These smart farms are 100 times more productive than traditional agriculture
45:38 Share

This is Most Innovative Companies from Fast Company, where we speak to visionary founders to understand how they think, how they innovate, and what lessons they may have for you and the businesses that you run in every shape and size. I'm James Vincent, a founding partner at Foundr. Before we get into the podcast this week, we have great news. At the Fast Company Innovation Festival on September 19th to the 22nd, so coming up,

Brian Chesky from Airbnb is going to join me on stage as a part of the Most Innovative Company podcast and also as a part of this wonderful event. To find out more about this event, go to fastcompany.com.

This is a story about being a relentless innovator. And just an anecdote from my time working with Steve Jobs at Apple. Every week for 11 years, we would go up and see him every Wednesday from 1 till 3 and talk about ideas for storytelling around all of those great products. And most weeks, it was pretty good.

Some weeks it was freaking awesome. You know, we sold the Silhouette, sold Mac versus PC. But every now and again, it was just a bad week. And one week was a particularly bad week in that we've thought three big ideas with

30 examples of each one. And each one of them just kind of went flat. And as we were walking out the room, Steve was like, can you stop back for a minute and close the door on the boardroom and sat down? And he said, I just want to tell you a story, James. Henry Kissinger, who was the Secretary of State in the early 70s, had commissioned a report from a senior analyst around Vietnam.

The guy, you know, is a deep domain expert. He writes an incredibly comprehensive report. It goes in. And two days later, it comes back and there's handwritten on it from Henry. Is this the best you can do? So the guy's like, oh, man, wow, maybe I missed the Russian angle or the Chinese angle. So he goes at it again, spends a few more days, really like super thorough, sends it back.

And two days later, he comes back. Is this the best you can do? He's like, wait a second. What am I missing? Oh, maybe I've missed some historical context or the role of Cambodia or whatever it was. And he rewrites some sections. And he's like, OK. And he puts it in. And Henry sends back for the third time, is this the best you can do? And he's like, yeah, this is the best you can do. So Henry says, OK, then I'll read it then. And I think in hearing that story from Steve, because that was really all he said to me

The lesson I took from that was take things to a place where they're the best they can be before you share them with me. And so I started to every, I don't know, two or three months, I would cancel a mark on the night before because I felt like it wasn't the best we could do as a team. That's kind of the bar that you set for yourself as a relentless innovator. I think, you know, during that time, Apple and with Steve, that was what he expected the team around him was to be a relentless innovator, was to, is this the best you can do?

And I think a great example of a relentless innovator is my guest today, Irving Fain from Bowery. And I'm really excited to get into conversation with him. I'm super excited to have Irving Fain from Bowery here today. They are revolutionizing the way that we make food. And indeed, maybe even more than that, the supply chain in its totality. And they've raised, I don't know, half a trillion dollars, I think. Anyway, a significant amount of money.

to do just that. So Irving, great to have you. Really good to be here. I'm going to go all the way back to the basics just to make sure that everybody in the Fast Company community understands what vertical farming is. So just describe to me what a Bowery is. So we build smart warehouse scale indoor farms that we locate close to the communities we serve.

We stack our crops from the floor to the ceiling under lights that mimic the spectrum of the sun. We grow in a totally controlled and contained environment. So 365 days of the year, independent of weather, independent of seasonality. It's reliable, consistent supply of high-quality, fresh, protective produce. Our product is grown completely pesticide-free, completely agrochemical-free food. It's 100 times plus more productive than a square foot of farmland.

And all the while we use a very small fraction of water compared to traditional agriculture. And what makes this all work and come together is first of all, robotics and automation that we design and develop. And then the Bowery operating system, which is software, it's hardware, it's computer vision, it's AI, it's sensor and controls, and it monitors, maintains, and optimize the entirety of our operations.

So in essence, we've taken what is a supply chain that unfolds over thousands and thousands of miles and a number of different players, and we've brought it into a single building close by the communities we serve where we can deliver a product in a day or so versus weeks or months of time. First time I met you was like nine months ago. And I remember coming and hanging out with you for an hour.

And, you know, I had some conversation around lettuce and warehouses and vertical farming. But what I really heard was an aspiration to make a systemic change in the system, right? And to like re-evaluate the system. It felt to me as if the lettuce was a prototype for greater things. Not that the lettuce isn't important, but it's the first step. I don't know whether it's too big to say this, but as books were to Amazon, is lettuce a

to where Bowery's going? - First of all, I'd say, may we only be so lucky to build a company as large, as important, as enduring as Amazon is. There's a long way to go from where we are today to reaching that point. But there's no question that there's an analog there in the sense that you have to start somewhere in every journey, right? As they say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

And on top of that, you know, I'm a big believer that no matter what business you're building, no matter what company you're working on, focus is critical. And, you know, the way focus manifests itself for Bowery was around what we were deciding to actually grow in the beginning. And so just because we felt confident that ultimately we could grow a very large and wide variety of crops didn't mean that that was the right place to start.

And what we needed to do was find the right point of focus to develop the technology and the platform itself where we could ultimately expand from there. I think the other piece of the puzzle here for us is this has always been about a much bigger challenge. And, you know, if you look around the world today and it's actually...

for me just personally been really shocking over the last few months just to see the consistent and constant drumbeat of headlines around drought conditions in different parts of not just the US but the world crop shortages in a number of different areas you know loss of water and key agricultural areas I mean the unpredictability and the uncertainty that we're living

amongst right now is only becoming more acute. And we need to be thinking now in a world that is consistently and constantly changing where the components of our ecosystem that we used to be able to rely on may not be so reliable. What's the solution and what's the system that we need moving forward?

And the focus at Bowery really is looking at this and saying, hey, wherever food is needed, we can grow it. And how do you provide a resilient and scalable food supply chain, not just for today, but for tomorrow? There's an adjacency part to Bowery's, right? I think I read in the Financial Times, you had that great article in it. One of the things you said was a Bowery for every city.

And so is that local global thing a part of the dimension of the need for Bowery? We have over the last set of decades made an understandable and globalized switch in the way we manufacture and procure goods because certain parts of the world were more efficient, faster, cheaper in producing certain either the complete good overall or parts of a good that can then be shipped somewhere else and the good could be built.

And that made a lot of sense in a world where you could trust and rely on transportation. You could trust and rely on the geopolitical relationships that underlie the trade itself that we're counting on. And you could trust and rely on the system itself. And what was initially pretty shocking to people around COVID, especially, you know, is specific to what we do at Bowery, was that

We take for granted that when we walk into a grocery store, what we want is sitting on the shelf. And we take that for granted in the Western world or the developed world in general. And all of a sudden, people started walking into stores and saying, oh, wow, I can't get the food that I want and that I buy on a regular basis. And everybody started to realize how dependent on not only other parts of this country in the U.S., but parts of the world we are for the food that we're consuming.

And now people are starting to think about regional resiliency and supply chain resiliency and wondering like, how do I make sure my country or my region is supported and the people who live in that region are supported with what they need. And essentially what we do at Bowery is just that.

We've built a model that is resilient to the uncertainties and the vagaries of climate change, essentially. And it's also, in its essence, simplifying substantially what is a complex, drawn-out, and a supply chain with many, many different individuals along the way.

And we collapse that supply chain down into a single building, very close to the communities that we actually serve. And so we can deliver a product in a day or so versus weeks or months of time. It's a higher quality product. It tastes better. It's more nutritious. And it's grown a lot more sustainably. And you can trust and rely on it with surety of supply no matter what's happening around you.

Because we went so meta, I want to go really small, which is but super important because I don't know if anybody that hasn't tried Bowery lettuce should try it because it tastes absolutely delicious. We did a side by side taste, a blind tasting at the office and you guys killed it. But I have a very sort of straightforward and simple question. Like, don't you need soil to grow lettuce that tastes that good? Is it representing the

the best possible climate and using technology? Is that an oversimplification of what you're doing in there? If you step back and look at agriculture, you know, over the last 10,000 years, so you think about the, you know, all the way back to the Tigris and Euphrates where we were realizing that we could take seeds and plant them and we could be stationary and live in one single place instead of nomadically wander around to find our next food source. But

We've spent, in essence, the last 10,000 years in our agricultural lives trying to manage against a set of external variables which are out of our control. And so what we're doing at Bowery is actually flipping that equation entirely on its head. And all those externalities that are uncontrollable are actually completely controllable in our environment. And so what we're able to give the crops, you asked, is it the perfect environment? I think there's actually a fair question is what is perfect?

And if you actually talk to chefs, you know, Dan Barber will talk about this, that sort of the imperfections is what makes food great. And I don't disagree with him. In fact, I think that sometimes like the discoveries you can make when you have a particularly hot year or a particularly wet year can be delicious, but that doesn't mean they have to be random from nature. And so what I mean by that is we can create and control all the variables of crop needs.

And so you asked about soil specifically, you actually don't need soil because what soil really is outside is it's a conduit by which plants take up water and they take up nutrients. And there's a very important biome that lives around the roots themselves in the soil.

We have the ability to give the plants the light they need, to give them the nutrients they need, to give them the water they need. And we also can create and we monitor a really healthy microbiome around the root structures in the plants. And we eliminate a lot of those pathogenic challenges that emerge outside.

We can still stress a crop by giving it less water, giving it more light. We can, all the types of interesting components that can create diversity of flavor, even beyond what we already have are possible.

It just can be controlled versus completely randomized. That's incredible. A new variants of lettuce and other foods in the future of Bowery. Should we be excited about the things that you're going to discover you can create? I think this is one of the most interesting for me parts of what we do at Bowery, which is

Back to sort of what we've been talking about, if you look at seed selection outside, it's really driven by a few variables. And this is why people talk about the narrowing down of biodiversity so substantially. The things we care about when we select our seeds are, does the crop resist drought? Does the crop resist pests? And does it transport long distances? So self-selecting out in the world. Yeah, this is what matters if you're a farmer. You have to have drought resistance, pest resistance, and transportation resistance so the crop shows up and it looks good.

And none of those factors impact us at Bauer. And so when we're not impacted by those factors, we have partnerships when we work with seed companies around the world to look in their seed banks decades back to find interesting flavors and interesting varieties and interesting crops that

we may not actually have tried before only because outside they don't fit these kind of three core rubrics that are used to select our seeds. One of the parts that we just launched our strawberries recently and we launched them in a two pack. So there were two different berries, a garden berry and a wild berry. And part of what was so fun about that is

And listening and talking, people were like, wow, I had no idea you could get two strawberries that had such a different taste. A strawberry, right? We think of like, oh, that's a strawberry. Oh, that's an iceberg. That there's a sort of one monotype of individual crop. Whereas there's actually just an extraordinary amount of biodiversity that exists in this world in general. We just, for the most part, don't get to experience it. So the first time I walked into a research farm and they're working on strawberries, there's 24 varieties laid out. I went and tested all these 24 strawberries and each of them had a different taste.

different texture. And so you just think about like what's available to us as consumers that we just haven't been able to try. And so one of the core focus for us is like, how do you help not only democratize access to quality produce, but how do you make sure you're introducing people to produce that tastes like what produce is really meant to taste like and used to taste like? So, okay. There's a bunch of vertical farming companies. What are you doing there that's different to the other guys?

We have really believed in technology as a core component of our business and what we're building from the very earliest days. And so part of that manifests itself in the growth system itself and the robotics and all the automation that we design and develop inside of our farms are completely automated at this point. The other piece that's in

incredibly important to us is what we call the Bowery operating system. And the Bowery OS is, it's the brains of our farm. It's actually not even the brains of our farm, it's the brains of our entire operation. It is our central nervous system in many respects.

And it is a combination of software and hardware and computer vision and artificial intelligence and sensors and controls that manages and maintains and optimizes everything that happens in our operation from before a seed's ever planted to when our product is delivered to one of our partner's distribution centers.

And so the first place the operating system manifests itself is inside of the growth space. And so we're collecting millions of data points in real time. And the data impacts the quality and the health and the yield of our crops.

And then we have a plant vision system, which is taking photos of crops in real time. And it runs those photos through deep learning algorithms that our team developed. And we can both understand what's happening to that plant, but also predict very accurately what will happen to that crop. And then all that data gets run through other machine learning algorithms. And our system says, based on what we see and what we expect, what tweaks and changes around that specific crop do we want to make? And those changes get pushed out and automatically adjusted in real time.

So you have this recursive, very fast learning loop that happens without any human involvement, without intuition or judgment. And it's constantly working across not only one farm, but the entire network of farms.

And so the more farms that come online, the more opportunities for learning and optimization emerge. And so in many ways, we're building this distributed network of farms. Every new farm benefits from the network that's come before it. That farm then starts contributing data and the network itself gets stronger.

So as you keep going then, so back to the sort of, you know, first step, you know, is you're really building an operating system that will be more, will be iterative, will keep learning to get better and better and better. And as you grow, you'll be able to figure out how to,

create the maximum best possible environment for growing all kinds of food? Like, where does it stop? So strawberries is great. Love that. And I love lettuce on a good day, you know, but I'm still a little hungry after that. Like, where do you go after this? One of the things people say, oh, well, what can you grow, you know, hydroponically? And the answer is you can actually grow everything. So people go to Epcot Center and see, you know, they're growing trees. Now, not everything is going to make sense economically.

But when we think about the crops that are good candidates for what we're doing at Bowery, it's a trillion dollars a year globally in market opportunity and growing. So it's an enormous opportunity. And so it certainly stands far, far beyond lettuces and herbs, fruiting crops and berries. It goes into root vegetables and tubers. It goes into mushrooms. I mean, there's so many places that you can take this forward from where we are today. And going back to what we said earlier, focus is critical.

Making sure we focus on the system and the technology. And because that technology is so important to both variety of what we can grow and the economics of the way the business works,

We've really focused on building core technology that we know not only works till today, but that will scale till tomorrow. Because back to where we started this whole conversation around the mission and where we're focused, like if we're going to truly make an impact on a problem that really is global in scale and is getting even more substantial and challenging, then

we need to make sure we have a system that not just works in the mid-Atlantic of the US or works in the tri-state area, but it works not only across the US, but it works across the world. And that's what we have. I want to go back. I want to talk about Irving for a minute, if you don't mind. Who is this guy and where did he come from? Providence, Rhode Island, as I remember.

You know, you did a bunch of different stuff, right? Before 2015, I think you started Bowery around that time. Before that, you were in finance for a minute. You did analytical software, which I'm guessing has helped you a little bit. And so I kind of think of you as a relentless innovator.

But I'd love to hear sort of where did you come from? How did you become the person that has just so brilliantly articulated the potential future of securing the food supply? If I think about kind of the through line to today, it's certainly just entrepreneurship and maybe innovation. Though I think innovation maybe gives me more credit in the early days than I deserve because I'm not sure –

One of my early entrepreneurial endeavors was buying plastic animals at the corner store for a dime and selling them for a quarter on the playground. So I don't know how innovative that is, but it was lucrative at eight years old or however old I was at that time. I don't know where it came from or why, but I've just always been interested in creating and building and solving, again, problems. In quotes, some of these were not major problems. Right.

I don't know what drew me to it, but it was always the thing I loved. And I always tell people, like, if anyone who knew me when I was younger would look at me today and say, of course, this is the seat he's in and what he's doing, they would probably be slightly surprised by the farming angle of it all. Because I certainly didn't grow up as a farmer, nor have I spent my life farming. I've really spent my life creating. And I knew this was always the path I wanted to be on. And

Even my stint in finance was focused on building a set of skills that I knew would be valuable to me moving forward. I was this naive 21-year-old kid and I said, "How does one learn business?" And this was when sort of dot-com had come crashing down, the tech world looked like nothing like it does today. And so I said, "Oh."

I'll go to Wall Street. That's how I'll learn business. I'll work at a bank. And so I'm not sure I learned business from that, but I did learn a lot. And even interestingly, people say, oh, you must regret that now. I don't regret it at all because I learned a lot of great lessons there, including that it wasn't the destiny for me. It wasn't where I was going to spend my life. And from that point on, I've always, since I was young, believed technology and innovation can solve hard and important problems. Yep.

I spent time building iHeartRadio. It was there when the iPhone came out and this notion of an app was appearing. We said, hey, we've got a great asset. We can do something with this. I ended up building iHeartRadio, which people have taken long after me and built it into just an incredible product and platform. From there, I started an enterprise software business and

I was so energized by just building of this business and the culture of the company and just the creation process. And that drove me for a while. Six years in, though, I picked up my head and I didn't have the personal passion for the problem itself. And

It was clear to me like the innovation piece of it's important, but the passion for the problem itself has to matter as well. And so I knew that what I did next needed to be something that not only I cared about personally, but it needed to be solving a problem that I thought had a much greater societal impact than just the folks who were on my cap table. I want to push into this because I feel like you're, you're, you're,

in a good way, an outsider in the industry. And I think sometimes that's hard to do from within an industry. And so I felt like maybe you brought all of the skills from somewhere else where you were like, okay, I've figured out technology and I'm looking at analytics software and I know that what could happen. And I want to solve a really, really big, important issue. And sometimes it takes someone from outside an industry to see the opportunity and to come in. Do you consider yourself a sort of outside innovator?

that could kind of have a refreshing look, an industry that was maybe struggling to scale because it was a little too stuck in its niche, as it were? So I would absolutely say I'm an outsider when it comes to agriculture overall. I mean, there's people who spend their entire life working in and around agriculture, but that's an advantage. But you have to be thoughtful about how you play that advantage. They say all the time that ignorance and naivety is actually...

an advantage for an entrepreneur. And it's something that you can use to your benefit if you're thoughtful about it. Because when you're too deep into an industry or too deep into a problem, it's very easy to start to see all the reasons why new solutions can't work or won't work or haven't worked in the past. And being sort of unconstrained by all the prior experiences and endeavors allows you to run through walls

or at least attempt to that most people in their right mind would never even try from that industry. The counter to that though is completely ignoring sort of incumbent wisdom and knowledge and experience can also be a foolish decision. And so it's about, in my mind, finding like the right balance between where can your outsider perspective allow you to take chances and make choices that others wouldn't

And where can you avoid falling into just obvious pits or into obvious walls that you won't break through by leveraging and respecting knowledge from folks who've been in that space for a long time? And so I spent a year and a half just testing and working on different

and possibilities to how we can build Bowery. And I started the whole endeavor looking at agriculture broadly, and I learned anything I could. I read everything I could. I watched everything I could. I talked to anyone I could. And as I narrowed down closer into what we're building today at Bowery,

I didn't only want to talk to people who were excited about it. In fact, I was more interested in talking to people who were skeptical of it. And so I made sure I sought out a number of folks who were convinced it couldn't work. Right. Because I wanted to know why they were convinced it couldn't work.

And maybe they were right. And it was really important to understand both sides of this. And it can be easy as an entrepreneur to have confirmation bias. And if you are too much of an outsider, sometimes that confirmation bias can just get fueled because especially an idea like this, it sounds good. It makes sense, right? People are like, oh yeah, of course that'll work. Of course that'll work. And so, you know, I sat down with professors and other folks who've done research to say, this is an impossibility for A, B, or C reason. It's interesting because sometimes

We've actually proven a lot of that research not to be accurate over time. But I'm glad that we entertained and understood it because it helped make sure we approach the problem in as measured of a perspective as we could and balance that incumbent knowledge with that sort of outsider relentlessness.

So this whole podcast is around innovation. And the people at Read Fast Company are in all kinds of companies. They're in startups. They're in bigger companies. They're in innovation roles. They're CEOs. They're

And so, you know, one of the questions I'm consistently asking is like, how do you think about innovation and how do you create maybe a specific question for you within Bowery? How do you ensure that innovation is built into the culture? It's an interesting question from two sides. Like the first piece of it is like,

We sort of can't help but be innovative in the sense that what we do doesn't have a precedent. To be fair, it does in the sense that, A, people have been growing food indoors under lights actually since the 80s. NASA was doing this in the 80s because they were trying to figure out how we were going to grow food when we were interplanetary. We're going to science the shit out of that, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was a...

But it actually started as a bit of a space race between the U.S. and Russia because Russia was trying to figure out how to grow food. And we said, well, we got to figure this out too. And so it's a bit of a sort of a Cold War legacy in that regard. But then what happened is universities picked it up and labs picked it up. It was just economically didn't make any sense. Yeah.

So that's number one. The other piece of this is greenhouses. So greenhouses have been growing food indoors and under glass for the better part of 100 years. One thing that's interesting, the Netherlands are the number two global food exporter in the world behind the US. And if you think about how large the Netherlands are, it's quite a feat. Why? It's because they've optimized greenhouse technology for such a long period of time. So I say there wasn't a precedent. To be fair, there were...

folks who have paved the way for us to take the next step forward. But the step we're taking itself, moving indoor vertical farming, does not have a real precedent. So it was sort of inherently innovative in its endeavor, right? Like the operating system, the automation, the way we're growing, building the brand that we're building is new. But that said-

It's new and then it isn't, right? Meaning it's new and then it's all of a sudden the thing you do. And there's this interesting aspect of organizations, and I've been thinking a lot about this lately, which is, you know, the bigger an organization becomes, there's at some point this implicit resistance to change.

People like consistency, and they like routine, they like habituation patterns. It's really critical to ensure that there's constant change occurring within an organization. Change can occur on a product level. Change can occur on a process level. It can work in all different ways. We've recently made a number of changes internally to how we're working.

and the way we're organizing around different bodies of work. And so that will ultimately pull through, I hope, to innovation in the work itself. But it started with the process and the way the work is happening.

And so I think innovation can fly at a number of different levels, but it requires intention the bigger an organization goes. And so, you know, it's been interesting for me because it's sort of, as I said, was endemic to who we were for a long time. And it still is such a core attribute of who we are at Bowery is reinventing and reimagining consistently. And we talk as a team about not getting tied to anything that we do today necessarily as a sacred cow.

and being willing to re-examine everything we're doing and the why around it. And just because it made a lot of sense three years ago or five years ago, we know a lot more today than we did three years or five years ago. And so maybe what we thought made a lot of sense or what did make a lot of sense doesn't today.

And the willingness to sort of tear it down and rebuild it again, that is a critical component to an enduring company. And really my focus here at Bowery is building a generational business that is really changing the face of food and agriculture. And so to do that and to be enduring like that, you have to be willing to continually reinvent. And that can be

difficult and challenging and uncomfortable and all the things, but it's critical. It's in the DNA of the company now, hopefully over time, you're building the DNA of the company. How have you thought about assembling the team that can take us to this place that, as you said, is just, is, you know, is raw innovation? Which are the people that

are domain experts? Which are the people that are making the big leaps? Well, it's interesting because if you define the domain as indoor vertical farming, there essentially are no domain experts because there really hasn't been much of a domain, right? So it's kind of an interesting problem, right? Nowadays, if you're building a software as a service enterprise SaaS company and you need domain experts in sales, there's a lot of them, right? You need go-to-market experts, they're there, right? You need product experts, they're there.

that sort of doesn't exist in the domain in its totality. Now, within narrower bands of domain, so plant scientists, for instance, or plant biologists and physiologists, we have incredible domain expertise. Within knowledge around data and AI or software and hardware, we have incredible domain experts in robotics and automation. We have incredible domain experts in mechanical engineering. I mean, it goes on and on and on. And that's actually, for me, what...

what is one of the most exciting, interesting parts of Bowery is just the sheer number of different perspectives, experiences, and expertise in different domains who all come together around a common problem. Well, it's a great answer. I mean, it also is fairly combustible, right? I mean, it's a big challenge to have all of these people, you know, just an example like Pixar, right? Before Pixar, you know, movies were made a certain way and you, but

Steve brought together sort of Ed Katsmall and James Lasseter, like great storytellers, great technologists all in one place. And everyone's like, oh my God, they've sort of never had a bad movie. They do one a year. And so that, you know, one of the questions was, I remember was like, would you rather have a good idea or a great team or great idea and a good team? And they were like, we'll take a good idea and a great team because a great team will make sure the good idea gets great.

Whereas the good team will make the great idea good. That's exactly right. So I feel like there's sort of, you're creating a system, a way of working that will continue to explore and innovate within the way you've assembled Bowery itself. Is that true? It is. And even more so, like we have...

this really fortunate confluence of variables, which is a very large economic opportunity in front of us, a huge cultural and societal solution to important problems, and a really complex set of problems themselves.

I always say to people, you can find huge economic opportunities which don't have much societal good and maybe aren't very complex. You can find organizations that do enormous societal good but don't have much of an economic opportunity. Maybe they're complex or not. And then you can find really complex problems that maybe have one of those or none of those. But to put them all together...

That's a really unique mixture of those three variables. And so what it means is it self selects for a certain type of person. We just have an extraordinary set of people who work at the company with, like I said, different perspectives and points of view. And you put those individuals together around the common goal. And exactly as you said, like it creates magic in a lot of ways. So what kind of leader does it take back to you?

This organization you've just described, which is probably most people would find quite

tough to manage because there's all these different variables. You're even saying even two years ago, if we'd set something up, we're going to keep challenging and keep challenging and keep challenging it. So how do you think about sort of what I witnessed, you know, in seeing you amongst your team is just how you can be incredibly granular one minute and incredibly focused on things and then see the big picture. And I saw that sort of like aperture shift, you know, big to small to big to small. So everybody understood the big picture was important, but no, no, no. But that little thing has to be absolutely perfect. So

Tell me a little bit about your leadership style. So first of all, it's interesting to see and just reflect on my own leadership style because it's evolved over the course of Bowery as it needs to. As an organization grows and changes and evolves itself, so must the leader. Because what the same as I said before, the solution for one of our problems five years ago may no longer be the solution today because we're different.

And the leadership style that worked five years ago, in fact, almost certainly doesn't work today. And so your job as a leader sort of first and foremost is to be evolutionary. And so that's something that I constantly focus on and where and how can I be different and more effective and better for the moment in time we're in now and what's ahead. That said, you know, particularly in a business like ours, which is quite complex, quite cross-functional, it is important though, this is true in any businesses,

As a leader, the bigger you are and the more mature the business is and the more mature and strong and substantial of a team you have under you, the easier it is to sort of be disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the business. And having comfort with some level of disconnection is actually sometimes a challenge as a founder because –

it sort of started with you. And it's very strange to sort of hand off your vision and your ideas and the incredibly important components of what you're building into someone else's hands. And that's absolute necessity. But at the same time,

maintaining a connection to some of the pieces that really matter is also really important. And especially in a business like ours, I hold a lot of import in understanding what's happening in the day to day to a certain extent. Because it's important for me to be able to explain to somebody

where we are, why we are where we are, and where we're going. But the bigger an organization gets, the more you have to be willing to be a little bit further away. And you have to be smarter and more thoughtful about when you dive in. Because if you dive in too frequently, you also lose the broader vantage point. Got it. Let's imagine Bowery five, 10 years from now. What does that look like? The problem we're solving at Bowery is a problem that's not only relevant to

the cities we're in today or cities in the US, but it's relevant to cities around the world. This is a global challenge. And unfortunately, it's a global challenge that's only getting more acute. And it was interesting. I was reading an article the other day about climate adaptation. And essentially, the premise was that

emissions reduction, renewable energy, EVs, all these types of technologies are critical because we have to cut down on the amount of carbon we're producing. But at the same time, there's a certain amount of change that has now been embedded in our system that isn't going to be reversed. And so we also need to come up with adaptive solutions to those changes.

And climate's impact on agriculture is absolutely one of these changes and challenges. And so our focus is building a global business with Bowery Farms around the world, in cities across the world,

Not only growing the crops we grow today, but growing a much wider variety of produce that becomes a much larger portion of the produce section in grocery stores and other channels around the world. Fantastic. Well, that was an excellent conversation, Irving. I really enjoyed it. A lot of fun. Thanks, man. So we just had a great conversation with Irving from Bowery.

A great example of a relentless innovator. Some topics that were brought up here were really fascinating. Where he came from, doing analytical software, learning from finance, being an entrepreneur, and then coming into a category as an outsider. And some of the perspective that that gave him to create a technology solution that

which is really what he talked about a lot, which is the operating system. And maybe it's lettuce and strawberries today, but ultimately in the future, I thought the dent in the universe, it seemed the future could be

pretty significant in a world that is so clearly now unstable and scarily so. Even this summer, we're seeing just climate change. You go to fundamental questions about where does the food come from, just as we go to fundamental questions about the supply chain, about how we survive the future. And I thought there was great optimism in how we were thinking about the

the future and that we can apply ourselves to providing food through innovating through technology. The other thing was innovating as an outsider and not an insider, but at the same time being incredibly methodical. I thought there was a methodicalness to Irving that we sort of switched the aperture from big picture to incredibly methodical and systematic.

which also probably is required in a business like that. I think one of the answers of what his team looks like was all kinds of different people. And his quick answer was, well, there hasn't really been a vertical farming category, so where do I hire people? And so you had all kinds of different people coming together, and that requires a certain type of leadership, which we also got into, which was

How do you kind of run and lead a multivarious company, which is kind of hasn't existed before? What type of leadership does that require? How do you shift apertures? I thought he did a great job of doing that. And then, you know, in the end, the impact of whether he'll know he's successful or not is if, you know, in an insecure environment, whether or not food has been more secured.

seems to me, you know, if it's true, if the lettuce is the prototype and is what they're doing there in Bowery, the equivalent of what Amazon did with books and is now 42% of e-commerce. Let's see.

All right, that's all for this episode. If you're a new listener, be sure to subscribe to Most Innovative Companies wherever you listen. And if you like this episode, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. I know we also want to hear from you. So let us know what you'd like to hear more of. Send us an email at podcasts at fastcompany.com or tweet us at hashtag most innovative companies.

Most Innovative Companies is a production of Fast Company in partnership with founder FNDR. We couldn't afford the vowels. Our executive producer is Joshua Christensen. Our sound design is Nicholas Torres. Writing is Matias Sanchez. Alex Webster and Nikki Checkley helped with the production. This podcast was done in collaboration with my wonderful partners at founder, Stephen Butler, Becca Jeffries, and Nick Barham.