Episode Summary

Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show speaker, investor and entrepreneur, Allison Kopf. Allison is the Founder and CEO of Artemis, the market-leading Cultivation Management Platform serving the fruit, vegetable, floriculture, cannabis, and hemp industries. Allison was named one of Forbes 2019 30 Under 30 as well as one of New York Business Journal's 2019 "Women of Influence." In this episode, Harry and Allison discuss Allison’s background in physics and what influenced her to enter into the field of AgTech. They talk about Allison’s time at the startup BrightFarms, lessons she’s learned throughout her entrepreneurial journey and her passion for developing software that can help the overall AgTech industry.

Episode Sponsor

CULTIVATD

Key Takeaways

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• 03:22 – Harry welcomes to the show Allison Kopf, Founder and CEO of Artemis, who talks about her passion for science and what inspired her to work in agriculture
• 
  
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• 14:56 – Allison talks about the supportive role her mother played in her entrepreneurial journey and what she loves about mentoring other founders
• 
  
• 
  
• 18:01 – Allison recalls her time working at the startup BrightFarms and provides best practices for aspiring entrepreneurs
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• 32:14 – The inspiration to launch Artemis and the need to leverage new technologies and systematize processes
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• 47:21 – What excites Allison the most about the future initiatives of Artemis
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• 50:40 – Allison’s role at the investment firm XFactor Ventures
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• 56:49 – A tough question Allison has had to ask herself recently
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• 58:23 – Harry thanks Allison for joining the show and let’s listeners know where they can connect with her 
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Tweetable Quotes

“My mother always tells me, ‘A girl can dream.’ She loves to let me dream and always has supported my brain and the weirdness that comes with that.” (15:12)

“I love mentoring. I really love coaching other founders, if only just to avoid all the mistakes that I’ve made and to speed up their paths to success. It’s a lot of fun. There’s something infectious about founders and entrepreneurs in that, it’s being around that energy of ‘I can do something that has a meaningful impact on this world and can make a dent and secure my place in this universe.’” (17:02)

“You really have to just go out there and do it. You have to go out there and sell stuff and talk about your vision.” (25:35)

“I started becoming obsessed with this idea that software could broaden the [AgTech] industry, could help it expand, could help operators do it in a sustainable and profitable way.” (35:16)

“We’re not gonna build fast just for the sake of building fast. We’re gonna build good products, get them out to the market fast and work with our customers to always improve.” (44:30)

“There is something to say about understanding the founder and the founder mentality and trying to find that and invest in that. And that is something that you can do as a founder because you know what the day-to-day is like so you can recognize that.” (54:27)

Links Mentioned

Artemis Website

Allison’s LinkedIn

Allison’s Investment Blog

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Mentioned in this episode:

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Or click the link in the show notes. Yeah, I love mentoring. I really,

really love coaching other founders, if only just to avoid

all the mistakes that I've made and to speed up their

paths to success. It's a lot of fun, right? It's a lot of fun. There's

something infectious about founders and entrepreneurs in that,

again, it's being around that energy of, I can do something that has a

meaningful impact on this world in some capacity. I can make a dent and secure

my place in this, in this universe.

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.

It's been a couple of weeks, been on hiatus, catching my breath,

getting some of these great interviews produced,

and I'm really excited to be back in the saddle. I'm your host, Harry

Duran. If this is the first time listening to the Vertical Farming Podcast, welcome,

welcome, welcome one and all. It's the show where I interview

fascinating CEOs and founders of the leading vertical farming companies from around the

world. Excited to bring you a new round of fantastic

conversations with inspiring leaders. Just to give you a little bit of a

sneak peek, coming up we have Robert Lang from Form 1,

Nicholas Steiner from Molière, Eric Levesque from Cultivated,

and conversations are in the works with the teams from Vertical Harvest,

NetLED, CubicFarms, and others. Special

thanks this season to the team at Cultivated, who you heard mentioned at the beginning

of the show. We're honored that they've partnered with us as the title sponsor for

season 3. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode with one of the co-founders.

If you're not familiar with them, they serve as vertical farming brokers and help match

your project with the right indoor farm technology, which is going to save you a

lot of time and money. Okay, I'm excited to kick off

season 3 with Allison Coff. She's the founder and CEO of

Artemis, the market-leading cultivation management platform serving the

fruit, vegetable, floriculture, cannabis, and hemp industries. Allison was

named one of Forbes' 2019 30 Under 30, as well as

one of New York Business Journal's 2019 Women of Influence. In this episode,

we discuss Allison's background in physics and what influenced her to enter the field of

agtech. We talk about her time at BrightFarms, lessons she's learned through

her entrepreneurial journey, and her passion for developing software that can help

the overall agtech industry. She shares her passion for science and what

inspired her to work in agriculture, talks about the supportive role her mother

played in her entrepreneurial journey, and what she loves about mentoring other founders.

She provides best practices for aspiring entrepreneurs. What

inspired her to launch Artemis and the need to leverage new technologies and

systematize processes? Lastly, we learn about her investment role at

X Factor Ventures, what has her excited about the future initiatives

at Artemis. Such a great way to kick off season 3. I can't wait to

jump into this conversation. This episode is also brought to you by the Vertical Farming

Weekly Newsletter. Each week, our team member Daniel Dray scours the

ends of the earth. He climbs mountains and fords rivers to bring you the

latest and greatest in the world of vertical farming. I got to have a little

fun with these intros sometimes. Sign up today at verticalfarmingweekly.com.

We're also opening up space for sponsorship of the newsletter, and I'm also

investigating opportunities to provide a small classified section. So

if any of those opportunities interest you, email me at [email protected].

If you've enjoyed past seasons or this episode, I'd love it if you

leave a rating and a review at ratethispodcast.com/vfp.

I'm excited to read yours out next. Okay, let's kick off season 3 with Allison.

So Allison Coff, founder and CEO of Artemis, thank you so much for joining

me on the Vertical Farming Podcast. Super happy to be here.

So, uh, where's home for you now? Right now, so we actually moved

to Pennsylvania, Northeast Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half outside of

Scranton. So anybody who knows the area knows that we are in about

3.5 feet of snow this week, which has been a lot of fun.

I'm— home for me is currently Minneapolis. So

awesome. Subzero temperatures for about 2

weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except for that you guys are more used to it than

we are. So my husband and I moved out from Brooklyn just a few months

ago. And so used to the cold being from the Northeast,

but not used to the very cold that happens as soon as you go from

city to very rural. So actually, I'm new

here because my partner's from here. She grew up here. I'm originally from New

York. I grew up in Yonkers. Yeah. So you know what I'm talking about then,

that move from the the city to the real cold.

Yeah, the next level cold. Exactly. Where they walk on lakes here,

which is kind of funny. I've been watching all the videos in Amsterdam of them,

of people ice skating on the canals, which is so cool. Oh yeah.

And so we were looking for the lakes to skate on because

we have skates. And then I remembered that I have no way to judge how

deep. Like in my head I thought, oh, this is such a great idea. We

can go skating on the lakes. And then of course, Not being very much a

city kid, not a rural kid. I'm like, oh, I don't know how to tell

if that's 4 feet thick or not. So we abandoned all hope

and we moved on to skating in a rink. What's interesting is that

the way it's been explained to me is that it's about surface tension.

So the ice does not have to be super thick. Like you would think it

has to be like a foot thick or something. I think 6 inches they said

is enough because if you think about when you stand on ice, if it's a

thin platform, it's distributed. Yeah. And there's stories of people driving

across the lakes, which would freak me out. It would definitely freak

me out. I would not do it. I'd also, even if I went skating on

it, I'd just stay by the edge, very much on the edge, just

where I know that it's kind of safe, or at least I could get out.

Yes. Yeah, it's so funny because a friend of my partner's, she's

like, oh yeah, I always carry screwdrivers with me. And I'm like, I had to

think about that for a second. It's in case you fall through, you're able to

like, pull yourself out of the ice. Oh, wow. So that's a skill

set I don't— I just don't have. I was like, okay,

yeah, next level type stuff. So that's interesting. So I was

looking that, uh, you majored in physics. I did, yeah.

How young were you when you realized that the sciences or,

or a topic like that was of interest to you? Oh, that's a great question.

I think, I think I was always into science,

at least since I can remember. I was always much

better at math and science than I was at other things, at

writing, at any of the sort of the other skills. Right.

And, and it's interesting. My mother was a writer at the time

and is a writer, I should say, but at the time she was writing and

my father was an accountant. So I had sort of both the sides of this,

this sort of creative, yeah, the creative writer

and then the math, but I only got the math side of it. I have

to work very hard to get good at writing, but I was always really

interested in it. I think it was more the creativity

towards things that couldn't be explained that was really attractive to me about the sciences.

Mm-hmm. It was how do you look at problems of things that are happening around

you and try and approach a solution to them and even go about

trying to think about how to create a solution to things. And

with the sciences, it's always about digging into them and just kind of getting your,

your feet wet and your hands dirty and sort of digging in full throttle. and

trying to solve in a really structured, organized way, which was really

attractive to me. But I didn't start out studying physics. I started out in computer

engineering and made the shift to physics after

probably midway through college because I found that

computer engineering for my brain was a little

bit too repetitive until you got— in an educational sense, it wasn't

until you got to the creative application of computer engineering that was really interesting.

But in academia, it's a lot of just studying the books, right?

And so that was a lot less interesting to me, whereas physics is a lot

of theory no matter what, applied or not, it's going to be a lot of

theory. And so the academic side of it was as interesting to me as the

applied side. So I found myself gravitating towards the hard

sciences and really moving into physics closer towards the middle, towards the end

of college for me. How important was it to have a good teacher? Because I

think about the few that I remember from high school, and my physics teacher actually

stands out. His name is Mr. Tedesco, if I remember correctly. And

I think the reason I remembered it is because he took such a complex subject

like physics and made it relatively easy to understand,

which I thought was fascinating. Yeah, I think it's so important. So I will give

a huge shout out to Kevin Breadberg, wherever in the world you are, who

was a teacher of, of the sciences, right, in high school for me.

But what one of the things that he did that I loved was he created

a program, and I'm not sure if he gets all the credit this right. Somebody

else probably should get some credit somewhere. But he— I went to a big

public school in New York, and he created or ran this

program called Science Research. I think other people— I think other public schools have this.

I'm not entirely too sure, but I think other public schools have this where

you can take— if I'm remembering correctly, I think it was 2 years.

It might have been 1, but 2 years where you design a research experiment and

you design an area of research that you want to dig into. And it culminated

in some sort of a cardboard cutout type presentation thing that

we all had to do, but, but more in front of more impressive judges and

things, like an elevated science fair, right? And I had

studied how nutritional supplements could affect your cognitive ability.

And so you're thinking about like a high schooler who's trying to structure this research,

which is pretty deep and really interesting. And you go into it for a year

or 2, you're really immersive, and it's in your free time. It's kind of an

add-on because you know, a little bit of a nerd here, but, but that program

really got my eyes open to what science could be in an applied way.

And if I look back at my career and all the way through academia,

almost everything I've tried to do was that experiential learning.

And Bredberg was great at this, but also my senior physics teacher, we

did cardboard boats that we tried to, had to compete in a race across the—

Mm-hmm. Like pool. Like everything that I loved about science was because it was

super hands-on. And that, that's just what was really interesting to me.

And as a city girl, when did you start to have an awareness

for agriculture or nature or things

that would eventually come to play later on? Yeah, so I grew up in the

suburbs right outside of the city, not actually kind of adjacent to Yonkers. So

we're probably across the bridge neighbors, but wasn't really

in farming country. It wasn't until I'd say

lightly in college. I worked on a project called the Solar

Decathlon for 2 and a half years. It was a program run by the Department

of Energy that has 20 universities competing against each other. Again, another

experiential learning experience, right? So you as

students will actually finance, design, and build a fully

functional home that is sustainable in some capacity. It's gotta be powered by the

sun, Solar Decathlon, but it's gotta do a bunch of other stuff too. It's gotta

be able to, you gotta be able to wash a load of laundry and live

off the grid, right? Okay. And part of that, you start looking at

all the interconnected systems. You look at water, you look at energy, you

look at food, the food-water-energy nexus, right? You start thinking about

how those systems play off each other. But it wasn't thinking about it

in a commercial ag sense. It was thinking about it more on the consumer side

and how I think about food and how I think about my own storage of

food or production of food or whatever it might be. And so we started, we

had an edible garden in our landscape, right? And we were thinking about the

really more urban side of producing food on just my

own basis, on just my own consumerism. And It

wasn't until after college that I really understood how

what we as consumers start paying attention to actually has a really big

impact on how commercial ag interacts with it and what the opportunities were

there. So I stumbled upon commercial ag completely randomly. It had nothing to do with

studying science. It had nothing to do with any of the projects I worked in.

I kind of got lucky and met Paul Lightfoot when he was founding BrightFarms at

the time, and just really fell in love with what he was trying to

build there and what indoor ag could do for

the food system as a tool. And it became something that I couldn't stop thinking

about. So it was really a random by chance thing, but I would say

earlier you start thinking about it a little bit, but it wasn't

really— my exposure to ag was pretty limited. But it seems that there's starting

to be created like a thread of your interest in

experiential learning, hands-on learning, and the connection

of applied sciences to you know, what's happening in

nature and sort of all those pieces were starting to put themselves together.

And that's part of the reason I think why maybe why you were

attracted to what was happening. And obviously, you know,

BrightFarms, when you joined, it was 2011,

early. What do you remember about first meeting Paul? Yeah,

so I will tell you distinctly, I had already had a job offer

on the table when I had met Paul and Toby Tiktinsky at the

time, who's also still working in energy, which I think you'll find a lot of

professionals in this space work at that nexus between energy and food in

some capacity. And most of us have had some career path

either in or out of ag that ties into energy in some capacity.

But I had had a job offer on the table for a solar investment firm

that was deploying large-scale solar and met

Paul and Toby in this tiny little office that we had at the time in

the Flatiron that was like quintessential New York City

startup, I'd say, and not very Silicon Valley startup, right? New York has its own

environment and ethos around it. A little bit, maybe less

ping pong table type attitude, a little bit more just cramped space

because it's New York and we have no space. Is it still called Silicon

Alley? Sure, it might be, but that's definitely not where we were,

right? We were in this tiny, tiny space. And I met them

and I distinctly, I don't really remember much about

Paul at the time other than like his infectious attitude. If you've ever talked with

Paul and anybody who's listening is, who's met him or heard him speak, there's something

infectious about how a lot of leaders in this space talk about

the industry. What I do remember is thinking to myself, man, I know nothing

about tomatoes or growing tomatoes or lettuce or leafy greens or

anything, but my goodness, this model seems

really interesting. And it, like a bug, I think a

lot of the people who are going to be on this podcast or who have

been on it will probably say something similar where they've been bitten by the bug

a little bit, right? Yeah. And I got home to my apartment at the time

and I sat down and I called my mother and I said, I said, Mom,

listen, I've got a really good job offer on the table. I've already kind of

accepted it, but let me tell you about this thing and this experience

I had. And let me tell you about this founder I met. And she's

like, well, I think you should just go for it, right? I think you should

just go for it. Grow tomatoes. Who knows? Like grow leafy greens. We'll grow whatever

it is that they're growing in there. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm on

board. And I jumped and it was this really magical moment

of, you know, everything that was happening in 2011 in this industry was really

exciting. exciting. It was the beginning. It was the very, very, very beginning

of what is the venture-backed model for indoor ag, which was a

lot of fun, a lot of challenges, a lot of exciting stuff. And so

it was just a lot of fun. It still is a lot of fun. Did

you say you have kids? I do not have kids. Okay. I'm just wondering

how important it was to have that sounding board of your mother for

a decision like that, because obviously you felt it was an important decision and you

wanted someone whose opinion you valued. And so obviously you thought of

calling her. Yeah, my mother's one of those people. She has a phrase for me

and she knows me probably better than anyone on this planet, maybe better than my

husband probably. But she always tells me like, a girl can dream.

She loves to let me dream a little bit and always has

supported my brain and the

weirdness that comes with any entrepreneur's brain, I think is weird.

And ambition, right? Like we're all ambitious. We've all all, we've

all got these, the crazy gumption to think that you could actually change the world,

right? It's irrational. And yet there's something really wonderful in

the irrationality because it leads to something incredibly logical, which is

creating a business. And so her as a

sounding board, it, it's not so much that she was gonna steer me in any

direction. It was more just to hear yourself against

a whiteboard, right? It's kind of like that, that experience where you whiteboard. Yeah. Yeah.

And you sit down and you say like, okay, here's what's in my brain and

let me put it against a wall. And that's sort of who the role that

my mother has always played for me. My father runs businesses. They're all like entrepreneurs

in their own right. And so it's helpful to have somebody where you can say,

hey, you've done something like this, maybe not a tech startup or anything like this,

but you've done something like this. And I'm going to throw

some crazy ideas at you. And I want you to

just sit there with it a little bit and then help me make sure that

I'm not making the absolute worst decision of my life. But But either way,

I'm probably going to make it on my own and you're just going to be

there to stand by even if I make the worst decision of my life. So,

you know, there's something kids can serve in this role. Your spouse can partner, right?

Anybody who loves you unconditionally is going to kind of have that

mentality usually in that helper role. And, and, you know,

my mother's always been that person for me and still is that person for me.

Yeah, that's very interesting. And I imagine you've probably had the opportunity to play

that role for some folks or Yeah, I love

mentoring. I really, really love coaching other founders, if

only just to avoid all the mistakes that I've made and to

speed up their paths to success. It's a lot of fun, right? It's a lot

of fun. There's something infectious about founders and entrepreneurs in

that, again, it's being around that energy of,

I can do something that has a meaningful impact on this world in some capacity.

I can make a dent and secure my place in this in this universe. And,

and not just, I want to skate by and sort of be on the earth,

it's, I want to have a real impact on this earth. And that energy is

incredibly infectious. And so, yeah, I've had the absolute

pleasure of working with various companies like, or organizations like Techstars to mentor

other founders in the ag space. I'm an investor in a

female-focused fund called X Factor Ventures, where we get to actually

invest and deploy capital into early-stage founders. So

definitely feel really lucky to have the opportunity to work with lots of founders and

pick up on their energy just as much as I can hopefully give back a

little. Yeah. So BrightFarms, when you started, that was almost

10 years ago. Crazy, huh? Time flies, right? In

your time there, what would you think was the biggest takeaway, your

biggest learnings from working with the team there? Oh man, biggest

learnings. So first I'll say it's exponential learning curve,

right? So for me, I didn't know anything about growing, it was sort of

getting, what is the phrase? You're drinking from the water— Fire hose. Fire hose, right?

You're, or you're, or you're trying to take off on a plane while you're building

the wings or something, right? Any of those phrases directly applies when you join a

startup in some capacity. And one of the cool things about

BrightFarms was we were trying to do something so big and

so infrastructure heavy that it required just

a lot, right? So software, totally different world. You can be pretty

capital light and scale a software business. pretty fast, depending

on the industry, of course, depending on your customer type, depending on the market, all

those kinds of things. But if you're building a consumer app, you can build an

app in a day, release it. I mean, if you can get on the Apple

Store in a day, but let's assume you can, right? You can get an application

up and running in a day, put on the App Store, put a website up,

and have people using it all within a week, right? And that's really,

really incredible. For something like building greenhouses and things, it's

just a lot more infrastructure. There's a lot more capital. There's a lot of

physical resource that needs to go into it. There's a lot more people that have

to be involved. There's a lot more. So it's, you know, working there was

incredible experience where you got hit with lessons from everywhere

all the time. And you're just trying to catch up all the time, which is

a lot of fun. I will say my number one learning,

which wasn't so much a learning as it was advice, was Paul and I, when

we, when I let him know that I was starting Artemis AgroList at the time,

we had a sit down and we had a great chat. And one of the

things he said was, now my role at the company was, had nothing to do

with sales for what it's worth. It was a lot of government relations and

operations. I was helping establish new facilities, helping understand the data science

on the farm. So working on the farm and expanding new operations.

So nothing related to sales. But he said, you know, if you're going to do

this, you need to get better at sales. Like you need to understand that as

a skillset and you need to do it. And I was like, you know, hey,

that's fair advice. Like, I don't know if I'm good at sales at all. I

have no idea if I, I've never really sold anything other than, you know,

ideas and I've sold like stuff for school uniforms

and things for sports and stuff, maybe wrapping

paper, but, you know, I had never really sold stuff,

right? And, and that always stuck with me because I think I jumped

to an assumption that I was bad at sales because that was the advice,

even though it wasn't necessarily true. It's just the assumption that I jumped

to. And so I spent so long,

and still, still spend time trying to understand

everything there is to understand about how to sell stuff, whether

it's your own products or the vision of the company

or raising funding for your company, whatever it is that you're

trying to do as a founder is sales.

Every single thing. When you're hiring, when you're in an all-hands presenting

the OKRs for the year, your goals for the year, all of those

things, that's all sales, right? You want people to come along for the journey on

this crazy, ridiculous ride with very limited traction that

they can trust is a real thing. You're trying to create something outta

thin air most of the time. And so you have to sell it. You have

to sell that vision. And it's probably the skillset that has

helped me the most in building what is our company,

but also it's probably one of the stronger skillsets I have now, which is really

funny, but it's because I put in the work. And so, you know,

not so much a lesson, but advice that turned into a lesson that turned

into a, wow, I did not realize how much of my job was going to

be this. And therefore I should get, become an expert in it. Which has been

a lot of fun over the last few years. I think it's one of the

most underestimated skill sets that entrepreneurs need,

because to your point, you're selling— people think traditionally sales is going to be

selling someone a product, buy my stuff. Yeah, give me money for my thing,

right? But then it's like you have to sell your team

on the vision, you have to sell new hires on the

excitement of working for this company, partners you have to sell, you

know, people who want to invest in the company you have to sell. So out

of the resources you had access to, were there one or two things that

you can think of that were helpful in that journey, in that sales journey, or

it was just a wide variety of things over time? Yeah. And just, and to

go on your point, by the way, about sort of the money for item thing,

my friend Preet Anand, who also a founder in the Bay Area

and now runs product safety for Lyft, which is again, crazy time

to be running safety for, for somebody like Lyft. But he writes

this great newsletter. And one of the things I think he said recently was you

have various currencies of life. You know, you have

time, you have attention, money, and I think social capital is the 4th one.

But the idea that you're always exchanging something for something else. And

so sales, I think if you can put on that lens of

it's not just a monetary necessarily, right? You have time, attention, money, and

social capital. You're trying to build, you're trying to exchange these things at all

steps for things. And so if you can get good at bartering those

things. Yeah. And you build and establish that skillset, then you're gonna be more

successful at stuff. So just a, that's an aside. As far as resources

go, there's so many resources now, which is kind of cool. It's a very

different time, frankly, than when I was starting the company or

even back at BrightFarms or even earlier than that, where

a lot of founders are talking about stuff a lot more. So there is a

lot of good resource. I mean, if you're thinking

about SaaS at all, right? You should be following Jason Lemkin. That's just number one.

Put SaaStr and his blog posts and everything on your list.

There are some great books out there around sales

and trying to understand all the different methodologies around sales, right? So whether you're

learning the Challenger Method or SPIN Selling or whatever it may be, you should

just try it, poke around to see how different people are selling

stuff, and then focus on meeting people, right? Talk to every

person you can talk to in sales, right? Talk to

VP-level consultants, AEs, SDRs, anybody you can

talk to to understand how they're going about their day.

And then other founders about how they structure their teams. I think this is gonna

be probably one of the big early mistakes people make in their

business is that, for example, we hired

director-level salesperson probably in month 2 of

starting the business as if we had anything to actually go out and sell. Yeah.

Which, you know, we were, we were trying. We were going out and selling what

was our probably beta or earliest version of our product pretty soon,

but it didn't mean that we needed a director-level person. I needed to be selling

it, right? I had to be selling it to everybody. And then you have to

grow from there and you have to learn what works and doesn't work for your

business. In ag, we have a really interesting dynamic of

should you be hiring people from the ag industry or should you be hiring really

good salespeople? Should you be hiring somebody who knows how to sell software if you're

a software company like we are and who's an expert in SaaS?

If you're a sensor company, a hardware company, should you be selling somebody who knows

how to sell hardware, or should you be selling, hiring somebody who knows how to

sell to farmers? I don't know the answer for your business, right?

But for us, we had to learn the hard way over years of what worked,

what didn't work, how to scale that, what to think about, what not

to do at all. And so, I think the more that you can

expose yourself to, one, different methodologies, two, what people do

on a day basis and like who they sell to, how personas work, all that

kind of stuff. It's helpful. And then 3, you really

have to just do it. That's like, I guess, the

short Nike version of it. You have to just do it, right? You have to

go out there and sell stuff, go out there and talk about your vision. First

of all, in your early days, right? Day 1, day 2, day 3, when

you've just got an idea, if you can't explain it to your grandmother

and have her go, oh yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense, right? Like,

if you can't explain it to Pick 10 people who have nothing to do

with your industry in any capacity. And if they're like, oh, that sounds

great, go do it, then you probably don't know how to sell it, right?

You don't know how to get the vision yet. And that's something that I always

recommend is just tell as many people, build in public, right? I think a lot

of people take the, I need to be private about this for so long. Talk

to people, just tell people what you're doing. The more you're gonna get the resonance

of the, and the practice and the repetition, frankly, of telling

people about it, the better off you're gonna be. So many things in there that

are really interesting. First, just working backwards, this idea of build in public is

resonating because I got accepted into a fellowship with the On Deck

community. Oh, congrats. Yeah. And since— hear super good things about it. Yeah.

So they're doing a lot of— one of the cohorts is using no-code tools

to build your MVP. So that's the one I'm in. So I'm building a podcast

marketplace, but they're proponents of this build in public. Like,

it doesn't have to be pretty. And, and I think we overthink as

entrepreneurs, like having something to ship that's nice and having that MVP.

But their whole mantra is, you know, to say, take your

users, take your fans on the journey along with you. They'll be your biggest

supporters and be cheering you on along the way. Yeah. In agriculture in

particular, if you think about software, for example, the software industry

in ag has really only been around since— prefaced with the

modern software, like the idea of SaaS business models, the idea of farm

management systems. Really only been around since like 2009 at

earliest, right? And in our industry, in the controlled environment ag industry, we were the

first. So it just isn't that old.

And one of the things that's really interesting is when you think about the

clients who's buying your product, you

can do one of two things. You can set

expectations inherently or not around your product being an

out-of-the-box, it works perfectly because it's going to be compared to Microsoft, right? And like,

That's great. Or you can say, look, we're building in public, right? And we're going

to have this attitude towards building a partnership with folks to

build together. Again, I don't know if there's a right answer to that. I know

what side I tend to be on, which is the build in public side and

building good expectations and relationships with your partners. But I

think for better or for worse, a lot of the industry took the other route

and it was more, there was this cloud of expectation. There

still is this cloud of expectation around software that it has to just

work and it has to work really, really well and it has to work out

of the box. And that's almost an unrealistic expectation when the

industry itself is so new because that's just not how it works. If you think

about NetSuite's early days, Salesforce's— Salesforce is still

not an easy-to-use system that nobody really likes using. It

just has dominated the market for so long, but they're continuously releasing

because it still has room to grow, right? And NetSuite, same thing. Is

it the best system to use? Not really, no, but it does what

it needs to do. And it's interesting because we didn't give

ourselves that flexibility in the agriculture industry in the same

way. And that inherently causes a lot of things like

high customer churn or failure to launch, frankly. A lot of the

companies just haven't gotten to real scale because there's a lot of lack of

trust in, in these new startup technologies. And frankly, that's

fair because farmers are getting sold some startup stuff all the time, right? There's

just a lot of stuff happening in this industry right now, which is great. But

again, if we create those expectations and we build in public and we share these

things, it's helpful. It's not just helpful for you as a company, but

also you as a product. Yeah, so good. And that last point about sales, I

think when you said you hired someone as a director because

mainly because you wanted to get off your plate, and I feel like as entrepreneurs,

we do all of, we're so used to doing it all from day one. And

the minute we think that we can get some help with something like sales, that's

not our our forte, there is a tendency to try to hand it off

as quick as possible. But I think to your point, we have to learn the

basics of it. Because if we're not doing it, we don't know what we're handing

off. And we don't know if they're doing a good job or not. And they're

going to tell us something and we're going to think it's good. But until we've

gone through it and sort of painfully worked our way through the bumps and bruises

of it, then we'll feel it's at a point where we can hand it off.

Yeah. And it's not so much getting it off your plate so much as maybe

an artificial belief that there's someone out there that's so much

better at this thing than you that they're gonna come in and magically everything's gonna

be amazing. Like that. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's a little bit of both of those

probably. And yeah, I fundamentally agree. Like I think

there's my belief on, on hiring in when

you're doing an off-the-plate type of a hire. So, and this is gonna happen all

the time because at first you're a team of 1, maybe 2, maybe 3, and

then all of a sudden you're a team of 5, then you're a team of

10, right? And then 20, 30, 50, whatever. But That you

as the founding team are gonna own everything, then you're

gonna hand it off, then you're gonna own everything but the thing you handed off,

then you're gonna hand something else off and you're gonna keep, and that, that list

keeps growing and you keep handing things off and that's just how it goes. My

mantra on this is always that you have to know the

ins and outs. Like you can't hand off a sales process until you know what

the conversion rates look like, what a funnel looks like. Mm-hmm. What the personas look

like, what sales materials you're using. I can't say I'm just gonna hire a

marketing team to create product marketing if I've never created it in the first place,

if I don't know what my objective is, right? And it's

interesting cuz we all do this when you hire a consultant for something.

So if you hire a consultant or a development shop or something like that to

work on a project, you outline what the project is and you set

expectations and then you hand it off to somebody to come do. And so I

think of it kind of like that. It's not a one-to-one because obviously these are

not People coming in for a short-term thing. It should be long-term, but you

still have to think about the role and try and understand what it is now,

what the state of it currently is in, and where you want to go with

it. And then hire somebody who can elevate it, right? Take it to the next

level, take what you're already doing and grow it into something

bigger or faster or whatever it is. And then think about

where it fits in that long-term. So interesting. And I think every

entrepreneur is either cringing or nodding as they, as they listen

to this because, you know what, we're all at different stages in that journey. And

I think there's no manual for how to start a company. And so we

sort of think of, you know, figure it as we go. And hopefully we have

a team that can support us or people along the way that can help

answer some of those questions. So to that point, as you were at

BrightFarms, when did the idea for what was to become Artemis

start to be born and what was it that you were trying to solve?

Yeah, so I tried so desperately to hand off the

idea for Artemis. Originally our company was AgriList at the time. So if I

reference it, that's usually when in the early days we calling it AgroList.

But I tried to hand it off. Like, as a person on the farm, I

needed what we built, and I really wanted to have

somebody else do it. Frankly, I didn't know that I was entrepreneurial. Maybe I

didn't know what was deep down inside, but I really loved where I was, and

I just really wanted this tool. And this is the— so many founders' stories are

very similar, right? I was experiencing this pain point. I

couldn't get it out of my head. I had to do it, right? So I

became kind of obsessed with this problem. And started looking into

the industry more broadly about who could use this. Was it just us?

Everybody? Was it future-built? Like, was it future operators? Who

was going to use this product? And a series of conversations, probably a year

before I started the company, to start

just figuring it out a little bit. And mostly it was deep curiosity,

frankly. It was just, is this an interesting enough idea?

And I really became obsessed with this idea that tool that we were

building had a bigger place in the industry because it could

enable the actual success and growth of the industry. So we

build a software tool, right? A platform that

manages all of your operations, anything that could make you money, cost you money. So

production planning, labor planning, compliance, food safety,

tracking, traceability, all the labor tasks. I think I mentioned labor, but

tasks and all the things somebody's doing on the farm. All of those things are

managed in Artemis, which in and of itself is a tool for the

farmer. But once you have your information in there, what

are all the other things that you need to do as a farm to really

run a business, right? I need to potentially secure capital. Maybe

I'm expanding, or maybe my terms on my real estate loan are not very good,

or maybe I want insurance plans that I want better rates. So

how can we use the information Artemis to get you access to that capital? Right?

We're de-risking inherently that investment for somebody. And so now,

years, 6 years later, now we connect with some lenders to help

offer those rates at more affordable, less risky rates to growers who

are expanding. But there's other areas in there, right? There's inputs. How can we

help connect to better supply of inputs? Can we get better rates on inputs?

It's really expensive right now to buy your seed or chem or whatever it is

that you're buying because— One, the market's

fragmented. It's smaller in the US, for example, than it is globally.

You're not operating hundreds of thousands of acres globally as an

operator. You're probably operating 1, maybe 5, 10, 15

facilities, but that max, it's just a little bit more fragmented. So you're paying higher

prices and there aren't that many seed companies who are making products for our

industry yet, which is a new exciting area. So can we almost like

a co-op pool those resources of people using Artemis to get access.

So this is a long story, but the short of it is I started becoming

obsessed with this idea that software could broaden the

industry, could help it expand, could help operators do it in a sustainable and

profitable way, frankly. And that we could really tap into some of these more

systemic, interesting ideas around

sustainability and traceability and food

safety. And some of the things that we as a system like to talk about

all the time, but are hard to actually execute in any meaningful way. And that

software, like, was the underlying infrastructure for all of that to happen.

So I started thinking about it a year before we started. We started the company

in 2015, I think April of 2015. And how

has the vision of what you thought the industry might need

changed over the years? That's a great question. Originally,

we thought that the biggest win for growers was

going to be getting And data from all of their fragmented

systems into one place. So kind of the operating system

and call it Twilio, if you will, of the farm, right?

The idea that you could pull climate control data into one place,

lighting data, fertigation, irrigation data, all this stuff into one place.

And were they doing this, was this all homegrown at the time? Yeah. So it's

still kind of the same, right? You have these legacy players that are leading the

way, Priva, Ritter. Hogendoorn, all these companies that are

Dutch. There's some small startups now globally that are kind

of entering the market, but you had these really big Dutch players in the climate

control space. And lighting was really Fluence at the time, now

Osram, or now part of Osram, Philips, GE

was sort of in the space a little bit. And then you had some, again,

some startups coming in, but you had these handful of systems that were all different.

Almost all the legacy hardware, did not have APIs at the time, right?

This is 6, 7 years ago, 10 years ago, right? There were not

really APIs, so there was no real way to connect to them. So a lot

of people had CSV types of downloads of data that you could

maybe push into a system if you built a little creative script to push something

in, right? So that's what the situation was. And what my, you

know, what our thesis at the time was, was if you kind of

brought all those CSVs in place, you could do interesting stuff with it. You could

do really nice reporting. You could do forecasting. You could do all these things. What

I didn't— that hasn't changed, by the way, like the thesis around that, you still

want to bring all of your information into one place. But that being the most

important thing, it wasn't, it turned out. What was the most important thing

was really taking all of the pen and paper processes that you had on the

farm and turning that digital because that led to direct top line,

bottom line improvements. So, that was things like who's doing what on the

farm. Are they actually doing what they say they're going to do, right? Did that

task actually get done? Did it not? So, one of our customers, we were

talking to them the other day, and they had this huge problem that people

just assumed stuff magically happened, but nobody had any accountability. And this is

a massive, massive operation, right? Yeah. This is a 20, 50-acre farm,

which in greenhouse world is big. And so, they had this

assumption, and therefore, things get done all the time. And then, what would happen, which

is great, is that You would just have

shorts or longs on product every once in a while because

people were moving or not moving or doing the thing or not doing the thing

at given times, and there was no accountability. And so that's something that we

focused on pretty dramatically, and then tying that into what

actually happens on the farm. So workflow and automating all of that and digitizing it

so there's a consistent record of it. What you can then do with all the

climate data is layer it So, if I know how a crop is

performing from a yield perspective, from a time perspective, then

you can layer on the climate data, the people data, and

start to really piece together what's happening on the farm. And so,

I don't know that that's a change assumption, except for that the priority definitely

changed being an integrator, which is not really what we do. We do

integrate with things, but we're not an integrator, to really the full

operating system of the farm and understanding all of that information

from seed to sort of end of life cycle of the plant. How much of

that is leveraging new technologies like IoT,

or, you know, where you have to like track the specific minutia of what's

moving where? How much of that is systems

or systematizing processes? I love geeking out on automations, and

then tools like Zapier fascinate me. So whenever, you know,

put processes in place that help a company be more efficient. I'm

wondering how many moving parts are— you thought were initially involved and how

that's grown over time. Yeah, so from an IoT standpoint, I

don't think we're there yet, frankly. And I always talk about this pretty openly in

the industry. There's, again, when you have a system, if you're a grower, right,

let's say you've been around for a long time, 30 years, 40 years,

you've already got your hardware and the lifecycle on that hardware is long. So

I'm not replacing my million-dollar system, my $2 million system,

probably frequently, right? And so, if you think about the

lifecycle of technology and where we're at from— if you've ever read Crossing the Chasm

or something like that, right? If you think about the technology lifecycle,

we're really early in IoT and

hardware from the industry's perspective. But we're also at the

late stage of that first wave of technology from 30,

40, 50 years ago. That will phase out because

technology dies, but it will phase out. We're not there yet. And this technology on

the early side hasn't yet caught up. And so we haven't like

bridged the gap between those 2 things yet, which is an interesting place to be

because what you have is the legacy players in the industry, the enterprise

operations are mostly on older hardware, most are old technology,

but starting to really bring new stuff in. They're bringing new software in, they're

bringing new. If they can integrate, they're trying to integrate, but it doesn't yet

talk, right? But they're bringing all this new stuff in from a workflow standpoint, from

an automation standpoint too. You know, you're getting a lot of new automated harvesting,

automated seeding, all these types of things. And then on the flip side, you have

some of these newer operations which are starting new and just continuing to

grow. So you have a dichotomy in the industry about automation. So,

you know, from an IoT standpoint, I don't think we're there yet because we haven't

built a solution for that old technology. So either the old technology has to phase

out completely, or you have to build a solution for getting that

information out from older solutions. So that's one. 2 though on

that is that you have to think about the dynamic of those companies where the

incentive is for them to tie in, right? So

if I'm Dutch horticulture company and my competitive advantage is in,

and I'm directly competitive, by the way, with like only 2 companies and it

is highly competitive, then Where is my incentive? Well, it's probably

not with opening up to other things. If, and like I can take

the closed route and I can just beat everybody

one at a time, right? I can just beat everybody down one at a time.

The flip side, obviously I would love if everybody saw their competitive advantage as

opening up and you are seeing this a little bit more in the attitude and

you're seeing APIs come onto the market and things like this, which is great. But

it's still the first step of that. We're still really early there. So, it's more

of the Apple approach than the sort of Microsoft approach to things right now,

but that's going to change. It is changing. I should, you know, give the industry

some credit in that it is thinking a lot more forward about how these systems

can all play in. How does that also play into the need

for new skill sets to work with all these

systems? I think, you know, the job description for, you know,

CEA, for positions in CEA, probably looks drastically different

now than they did, you know, 5 to 10 years ago. Yeah. So, I do

these live talks on LinkedIn and just was talking to one of our

customers and they are a database

admin, data engineer type role

for a farm, right? And that didn't exist in

any, like nobody would be thinking about automating database syncing with ecosystems.

Yep. And it's in a past life. And so, that's happening. So, there's on-farm

roles that are evolving of how do we think about our data on farm? How

do we think about our technology? And it's evolving from more of

an IT professional to more of a

data-centric, more of an understanding and appreciation probably

for these more modern technologies, things like SaaS, things like that. So, that's

happening on the farm. There's also the companies themselves, right? So, you now

have what used to be an industry that was mostly ag professionals, which heavily

research-based, right? You have lots of scientists, you have lots of people who understand

genetics, You have really heavy focus on that, which is still happening. It's just,

again, everything's always becoming a little bit more innovative. But now you

have technology companies coming on. And so now you've got kind of this

two-framed attitude. You've got people who are saying, hey, we're Silicon Valley type

company. I guess I have to say type company now because we're all remote, right?

So a Silicon Valley air quote company. Yeah. Maybe they're in

Silicon Valley, maybe they're in Miami, who knows these days? But you've got these

startups that are saying, hey, we can hire the best engineers in the

world and we're going to build a tech company that just sells to ag. You've

got, on the other hand, companies that say, no, we're going to put all the

ag, the best ag people together, and we're going to build technology for farmers,

but we know the market better. The approach that we took at Artemis is blend

the two together, right? We're going to say, we're going to put the best of

both worlds together, and that's going to bridge the gap, and it's going to help

us, one, develop technology faster, because that's That's the beauty of startups,

right, in Silicon Valley. And 2, but we're going to understand our customer and we're

not going to build fast just for the sake of building fast. We're going to

build good products, get them out to the market fast, and work with our customers

to always improve. It's sort of that hybrid approach. I'll give you an example

of one of our engineers. She worked in commercial nursery

operations in Oregon and then studied

engineering, went back and studied computer engineering. Mm-hmm. Came to us as an

intern, is working her way up through the engineering ranks. With us and has been

with us after she listens to this, but I think she's been with us about

4 years and she's sort of been growing into this nice senior engineering role

with us that is a true sort of Silicon Valley level engineering role,

but came to us from a totally non-traditional background, came from horticulture into the

space. And I think there's room for that. That's what's really exciting is there's room

for, I want to blend the 2 things together in some capacity,

whether I'm coming at it one way or the other, thinking about how you can

approach it Yeah, it does feel like there's going to be

more of a need for these hybrid skill sets for

people. And those are the people that are, and also the ability to work well

with ambiguity, I think at times is just to understand what the future challenges could

possibly look like. Oh yeah. I think this is super interesting to me as a

founder in particular, as I build out the team. And it's something that I've really

worked to, to both encourage and reduce at the

same time. This is funny, but you try and have as little ambiguity for the

team as possible, right? Have a roadmap, have a plan, but at the same time,

it's a startup. Everything's gonna change all the time. And we as founders

know that really well. But especially if you're thinking about

building a team where people haven't worked at startups before,

which is gonna be the case in ag, is not everybody's gonna have worked at

a startup. You have to think about how to set those

expectations well and think about ambiguity is not something most

people are used to in a job. Yeah. Right? You have a career path, you

have a ladder, you've got objectives, you maybe have quotas, you have this sort of

set path for yourself in a career. So the idea of breaking

all of that and saying, we want to be

comfortable with a product roadmap where we can throw everything out the

window and pull new things in as we go, like

that's a wonky thing. And unless you've worked at startups or in the tech industry

before, that's not a comfortable feeling for a lot of

people. And so, creating an environment where you set

expectations that you can do that, you also have roadmaps, you have

product plans, you have company plans, right? You have these things, but you balance

the ambiguity with semblance of, here's where we're going, right? Like, here is

where we're going. How we get there might change, but at least where we're going

is pretty clear. That being said, even sometimes that gets thrown out the window too

in a startup, right? And that if you have to pivot, and there's companies who

have pivoted really well, But you have to allow that flexibility. So, I

think that's even more important in our industry where

you're not going to always be building a team that is 100% people who came

from startup. Yeah. So, as you think about the

next 3 to 5 years, and I know it's hard to predict, especially with the

landscape changing so quickly, and I'm sure your plans for this

year were dramatically different in February of 2020

than they had to evolve to. So, that being said, how do you think

about what's to come in terms of what you're working on at Artemis and what

has you excited? Yeah. So, I probably don't foresee this changing too much,

actually. The long-term is usually easier to plan sometimes than short-term, but

our plan hasn't really changed long-term since we started the company, which has been,

again, great and wonderful to work on. Where

we're really excited, what gets me really excited is that we're sort of finally at

a point as a company and an industry, frankly, where we

can work together to really physically expand this industry. So I talked

about this a little bit earlier, but we have been working

to develop this product that people love, that people really enjoy working with, that

really solves a lot of the challenges that you have on the farm. We took

last year to really focus on building up into the enterprise operation, so that was

a big focus of last year irrespective of what happened with the global

pandemic that we've got going on. We all still need to eat, which is It's

a luxury that we have in this industry, right? So we moved upstream to a

lot of these larger enterprise operations last year. And now,

for the next few years, we're going to be really focused on how we can

not just continue delivering that value to growers, but

also keep working towards offering these new financial products to offer

some new other things that I can't talk too much detail about yet, but that

have physically expand what we can do to a grower, and then also

expand the industry and help new growers get on the market faster. help

people expand their operations. So that's gonna be a big focus for us over the

next few years. That's exciting. And is there a company blog where you keep

fans of Artemis up to date on what's to come and, and what's, what's happening?

Yeah, absolutely. At artemisag.com, we've got a blog right on our site,

which is where there's a lot of good updates. But we also do 2 things.

One, we have these live chats that we do on LinkedIn,

which I highly recommend checking out. We usually interview a grower or

business owner in some capacity in this space. once a week and we have these

chats. And so that's a good place to hear about what's going on in the

industry. And then I also have a personal newsletter where I update a lot of—

I build in public, right? So I talk a lot about the startup journey and

things. So you can also find that on Substack. It's called Snippets.

And so snippets.substack.com. Yeah, I saw that. The whole

newsletter economy is— that's another fascinating industry that I've

been interested in that I followed because of podcasting and now we're starting

the Vertical Farming Weekly, so that's its own rabbit hole. Yeah, you hear about the

whole economy there as well. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I mean, for me,

I, like I said earlier, I'm really challenged by writing, and so it's really hard

for me to write in with brevity and clarity,

and to do it fast is hard. So I try and do this biweekly newsletter

and just share some of the stuff that's going on, some of the things that

I'm learning and thinking about, which has been a lot of fun. And it's been

growing nicely, which has been a lot of fun to interact with other people who

are experiencing some of the same things that I'm experiencing as a founder and to

just talk about them openly. Also another one of those skill sets as an entrepreneur

and as a founder that probably behooves you to try to learn and get better

at communication. I think everybody, I think everybody should be good at writing. Like anybody

who is, you don't have to be stellar, right? But just having that base set

of being good at writing is, yeah, you definitely wanna have

that. Just a little bit before we wrap up, wanna talk about your

role at X Factor Ventures. Mm-hmm. And when did you

engage with them and Why is that something that's important to you? Because I think

one of the interesting things that I read about is the focus on investments in

companies, not only with billion-dollar market opportunities, but that have at least one female

founder, which I thought was great. Yeah. So X Factor Venture is a really cool

fund. It's very standard venture capital fund in the way that you think about the

way that it's structured and how we think about investments, right? You're looking for these

billion-dollar opportunities. We're thinking about things that are going to have

a really dynamic impact on various markets.

And the way that we look for returns and things. Really untraditional in the

way that we are structured is that all of our

investors are also full-time founders. And so there are a

bunch of different ways these funds can be structured in the market. You hear a

lot maybe about the scouts that's been a rise in venture capital in the past

few years where big funds like Sequoia might have founders

who are also scouts. And the idea being founders by nature

tend to have really interesting deal flow because we see We meet other founders and

other founders come to us and we interact all the time. And you don't really

realize it until you're like, that person, I would invest in

that person everything I've got. And of course, us as founders,

we have no money. We never do until you do, right? And so,

you're like, ah, man, I really wish I could invest in this person. And so,

what X Factor did was instead of setting up a scout fund, we said, let's

set up an actual fund where it's gonna be managed by the founders. But it's

going to utilize the infrastructure of bigger funds because founders

also don't have the time to do the infrastructure stuff that comes within a real

full-time job as an investor. And the idea being you could capitalize on this

deal flow that founders inherently run into. So we have a lot of

partners for a small fund. Usually you'll have like one partner for the size of

fund we are, but we have, I don't know, 14, 20, some big

amount of partners because I have a full-time job. I

have to run my own company. But, or, and we also, the other

thing that's really interesting about us is that we invest in female-founded companies.

So, like you said, we have to have at least one female founder. It could

be mixed gender, you know, whatever kind of founding team you want, but it

has to have at least one female founder, one woman on the founding team. And

that's been a lot of fun too. I think the most interesting thing has been

how diverse the, our investment portfolio has been

when it comes to industry. I think a lot of people wrongly make the assumption

that, oh, they're investing in women, so it's gonna be all femtech type things, which

we do have some, a lot of femtech in our portfolio, but we've done a

quantum computing deal. Like I've done a quantum computing deal, synthetic CBD

pharmaceutical play. So there's, it sort of really runs the

gamut from B2B enterprise to femtech

and B2C type stuff. So that's been a lot of fun. And

it's been great working with all the founders that we've had the chance to work

on. So I've got, I think, 6 companies that I've invested in.

That again, really run the gamut when it comes to industry and, and what they're

doing. We are early stage, so we'd like to see things really, really early.

Pre-seed and seed is the sort of investment stage that we look at. So we

love things that are in that like idea, very limited

traction. Maybe they have revenue, but really early stage. And that must be

its own set of learnings, early days as a

VC and early mistakes and just a whole nother

industry to sort of master it, which would take a lifetime to do. Yeah, we're

lucky because we have great people like Chips, who's with Flybridge, who

started the fund X-Factor. And so he

has mastered it, right? He has been doing this his whole career. And so

he's also a partner. And then, I mean, a lot of the founders are now

pretty successful VCs because they sold their companies. And so they sort

of are investing in the second wind. And I wouldn't, you know, no,

we are not All masters at this, right? Like, that's absolutely not the goal, but

there is something to say about understanding the founder and

the founder mentality and trying to find that

and invest in that, right? And that is something that you can do as a

founder because you know what the day-to-day is like. And so you can kind of

recognize that the other stuff comes, right? The other stuff, as an

investor, you're making a bet that in the early stage, at least, you're making a

bet that the market is massive. Really, really, really massive. You're

making a bet that the founding team is a good founding team, that the founders

are good, smart, good, have the mentality, right? All those

things. And that, that founding team can connect the dots, right? Can get, can build

something really interesting in that big market. It's a, that's a

wide, that's a wide bet to make, right? But if you can

at least get those things, then the rest should

follow, right? Like, and something interesting can be built. But obviously the

rate of success of most of these funds, pretty low, right? The success of

startups is pretty low. So you're just trying to, I always make the

analogy of having like dimes on a table and each one of those dimes is

a little bit of risk and you're like trying to take them off one at

a time. And, you know, other dimes come on the table, you're trying to take

them off and put more dimes on, but like, you're just trying to make a

bet that you can guess better than somebody else can, that, that you

can understand the risk. And what's interesting is that as a founder,

there's things, you know, having experienced it that you can relate to and

have those conversations with other founders that people who haven't gone through the founder's journey,

I think, can't relate to. I think, which I think makes it special. I think

that's the really beautiful thing about the fund actually, is that the

founders can tap into— we're not, we don't take board seats,

right? We're not the investor investor. We're not leading rounds. We're not

that kind of investor. And what's nice about that is they can tap into

not just the person who invested in them, but the entire network of founders that

are with X Factor to really have an operational sounding board.

And so everything from, I had one of our founders ask, text me for

a distribution agreement because they just didn't want to spend the legal money to do

it. So I sent them mine, things like that, to strategically thinking about

new markets or something. So it's a lot of stuff that we've, if I haven't

gone through it, somebody else on the team has gone through it. So it's an

opportunity to tap into that, which is great to help stop making the mistakes that

we made, right? I'll have to introduce you to one of my clients, Sylvia Ma.

She has a podcast called She Invests. She focuses solely on conversations

with female investors. Oh, that's awesome. That would be great.

Just a couple last questions. What's a tough question you've had to ask

yourself recently? Where do I want to live? Good

one. It is, right? So my husband and I are definitely thinking about what comes

next for us from a living standpoint, and especially as things have gone fully remote.

We were 90% remote anyway as a a team going into

COVID. And, but now personally, it creates an opportunity to

live somewhere else. And so, I don't know if we're going to stay in New

York. I don't know if we're going to stay in Pennsylvania where we're currently at.

I don't know if we're going to move elsewhere. So, you know, if the mayor

of Miami wants to welcome us down there for a meeting, we'd probably happily take

it. Right. So, we just don't know where we're going to live yet and where

we're going to keep building. And that's been a really fun thing to think

about. What's going on with Miami? Cause I keep hearing like it's— Listen, I

keep hearing it's the next place to be. So, I think we're going to have

to go check it out. I've had a, I don't know if you're familiar with

Upstream Map. It's a sort of a networking iPhone-only app, but there's been a lot

of VC conversations on there and the founders. I think all of Silicon Valley moved

to Miami. Yeah. It's so funny cuz a lot of the conversations are

originating from Miami, which I think is fascinating. Wherever there's

warm weather, right? Yeah. But it's very warm if you've not gone to

Miami. Yeah. Yeah. What do you miss most from New York? Uh,

bagels. Yes. Like obvious, obvious easy answer is bagels. Like

there's just nowhere in the world that you can get a New York bagel. I

don't care how close to New York you are or what imitation

somebody's trying to hawk you, but you cannot get a good

bagel outside of New York. That's so funny. That's the one

thing— pizza and an everything bagel. Yeah, an everything bagel. A

good untoasted everything bagel. Can't find it. Well,

on that note, everyone's mouths are watering. Go get your bagels.

Go get your bagels. Thank you so much for this conversation. I was really looking

forward to it, especially with the background you had and the experience you had. I'm

glad we were able to connect and just, yeah, just learning more about the industry

every day and the challenges you've faced and overcome. And I

think that being just a spokesperson for this industry,

I think is a great thing. So I appreciate you taking the time to share

your story. It's been a real pleasure. This was a lot of fun.

Where's the best place for folks? You mentioned the blog. Anywhere else for folks to

connect with you and Artemis? Yeah, we're on all social media forums, so you can

just find us at Artemis Ag on social media. And then my personal is my

name, Allison Coff. So follow us. You can probably reach out to me directly on

any of those platforms. Yeah. Thanks, Allison. Thank you. Thanks

again to Allison for coming on the show and sharing her story. As always, full

show notes are available at verticalfarmingpodcast.com. Special thanks to our

season 3 title sponsor, Cultivated. If you're looking into a vertical farm and don't know

where to start, reach out to them today. Best of all, their service is free

for you because they work on behalf of their partners. Learn more at

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Tune in next week for my conversation with Robert Lang, CEO of

PharmOne. As a reminder, if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a

review at ratethispodcast.com/vfb. We'll be sure to to share it with

more listeners. Thanks for listening. read those out on future episodes. Until we meet again

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

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