

for joining me on the Vertical Farming Podcast. Yeah, my pleasure, Hari. Thanks for

having me. So just to start the conversation, I'm curious what the best

thing is that's happened to you this past week. To me personally?

Yeah. I arrived at a

beach house that my family and I are going to be at on the coast

in New England for a month. It was spectacular. Yeah. So I

got here and it was raining. raining and 40 degrees.

And as soon as that ended, it's been beautiful and sunny every day.

So as much as the work is intense, I can walk outside

and put my feet in the sand and look at the waves and ground myself

and then come back to the insanity. So that's probably the best thing that happened

to me this week. Well, it's something I was going to ask you about earlier,

so this might be a nice segue. One of the things that caught my eye

when I was looking at one of the the bios was how some of the

changes and decisions you've made later on in life were based

on your deeply rooted fervor for health and wellness.

And, you mentioned grounding, so I'm wondering what that journey to health and wellness

has been like for you. Well, for me, it started

probably almost 30 years ago. My

father had a heart attack at a very, very young age

right before he was 50. I was in my early 20s and I

was always health-conscious,

fitness. I played different athletics when I was in high school,

but the doctors pulled my brother and I aside and

let us know that unfortunately genetics was the overriding

factor here and that if we wanted to try to

avoid a similar situation, which resulted in a triple bypass and

quite a bit bit of health stress that we should really start taking care of

ourselves as much as we can. And that kind of started for me

just regular moving activity and has graduated as

I've gotten older to a lot of meditating, try to do

yoga with my wife as much as I can, just centering stuff.

And it's just a, like you say, it's a journey, you know, just constantly staying

after it, making sure that, you know, there's nothing wrong with having a

little fun every once in a while, but generally speaking, try to take as good

care of myself as I can. to weather the, at least the

pre-COVID traveling and flying. And, you

know, there's a vertical farm or an indoor grow everywhere in every

corner of the world that wants to talk to us. And, you know, I just

find that being at my best physically and mentally is always an

advantage. Do you notice, or people that are close to you be

able to describe the difference between pre-awareness of wellness

David and post-awareness of wellness David? Probably not, only because

it's been so long that the people that knew me back then without

really knowing anymore. But yeah, I

just— people would overall describe me as pretty intense. And I'm

one of those people that crack of dawn before the sun comes up, I like

to have— get my hour of intensity in and sit and

have a cup of coffee, gather my thoughts, and then attack the day. So it

just happens to work very well for me. Does that come from

just a function of how you were raised or just people, mentors along the way,

that discipline, that early morning discipline? Probably along the way, you

know, and just the way my life is kind of settled. I,

you know, thinking back when I was young, there was no possible way you could

get me out of bed at 5:00 AM. And, you know, I was the get

out of work, go to the gym at 7 o'clock and, or play basketball or

whatever with my friends. And now I just, I don't know,

my eyes open and it's time to go. And, uh, I find that

if I don't get that certain level of intensity in the, the

kind of the built-up intensity that is going through

with my thoughts and the things that I want to get done become

harder to sort through than if I just take that hour and really

bear down, you know, clear the— I don't know how to say it the

best way, but— The cobwebs. Yeah, clear the waves and

make it so, you know, just thinking and processing for me.

It's strange. I find even on nights where I don't sleep very well, if I

go and exercise, I get through the day, no problem. If I don't, I feel

slow and sluggish all day. So It's just something that works for

me. Different people, different things. And even if I can't go and exercise, I'll go

for a walk, or I'll, I'll definitely try to breathe and

meditate, even if it's for just a couple of minutes, just to get centered. And

it, yeah, it seems like it would be something that you'd want to do, or

that you've disciplined yourself to do in order to reset, or that

Ctrl+Alt+Delete, I guess, to ensure— That's exactly what it is. That's a really good way

to describe it, Ctrl+Alt+Delete. And I've just found that I've become more and more

dependent over the years on it as my Working life becomes more

intense and the magnitude of the decisions becomes

more significant. I don't know about more intense, but the decisions I'm making today as

professional are much different than the decisions in magnitude that I was making 20

years ago. And I, like I said, for me, everybody's got

what works for them, but for me, what works is clearing everything out first,

you know, really trying to focus on breathing and

getting through a workout. And then a cup of coffee and boom, I'm

ready to go. Or 2 or 3 cups of coffee.

Yeah, staggered throughout the day as well. What is your beverage of choice? Coffee

and water. Black coffee. Okay. Yeah, that's it. Nothing too fancy.

Well, we'll get into vodka, but me, you gotta get to know me better before

I start declaring those details. That's fair.

I'm wondering if you felt like this— you've always been someone that's driven. I

noticed obviously there's a lot of education in your background,

and even like the things that you were studying back then, did Did you always

feel like even when you were in high school that like leadership and running your

own company was something that you were destined for? I always felt like I wanted

to do something that had a leadership component to it. I think

when I was younger, it had to do more with

status and accomplishment, you know, wanting to be

in that type of position and not really understanding what

leadership was and what responsibility and accountability really is.

I think a lot of young, driven people want— they think they want

something, but really understanding what it's about and why,

I think, comes with a certain level of maturity. And as I got older,

I'm still fascinated by leadership, but for different reasons than I was

when I was younger. When I was younger, it was more about being that person,

being in that role that I could always see. Wow, I want to have that

job. I want to do what that person's doing. And I don't know when that

changed, but over time it's more evolved into,

I've seen and done so much. I've been very

fortunate to live in Asia and work

there and have raised a family there, spend 5, 6

years in Europe. I feel a compelling

urge a lot of times to pay that forward,

you know, use that to help other people.

Maybe have to experience a few less mistakes

on the way just because of the experiences that I've had. So for me,

leadership now is, is more about sharing

everything that I've been fortunate enough to learn from great, great people over the years

and hoping that maybe I can be one of those people in somebody's journey that

helped them, you know, a little bit, save them some time, or open a door

for them that they didn't know was open, which I've been really, really

lucky over my career that I've had a number of people kind of just poke

me on the shoulder and say, no, door's right over there. You just got to

open that one. Speaking of that, can you think

of a name or two or someone that's had a special relationship for you, either

as a mentor or someone that you've learned from? Yeah, I've got

a lot of great people, and I put all of those people in the same

bucket, even people that I had really bad experiences with. Sometimes

I've You know, in the middle of those experiences, I didn't really like it that

much, but being able to reflect on my career, the

people that gave me the hardest time helped me as much as the people that

helped me. But I got a job right out of school

with a company in Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. And I was

extremely lucky that I was at that company for close to

21 years. It was a very small family company.

And I got in the door when it was just a couple of million dollars.

It was a local contract manufacturer. And over the years, we

just did a lot of things right, got lucky, grew it to $40,

$50 million. And I kind of grew up my career at that

company. And that entire time, I worked for a single person.

I just spoke to him this morning. No way. I don't work there anymore. And

we're still very, very good friends. The gentleman's name is Nick Scarfo. He

hired me, and as he moved up, he brought me up. He eventually

bought the company from the family. And what I learned from

him was all of the pieces of me that I

didn't have. He was just a notorious

great street fighter is what I call it. There's people in business that

just have an incredible amount of formal training skill, and there's people who are

just really, really good in interactions and negotiations. Yeah. And I

learned so much from him. that I still use to this day.

And then there was another gentleman that I had a very short stint at a

big global company called Future Electronics. I was heading

up their lighting activity in Europe. We're based in London.

And I had a mentor at Future. This gentleman's name was Dan Casey, and

I still talk to him as well. And these people helped me, you know,

almost every time that I could think that I was at a crossroads, I contacted

one or two or 3 of the people in a network and say, hey, what

do you think? You know, and they're just always there to help. So I feel

like I'm really blessed to be able to have that type of influence in

my career, and I would like nothing more than be able to pass that on

to, you know, to somebody else. To me, that's more about leadership than being

in charge, being the boss. You know, being the final say is what you want

when you're younger, but then you realize as you get older, it's not really all

about that. It's, you know, trying to get a group of people to execute on

something that they have to fully buy into. Consensus. Exactly.

Exactly. So I'm curious, as you were describing the

relationship with those couple of folks that you worked with,

I imagine they start to color how you look to pay it forward

and have people look up to you and possibly ask

you for mentorship or guidance. And I'm sure you think about those

relationships that you've had And that colors your experience? Yeah, for sure.

And it's interesting because in that particular case, those 2 gentlemen, they're just,

they're polar opposites. The guy that I grew up under and learned for

those 20 years was, you know, look, he went to college, he has a degree,

really smart person, but he was very much a street smarts

person reading situations and just learning to,

you know, be a bit more combative at times, be a bit more confrontational. You

know, I didn't know any of these things and I watched and learned a lot.

From him. And then the other gentleman, Dan at Future, was just your

steady as you go. Nothing flustered the guy. I mean, you

could literally come to him and say, I mean, your house just exploded, what are

you going to do? And okay, well, we got to solve this problem. Let's think

about— one of those guys. For sure. And, you know, you need both of those,

right? The first one was just like, forget it, you know, just chaos, mayhem,

get in there and, you know, figure out how you win in a

situation where everybody's confused. And he's the guy you want in the

trenches with you. Yeah, it's a really valuable trait. And if you don't

know how to seize opportunity in chaos,

I don't know where you can learn that. There's no course that teaches you that.

I learned that from somebody that was fantastic at it. You know, when I— when

we saw things that I thought were bad, he would always say, no, no, this

is a great opportunity. And I still use that line, you know, over all the

different jobs I've had, that look, you do your best to always keep customers

happy, but it's not always going to work out. There are times when customers are

just going to be furious. That's a great opportunity to get closer to a

customer. That's what he would always say to me. Don't be afraid of

negativity and don't be afraid of aggression.

Absorb it and do something with it rather than let it intimidate you,

which was a fantastic lesson. Great advice. And then on the other side of it,

the other guy, Dan, was just, he was very, very astute at reading the

trade winds in big companies and understanding You know, it's going

this way over here and this way over there, and you got to position yourself

in a certain way to make sure that you can keep everything going.

And, um, yeah, if there's a chance that I can help

anybody along the way, I feel like it's my responsibility now.

You know, I— those things came to me through a lot of good luck, through

a lot of, you know, hard work, but you still are— when you have the

opportunity to come across people that really help you, it's a great feeling. I had

a similar relationship with someone and I worked in corporate for 20 years. I was

at JPMorgan Chase and E-Trade and I called him my corporate godfather.

He ended up being my boss in 5 different roles at 2 different companies.

So I can definitely relate to it. I would say Dan Casey for me was

exactly that person. And the other guy, Nick, was more like a

trainer in a boxing match who would just throw water on your face,

slap you on the top of the head, be like, it's all okay. I know

you feel like you're about to die in this fight, but go get them. And

you need a little bit of all of that. You have to understand how To

manage adversity. You know, when everything's going good, it's actually not that hard.

No, it's when it gets sticky and having confidence in yourself, being

not afraid to make decisions, not afraid to make bad decisions, right?

And how to keep people aligned behind what you're trying to do. And that's invaluable.

You— I don't know that you can learn that in school. No, they don't teach

that in school. No, no. And you got to be— can't be afraid to fail.

And that's another thing that— that's a big one— that fear of failing, it's not

You know, fail, go ahead, figure it out. You know, and having people that

allow you to brush yourself off, do a little bit of

self-reflecting and move on. That's a massive confidence builder that I

found over my career. Yeah, I've sort of had to relearn some of that

as I went. Because now, as an entrepreneur, this idea of failing fast

and just getting up faster and just being like, okay, dusting yourself off and saying

that didn't work. What's next? We're gonna try. Yeah, what's next? Failure is— it's a

part of success is, in terms of how I view it, there's no such thing

as perfection. So yeah, so changing gears a little bit,

I'm interested for you to describe what it was like to be at Frane.

Is it Frane? Frane? Frane, yeah, like F-R-A-N-E, pronounced like

that. Yeah, at Frane in the 2000s when LEDs

were just starting to pick up. And like, how do you prepare for something like

that? And did you know like what was about to happen? It was

crazy, and I'll work backwards. No, we had no idea.

So we were in the middle of trying to expand globally our

automotive footprint. So this was a company that made pieces

for the dashboard of cars, typically the needles, the

speedo, the gauge, tachometer. So these are small little light

pipes. Over the years, the technology by the 2000s evolved that

these little pieces of plastic sat on your dashboard and there was an

LED light behind it, and that shined up through

the piece of plastic. And when you're driving down the road, you know, you have

to have— nobody knows this, but when you're dealing with Ford and Chrysler, you

know, you've got 50 people standing around with a magnifying glass looking at this piece

of plastic that costs like 18 cents. That's right. Trying to find, you know,

microscopic defects. We had a really good relationship with the companies

that made the LEDs for cars in the late '90s and early 2000s.

We were getting ready to expand in Europe. We hired a team of people

in Italy. And they were working very

closely with Lumileds who had just

invented or just released, I don't know if invented is the proper word,

but the first high-powered LED. So it was like a $10 LED that

they flew out to our facility and they showed it to us and said, look

at this thing. And it was so bright, you know, it was this massive

glowing piece of, you know, computer chip. And they said, we need to figure out

a way how to take all of this light and put it in a spot.

Can you help us? And that dragged us

into LED. I mean, unprepared, no

strategy, no plan, no 5-year vision. They just showed up and

said, help us. We took it on. We invested a couple of

million dollars and made tooling to make these pieces of

plastic that went on top of these $8, $9 LEDs. Yeah.

And instantaneously we became the optics company for high-powered

LEDs. And the business went from, you know, a couple of hundred

thousand dollars a year to tens of millions of dollars, which kind of

shot us into a growth mode that the company had

never really experienced before. That was the direct thing

that sent me over to Asia to go find factories and find partners so

we could scale this thing. And it really, I would say that

was, I had already been working for 15, 16 years at the time,

maybe a little bit less, but that was a springboard. You know, that got me

into Asia and traveling around Europe and talking to

people that industries that were growing like hyper fast.

'Cause I was 20 years automotive. Automotive was, you know, 4 or 5%

a year. You made the same amount of parts, they built the same amount of

cars. It was very, very predictable. You had to be spot on with efficiency and

quality. When you get over to the LED side and they started

saying, okay, now we can make streetlights with LEDs and downlights and

indoor lights and all this, it was— Yeah. as fast as you could possibly go.

And that's where I cut my teeth on learning how to grow a company really,

really fast. And I talk about failing fast, you know, you talk about making

dozens of mistakes every day because you just don't know. Yeah, you

just don't know. What are some of the highlights, or maybe a

lowlight, that you remember? Yeah, I remember quite a few,

quite a few that I don't talk about that much, but, you know, getting over

to Asia and you know, trying to go by myself. The

company sent me, my wife, and daughter, and cat, and

said, go figure it out. Wow. I mean, there wasn't an infrastructure, there wasn't a

company, there wasn't anything. I had to go get my own visa, you

know, establish all these relationships, and

establishing relationships with factories that knew who we were, that wanted to do

business with us, but not understanding how to figure out if

they were the right partner. We had to go so fast that we wound up

investing in a bunch of different places just to see which one would work.

And at one time, it seemed like they were all failing.

And we were on the hook for massive

deliveries and support. And there was a couple of month

stretch there where I was literally sleeping on the floor in

factories in China next to machines that were supposed to be making our parts.

Wow. I'd just lay down on the ground. I was so tired. I'd just doze

off. And then I'd wake up and catch the next part off the machine and

look at it and make sure it was okay. And thinking to myself, boy, I

went and got a master's degree to do this. And I had

an MBA too at the time. So, but I mean, hey, you learn,

you learn. And that was some of the most valuable lessons

that I have ever learned in my life, for sure. Being on the ground there

and dealing with that type of adversity, you know, 12-hour time

difference. And yeah, yep. So that would be the thing that I remember

the most, sleeping on the floor. That'll be something you

definitely Don't forget. Did you have time to take in any of the culture? Because

I— you mentioned a lot of countries that you did get to visit as a

result of this. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm lucky that I'm married to

such a great person because she would not allow these things to turn into

just all work. Like, you dragged us here and we're here to support you, but

we are going to explore. So we spent a lot of time exploring

Southeast Asia, all the different areas around there and the

cultures. And then we were in Europe, we were in Italy,

Netherlands and London. And yeah,

very, very lucky. And talk about an amazing experience to

raise a child in. Yeah, he was born— our daughter

came with us to Hong Kong. She was 5, but my son was

born there. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Born in Hong Kong.

And then we moved directly when he was about a year old to Italy.

He was a year there. We went back to the US for a very

short stint and then we were back in the Netherlands. and then in London. So

it was, yeah, culture, the experience, the children got

to learn a lot of different things. You know, as with anything,

a lot of great came of that, and there's things that I think my kids

are going to be forever better for. Sure. But along with it, it was a

lot of stress, you know, moving from country to country and starting your life

again and finding the pharmacy and the doctors and the supermarket and figuring

out the language and the money and The cars, and it's a lot of stress.

I mean, people look at these things, oh, it must've been so glamorous. You lived

in Italy and you lived in— yeah, it was wonderful. There's no doubt about it,

but it was hard. Yeah, it was really hard, especially when in Italy,

my son got the measles and we were in an emergency room

in Italy and doctors— you talk about a TV show

experience. So yeah, it was a lot of great things that

we look back and laugh, but there's trials and tribulations, that's for sure.

So now, as you're moving forward in your career, talk

about when you're starting to have conversations with the team

at Fluence and how you're starting to become aware also of what's happening

in the controlled environment agriculture market. Yeah, so

I would say towards the end of

2017, I had come back to the United

States and was hired by a big European lighting

company that wanted to really blow out their

US presence. They didn't have a strong presence there. So they hired me away.

We moved back from Europe, took over this company, closed down

some of its operations in the Northwest and moved into

Texas and took advantage of a lot of economies of scale. And then

suddenly I find out that this 100-year-old family

company has fired the CEO. They're questioning all their strategy.

Stay tuned. And then 2 weeks later, we got a call that said the US

is closed. That's it. We're terminating every— I had just hired like, 25,

30 people. First time in my life that I had ever found

myself, very fortunately, out of a job and started

kind of pinging my network and seeing, all right, what do I do here? What's

going to happen? And one of the mentors

that I didn't mention was working for an investment bank,

helping them understand if this small little company in Texas

was ready to be sold. That company was Fluence. I didn't know it at the

time, and he called me and said, look, I'm not sure about this yet, but

this might be something you want to take a look at. This is right up

your alley. They're going to scale. They need somebody who's, you know, global

experience. They've kind of hit the jackpot here with cannabis.

They're really getting into controlled environment agriculture. I know you don't know anything

about that, but you're an LED lighting guy. You know how to scale businesses. Go

take a look. And that was the introduction to the founders.

Fluence originally before they sold it to Osram. And I probably met with them

3, 4, 5 times. I don't know, it could have been 10, but it seems

like 3 or 4 times about joining and helping them.

And they were at that point where they were very

successful. They had grown the company, but they've got to that level where it was

time to sell or raise money. You know, they just couldn't keep up,

and they had decided that they wanted to sell. We couldn't reach an

agreement on how I would participate in

helping them get ready to sell. So I took a consulting

job with another big European company for like 6

months, and then they sold Fluence to Osram. I was

kind of disconnected from them for a couple of months. I got a phone call,

4th of July, right around there. It's the guy, hey, how

you doing? Oh, I haven't heard from you in 4 or 5 months. What's going

on? I sold the company to Osram. I gave them your resume and I told

them that you should be the CEO, good

luck. And he hung up. Like, okay. Half an

hour later, the OSRAM guy called me. I interviewed

and got the job. Wow. Yeah, really fortunate. I had known OSRAM and

OSRAM at different levels of the organization had known me 'cause they'd been in lighting

so long. It's kind of a small world, not horticulture lighting, but just LED

lighting in general. And brought me in and, you

know, the crazy ride started the middle of

2018. Osram was intent

on growing this business as fast as possible.

And now that's what got my career started at Fluence. So really crazy.

And learning photobiology and controlled growing

and vegetables and cannabis on the fly. I mean, I was a streetlight guy

and, you know, inside theater lighting and museum lights.

My friend had done an optical project to light up the Mona Lisa. That was

my biggest thing that I had ever done, standing in the Louvre. We built this

optical system. But nothing like this, you know. Now going

around into cannabis grows and tomato greenhouses and vertical

farms. But at the end of the day, it's LED lighting.

There's a definite science to it for sure when it comes to growing things

and understanding that relationship. But scaling is scaling,

you know. When you want to go from slow to fast, from small to big,

from Texas to Canada to Europe to Asia, you need to

follow kind of the same footprint. And I'm lucky that my experiences

over the years were really well suited to help the company do what it wanted

to do. So I imagine there were a lot of surprises along the way, not

the least of which is how surprised were you at the size of the Mona

Lisa compared to what you thought it looked like? Yeah, it was very surprising.

Yeah, it was. You know what was really surprising is the amount

of detail that the people who are in charge of

these types of things that they pay attention to. So yeah, really, really

seriously. You know, staring at a

painting for 30, 40 minutes seems like a lifetime to me.

Staring at a painting for 10 days straight is something

totally different. And there are people who, that's what they do. Yeah, that's

what they do. At that point, I imagine the Mona Lisa starts staring back at

you. Yeah, it starts talking to you at that point. You start hallucinating.

So you, it didn't seem like you were that fazed going into a

new industry. Is there anything that stands out For you

when you think about LED lights, you know, coming from entertainment

streetlights and then the way it was being applied in the

world of controlled environment agriculture? What were some of the things that were different about

how those are handled or what the implementations would be like that stood out for

you? Yeah, see, I had come from the world of

lumens and output and brightness and intensity.

Controlled environment agriculture is different. It's photons. With

lighting, it's how do you get the most photons from the fixture to the plant?

And then, how can you manipulate the delivery of

photons in different spectras to get plants to

perform differently? And, this was completely—

foreign is beyond the way to describe it. I didn't understand it. I remember

I got up in my first conference to speak and my biggest

panic was remembering how to pronounce the difference between

photoperiod and photoacclimation and all of these words

that, oh, it's just for somebody like me, it's— I had

never been involved. Yeah, of course. And learning the biology, the

basic biology behind it, well, remembering it from college and

trying to, you know, be able to have conversations with people in the space.

But, you know, like anything else, what I found is that it

was a very exciting industry. The people in it were

not looking at it from a competitive standpoint. They were looking at it from a

help the world standpoint. You know, they were really committed

to doing something bigger than, you know, helping the

greater good. And everything in my

career up to this point had been transactional. You know, it was

selling to somebody who wanted to buy our stuff and, you know, trying

to get the best price and trying to get the best terms. And this has

been, for me, just an incredible experience of just

dealing with people. Now look, Growers want to grow, and there's an efficiency

profitability aspect to it that's critically important. But

generally speaking, when we're talking to a customer, that customer is

switched on to, you know, growing things and helping

people. And that's just a very, very different world than

automotive and streetlights and museums and everything else. And it's just been a

very, very refreshing change because all the other business

stresses are still the same. You want to grow, you want to be efficient, you

want to deliver, you want to make money, keep everybody happy. But

when the, you know, the general undercurrent of the customers you're dealing with are either

to, you know, help people who are sick medicinally, or,

you know, or even recreationally want to enjoy cannabis,

to food safety and delivering food, and, you know, then

you get into the vertical farming and how you start to reduce the carbon footprint

globally of things. It's just a very, very different situation, and it's been

great. Opened my eyes to something that I actually didn't think existed in

business. So it's been really nice. What's been a common thread in these

conversations is the realization that we need more people in

the space. Yeah. And you alluded to this idea of like not

feeling competitive, rising tide lifts all boats. It's been— I feel like that theme has

been persistent because I think the scale of the problem that we're trying to

tackle here in terms of getting food to people that

don't have immediate access to it, like we assume sometimes people do, and you think

about food deserts and access to fresh food, It does become interesting to

see that all these technologies, all these companies together

are marching towards that somewhat same drum in terms of

trying to do what's right and do something positive. Yeah, I agree

with your statement at the beginning there that this is going to need a lot

more talented people. I think the natural evolution

of an industry that was somewhat small and

niche to really move into the center stage in the short

amount of time that it did, and you start to talk about— like, I never

had heard of what a food does it was until I started to work at

Fluence and understand the relationship between arable land and the

population and how are we going to solve— these are not

kick the can down the road issues. These are right now issues.

And it needs a lot more great people. It really does. I think

that the capital to affect this type of

change globally is available, but you need really

great people to step in and say, you know, I'm going to take a chance

here. I want to do something that's right. I don't know if it's going to

be successful or not, but we're going to go do it anyways. And that's just

why I have just an enormous amount of respect for looking at people like Irving

Fain at Bowery and people that started AeroFarms and Farm.One and

everything. We're doing a lot of business with similar things in Singapore and

companies in Japan. These are really committed to a cause here.

And it takes— starts and ends with great people. You need somebody

to take that charge and say, I'm going to do it. Yeah, I'm looking forward

to speaking to David from AeroFarms in a couple of weeks. So it's going to

be interesting to kind of continue to tease out that thread and see, you know,

how everyone does start to work together. Given you were new to the industry,

were you able to make it to conferences? Yeah, I did. I

spent the first, yeah, first 2 years of working at Fluence, I was on

the road constantly. I did something like 300,000 miles in

2019, just an insane amount of travel. But I would go

to every conference I could and soak up every piece of information I could from

people that I felt were changing the world. And that

starts with even small little growers that they didn't really

think that they were changing the world, but in my view, I thought they were,

to people that were, you know, like the AeroFarms, Dave from AeroFarms, or Irving

from ARI, or any of these other, you know, big leaders that's,

you know, look at the world and say, this is an opportunity to do something,

and I want to make a change here. So it's been really fantastic. And

when you think about the challenges you're facing, or initially you're

doing the COO role at Fluence? Yeah. At first they brought me in to be

the chief operating officer, and the belief was that there was just so much

photobiology stuff that I had to learn.

And one of the founders of Fluence, this gentleman named Nick Claes, absolutely

brilliant, brilliant photobiologist, trained himself, not a

formal biologist schooling. This was a lighting guy. And

just made it his mission to understand the relationship between light

and plants and life. And everybody

believed, and myself included, that learning all of this, you know,

deep-seated, you know, pun intended, industry knowledge was going to be

critically important to succeed. At the end of the day, it wasn't as

important as we all thought. It's very, very important, but,

you know, it turned more into a scaling challenge. The

market was pulling us. We didn't have to go out

and convince and talk into and sell. It was, how

do we answer 600 inquiries a day? And then tomorrow it's

900 inquiries. And how do you get all these people

answers and make them believers in what you're trying to

do? And that type of scaling is really tough. It's really,

really tough. You can't— it's like saying, I'm going to take a

house that it takes 6 months to build and I'm going to build it in

6 weeks. And I'm going to expect that when I open the front door, it

doesn't fall off. And, you know, I turn the sink on and it's— the mud

isn't running out of the faucet. And that's kind of what

happens when you take a— at the end of the day, we're selling

hardware. You know, you got to put stuff together. You have to take bits and

bobs, and somebody's got to put it together. Somebody's got to test it. Somebody's got

to ship it. And, you know, one day you try to make one, and then

the next day you try to make 10, and then one day somebody says, I

need you to make 10,000 today. That's been the hardest thing

here, really, being kind of a victim of our own success,

that the only way to realistically do this and do it

perfectly was to slow down and be a lot more deliberate.

But when the market is pulling, you can't slow down. They'll go to somebody else.

And it was trial by fire, very, very lumpy. But

going back to what I was trained and mentored in, that

every one of these potentially negative experiences can be flipped into

something very positive. That came true in almost every

situation because there was a lot of challenges in going as fast as we went.

I know it's something that would be impossible to encapsulate in a

podcast episode, but when you think of the experience you've had

scaling extremely fast, as you've alluded to several times,

companies that find themselves in that position, and I imagine in this industry there,

there may be others, and and companies that could be at that point that are

listening. But how do you think about tackling a problem like that?

Just at a really high level, like, what are the key things companies need to

be thinking about to exponentially scale successfully? I would say

it comes down to 2 things primarily. You need

great people. And complete, you know,

this is what everybody's going to say, you need great people. You cannot

Do all of the things that you need to do yourself. And it has to

be great people that you can trust. And the second thing is

going along with that, with great people, is you need to give them a very

clear picture of where you want to go. And then you need to get the

hell out of the way and let them go and make

sure that they feel like they can fail fast because

the speed required to keep up with what's going on here.

Almost demands rapid failure and rapid

redos. Just no deliberate time

allowance for really anything. Product development, customer

strategy, distribution, global footprint of manufacturing, supply chain. You get

on and on and on and on. Accounting system, finance, HR. Oh my God, how

do we make sure that all these people we brought in— there were 75 people

when I got here, now there's 250. When's the last time we did a review?

Oh man, we forgot. We got to put a policy in to review all the

employees. It's just It never ends. And I think that

when you're embarking on something like that, understanding how

important it is to have absolute superstars. And

if you don't have them, you gotta act fast. And I would say

that, you know, some of my learnings here were when you're

going this fast, failing fast includes making decisions about people

and then undoing those quickly. You know, I know the You know, the view

of the world is, you know, measure twice, cut once when it comes to hiring.

When you're going this fast, you can only do so much diligence. You got to

get people in, you got to let them run and see, give them feedback.

But if you come to the conclusion that you possibly have made a mistake,

you got to undo that mistake very, very quickly. Because every day that is

not addressed, it's exponentially getting worse. And I

would say that that was one of the things that I learned that lesson the

hard way. You know, oh, I just A little bit more, if they just can

give them a chance. No, no, you actually can't. You know, we're going

too fast to give you another chance. And so I would say,

yeah, scaling and being crystal clear on— because when you're going this

fast, it always comes back. What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Is

this related to that? And then explaining to people, as opposed to

managing what they're doing or directing what they're doing, really

telling them, over there, that's where we want to go. You know, you guys got

to figure out how to get there. And if you want my feedback, come back

and tell me. But I'm just telling you, we got to get over there. We

got to get over there in 2 weeks. And it sounds like that's something that

comes up during the hiring process, right? You're like, you're about to board a roller

coaster. Just be forewarned. Fair warning, right? If

you have a heart condition, this is not— this is not a good ride for

you. But yeah, yeah. And you get into all the

classic business problems, like how do you make sure that you're

bringing the right person on board? The last thing in the world you want to

do is bring somebody on that isn't the right person and the team and the

culture, and I get all that. But in this market, and it's

that fast, and there's such a shortage of talent,

of people that really understand the market, you've got to go outside

the network, bring people in from the outside, and then just give them

the authority and hold them accountable. It's tough, really tough. I

get the sense that anyone who makes it through that process, you sort of become

battle-tested and hardened, and even the cohesiveness as a team,

everyone that can get you through a ride like that would seem to be really

good for strengthening the culture of a company. It is like a

family. No more like it than in any company

I've ever been in. I mean, I've— I worked at a company for 20 years.

I became very, very close with the people over that amount of time.

These are people that I'm friends with, that I went to weddings and anniversaries and

children's births and children's weddings. But what

I went through at Fluence with this team of people that I now have, you

know, what we went through in 16, 18 months is about 15

years of someplace else. And it's,

you know, there's, it's different leadership, it's different coaching, it's different

mentoring. It's, yeah, it's just got to really make sure that you're

attuned to what's going on with people. Because one thing you can count on,

they're all overloaded. They don't have time. They're working 20-something hours a day. They're waking

up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and they're checking

their phones. They're committed. There's no question about work ethic and

determination. But the other side of that is if you don't check in with them

and a week goes by, a week in this world is like a year.

in the world that I was working in before. And making the time,

even though there's times when I just want to, you know, put it down and

do something else— like, how are you doing? Is everything okay? Do you get what's

going on? Rather than focusing on whatever the problems are, stepping

back and letting people know that, look, I care about your well-being here. If you're

not in a good place, talk to me about it, because I know that all

these other things I'm counting on you to do, you're not going to get done

if you don't feel like you understand what's happening. So I get the

sense that that process that they went through in the scaling

prepared you to some extent for what happened when COVID hit

as a team. Yeah, yeah. And the pivot that we had to

do was brutal. I mean, it was one day, how do we go

from, you know, shipping $5 million a month to $10 million a

month to how do we full stop, just stop,

nobody wants anything, and what do we do for the next 2 months? A

lot of fights, arguments, tears, screaming,

yelling, but these types of things are good. They bring a team

together and you get to understand really what's at the root of where

people are at. And, you know, obviously the

whole situation with COVID was— is just a tragedy globally,

but what it allowed me to do, at

least with the team at Fluence, is to really pull us that much closer

together. You know, talking about twice-a-day calls, just check-ins.

What are you seeing? What are we seeing? How do you see things? And that

building that, those relationships and that trust was invaluable.

So just to give an overview of Fluence for the benefit of the listener, can

you describe what the current product offerings are? Sure. Yeah,

we're a fully LED lighting system company. We have products

that are suitable for greenhouses, top lights, Vertical

grows, stacked grows for cannabis, stacked grows for vertical

farming. There's 4 primary types of lights. There's

a top light that is your typical greenhouse light that's way up above the

plants. There's a multi-bar light that is

in vertical grows. There's a vertical

vegetable light that's very specific. And then we have a whole controls

portfolio of communication protocols that the lights

communicate with sensors inside the grow. and send all

that data to a processing platform that helps the farmer or the grower

understand what's going on in different parts of the grow. So we've really

evolved over the last 3 or 4 years from probably

99% cannabis to more like

60/40, 60% cannabis, 40% commercial ag. We call

commercial ag, which is anything that's not cannabis, vegetables, leafy greens, flowers

even. And, you know, we're not losing in

cannabis, the market is growing, it's so big, but I felt Like

diversification was key and taking all of the science. The

company was such a heavy science company when I got there, really

cut its teeth on trying to understand how you

validate certain types of light recipes with very

specific types of cultivars of plants. And that

attention to detail is really what separated Fluence in the early days

from everybody else that was making a light. And it was very, very similar to

my days at Frane. Going back to that discussion about optics, when LumiLEDs

came to us and said we need something to capture all this light, you

know, we came up with certain form factors. I'm talking about heights and

diameters and attach points that are now the standard in

the industry. You know, the 25.6 millimeter round optic is—

we came up with that number for a very specific reason. Fast forward to

Fluence, Fluence is the exact same thing. You know, the top light

footprint, our spider, what we call it, which is a light with

6, 8, whatever amount of bars. You know,

imitation's the greatest form of flattery. These standards have been established and

everybody that's coming out with lights now is coming out with this form

factor. So, you know, what we're trying to do is make sure that we

base everything that we do on research and science.

And we want to be able to go to growers and say, you know, either

talk to our customers or talk to our research partners. We're not going to try

to sell you a bag of goods here. This is what we did to validate,

you know, what we're telling you. And it's— so far it's worked.

Is there a recent client win that you can think of where, you

know, you partnered with them to really figure out a solution that would best fit

their needs? Yeah, there's a few. I mean, it's not too recent.

Our relationship with Bowery, uh, Shenandoah Farms, fantastic. It's

been, you know, it's a lot of interaction and research and

proving and trial and error. We've just

validated a light recipe for cucumbers in Europe that

is now the de facto recipe,

and we're winning— these are massive, massive projects.

I don't know about naming any of these specific partners necessarily,

but— and we just won a big vertical farm project in

Singapore, and I'm sure you're aware that's a hub of, you know, the kind

of the source of funds for vertical farming. A lot of the big US firms

are being backed by this Singapore sovereign fund, and they take food

safety and security very, very serious there. So we've had some big wins over

there as well. It's just nice to see, you know, what Osram wanted was to

globalize the business. It was a very North American business. Um, it was a bit

intimidating at first. I remember in my interview what they told me is, uh, you

know, if we lose a job in Russia, we're gonna come and ask you why.

And I was like, okay, I've never even been to Russia, and I don't even

know what to tell you. But, you know, their view, and they were right, the

world is moving fast. You got to put a team of people on the ground

in these places and understand the dynamics of what's going on in these

markets so we can quickly react and attack. And, you know, because

we were backed by such a big, big multinational with a massive

footprint around the world of salespeople and technical people and operational

people, it was a lot easier than it was if we were just going at

this alone. It would have been very, very difficult. Where are you seeing the most

innovation happening in the LED space now? In terms of what? Just

in terms of like, you know, because at some point there's limits to what you

can do with the technology itself. Is it in the applications, or do you feel,

you know, having been at the forefront of the, the

growth in LED, are there opportunities there for new things that are— that

you— Yeah, I think from an LED technology in itself,

you know, it boils down to it's a diode. Sure. It's a computer

chip that lights up. The Moore's Law kind of

phenomenon around LEDs, it's getting to the end. Like, I'm

not a scientist, I'm not a photon electron guy, but what

I do know is that, you know, squeezing another 5 or 10% out

of LEDs today is not like, you know, doubling every year for the last

10 years. So you're getting to that point on performance that you're almost at the

end of the line. The price is ridiculously low. You can't squeeze any more out

of it. It's complete commodity. So what we see and

what we feel, there's 2 kind of frontiers here that are

ripe for some more exploration. Number one is figuring out

how you can tailor a light recipe to a specific

cultivar of a specific plant. Not every single tomato, not every single

cannabis, but, you know, Merle's tomatoes. How can I

genetically do something between tissue culture and lighting

that can make it so that Merle's tomato plant will grow 20%

more? And we're doing a lot of work in that kind of

vein with cannabis strains, with lettuce cultivars, with

tomatoes, with cucumbers. So there's a lot there. I mean, it takes a lot of

research, and it takes even starting to get with companies like

Bayer and Monsanto and Syngenta. You know, they're formulating

seeds and working with these people to understand the applications. But

then on the other side of it, there's the digitization of what's happening.

So these lights are now turning into data receivers,

and I could see a point in the future where the light may not be

a transaction. The light may be a Trojan horse. Take the light, you don't have

to pay for it, but process and assimilate data for you every

month, and you give me $20 a month for every light

that I'm telling you that this part of your grow is too hot, or there's

not enough, you know, air movement over here, or, you know,

whatever. using the light as more of a smart farming

diagnostic tool, which isn't directly LED, but the fact

that it's LED enables you to digitize the whole thing

because now you have— it's solid-state electronics. So I would say we're

not going to see that much, I don't think, innovation in terms of the

pure LED light, like somebody come out with to say this is the light.

But I think you're going to see a lot of great companies come out that

have AI capabilities, sensor Data management

capabilities, and then I think the relationship between strains

and the recipes to maximize those strains, especially when you get into

vertical farming too. Now we're talking about a Bowery or an

AeroFarm. Think of how valuable it would be to them if together we were

able to unlock something that allowed them to even get 5% more

output. I mean, you've seen these facilities, 5% output more is— it goes

right to the bottom line. Sure. So that's kind of what we're focusing on.

Lots of exciting innovations. What would you say is a tough question you've had to

ask yourself recently? I'm thinking, what's not a tough question?

How can we do all this? I get that all the time. Why can't we

just slow down and focus on one thing?

And that's— when I'm done and retired from this,

I will probably have a better answer than I have today.

But it's, you know, this is very much, you gotta make hay when the sun

shines, and this is a fast-going, faster

industry. So I would say some of the more difficult questions I

have is, you know, getting people to understand that, yeah, we have to

actually do everything. I'm sorry, I get it. You can't be everything to

everybody. I know all the clichés out there in business. You gotta focus.

But in an industry, in a market like this, I think that

if you're not prepared to pivot, to be flexible, and to adapt to what's happening,

you're gonna have a really tough time. Yeah, it does feel like a once-in-a-lifetime moment

for this industry, at least a significant wave. I feel that way.

I felt like when I came in at AT in 2018 and was looking at

the Canadian cannabis situation, I was just

dumbstruck by what was going on and the trips that I would take up there

and look at the magnitude of these greenhouses. Like, you're really going to

grow that much cannabis? What in the world are you going to do with it

all? Right? So that was my first kind of like, okay, wait a minute, they're

going to need like 20,000 times more product than we can

physically produce. How are we going to do this? To

a vertical farm where it's, you're kind of like learning on the fly.

There's no book, oh, this is how you set up a

vertical farm and this is how you do it properly. And

literally leaking fertigants and

lights that are shorting and plants that aren't growing right. It's every day there

was something that needed to be figured out. And just reminding the

team, like, guys, we're in uncharted territory here. When the customer calls and says something's

not working, go figure it out, you know. And that's like an occurrence every day,

you know, because you don't have anybody that is going to leave

the huge vertical farm down the street from Bowery and go grow to Bowery.

You're going to go hire growers that probably have experience growing little teeny sections.

Sure. And it was the same thing with cannabis when we went up to Canada,

and even in the US now, You know, the growers, you know, great

growers. I grew 10, 20 plants in my basement every year, and it was the

best cannabis ever. Here you go, here's a greenhouse, here's 15,000 plants, you know,

or here's a stacked 3-level grow where the temperature at the top is

4 degrees different than the temperature at the bottom, and they just, they have no

idea. So, and then when you put the lights in and the plants

don't grow, guess what? Oh, it's got to be the light's fault, you know, so

they call us. So then, you know, we became pretty

good at figuring out how to sit with a grower and

say, it's really the way you're running your system. And we're not pointing fingers

here, but let us help. And that's where we kind of

adopted this mantra of, you know, consultative selling. We wanna

help you grow. You know, buy our lights, don't buy our lights, either way, we

wanna come in there and help you grow. And this company has built a

fantastic amount of goodwill with our customers that aren't

customers, that never bought the light from us, but that we went in and helped

them understand that it was too much water or not enough nutrients or not enough

airflow. to let them know that all we care about is the customer succeeding.

You know, you'll come around, you'll buy from us eventually, or you'll give us a

shot eventually. But really what we're here to make sure is help to

understand how people can grow smarter. You know, and that's our tagline. We

live by it. And it sounds like just to bring it all full circle, this

idea that you introduced earlier, this idea of building solid networks

and relationships, pay yourself forward, trust.

There's so much going on here and we've had our lumps. I mean, look, we

ramped fast. We, you know,

brought forward technology that was not fully

supported by some of our suppliers because we didn't know what we didn't know

and resulted in some problems at our customers. That was, you know, a

few big hiccups that we had to go out and, you know, go

say we're sorry and fix it. And that's tough. That's

really, really tough if you've never had to do anything like that. But again, I'd

go back to those are some of the best character-building,

relationship-building events that you can encounter, but you have to

embrace it and you have to, you know, you have to be all

in and not be afraid. Yeah. Well, David, uh, definitely

a wide-ranging conversation. I want to thank you for sharing a little bit of your

backstory and— All right, this was great. I never had people ask me questions like

this, so I got it all out. I feel great. I feel great. Therapy session

complete. I can mention Nick Scarfo and Dan Casey in the same conversation. I'm having

a good day. We'll make sure we tag them and we promote it on socials

as well. But, uh, where's the best place for folks to just learn more? We

can go to Fluence. Fluence.science, right? Yeah,

Fluence.science on our website. It gives you everything that's going

on. There's quite a bit of change coming. We're again going

through another massive growth year. We're probably going to double again this

year. And, you know, just keeping up with everything. We're at a

number of big trade shows that the world's opening up again. So

that's the best way to find us. Very good. Well, thanks again for your time,

David, and hope we get to connect at an upcoming conference as well. Same

here, Harry. Anytime. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Special thanks

to David for coming on the show and sharing his story. As always, full show

notes available at verticalfarmingpodcast.com. Thanks to our season 3 title

sponsor, Cultivated. If you're looking for a vertical farm and don't know where to

start or which technology would suit your needs, reach out to them today. Best of

all, their service is free because they work on behalf of their partners. Learn

more at cultivated.com, and that's spelled C-U-L-T-I-V-A-T-E-D.com.

Just leave out the last Learn more about early bird registration discounts

for Indoor AgCon at indoor.ag and save $100

off registration with our promo code VFPOD2021.

Podcast production and marketing provided by Fulcast. Sign up for our free podcast brainstorm

at fulcast.co/vfp15

and learn how a podcast may be helpful for your business. Don't forget to leave

us that rating and a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

We'll be sure to read those out as we did during this intro. Tune in

next week for my conversation with Thomas Oberlin of Fazenda

Urbana. It's one of the first vertical farming companies in Brazil. It'll

be nice to get some international flavor. So looking forward to that conversation. Until we

meet again, here's to your health.

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

includes any links mentioned in the episode, as well as a full show transcription,

Visit verticalfarmingpodcast.com. There, you can

sign up for our email list to be notified when new episodes are

published.

$680 million poured into precision ag last year.

Autonomous weeding robots dominated, and John Deere made 2 acquisitions in 3

months. A food company, not an equipment maker, bought a

robotics startup to protect its own supply chain. The deals are

accelerating, the money is moving, and the winners are already separating from the pack.

If you're investing, building, or buying in this space, you need the full

picture before your competitors get it. The 2025 Precision

Agriculture Intelligence Report from iGrow News is now available.

Get your copy today at

igrownews.com/precision.