Randomly/weirdly, I also 1) Have 2 HP12cs on my desk; 2) Used them first in my finance career and now in tech; 3) Have Hunter as a surname.
If you used to work in algorithmic trading and you are British then this would be truly weird.
466 karma · joined October 3, 2012
If you used to work in algorithmic trading and you are British then this would be truly weird.
This is a good overview of the history of the field (up to SVMs and before deep NNs). I found this useful for putting all the different approaches into context.
For vine crops (tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants), we use a high wire system. The stems are clipped to the wire as the crop grows upwards. The entire wire (and crop) is then lowered as fruits are harvested to make room for more growth. We keep the same crop for an entire year.
I've been in some of the greenhouses in Mexico, (Sinaloa to be exact) growing peppers and Asian eggplants. They were fairly simple plastic houses but had strict entry protocols including booties and yellow sticky trap mazes to enter.
Pest and disease management is a big deal in greenhouses as they spread quickly given that it is an indoor environment. In Mexico, more high-tech plastic greenhouses are being built. They are cheaper than the Dutch glass equivalent but still have a high degree of actuation. In Mexico, there is so much light, that you don’t need the high light transmissivity of glass.
There is a more complex industrial greenhouse I saw in Utah growing tomatoes on string. Very tall, unfortunately I didn't get to go in. It's next to a power plant and they pipe the expelled CO2 into the greenhouse for increased crop production. I believe it was started by Dutch growers.
I’ve been to this facility. It was built by a company called Houwelings which are a Canadian company with Dutch heritage. Unfortunately it was not operated well and it has recently gone through a restructuring [1].
I agree on greenhouse quality 100% but but am personally a big fan of soil and compost and dislike hydroponics. Nearly religiously so haha.
There’s a case for soil vs hydroponics but the reality is that you can’t supply year-round at the quality and price that consumers expect without hydroponics.
Also I didn't realize you were founder of this company. I thought you were just a guy on the internet.
I am both :)
People think because something looks like a tomato it is all the same. But there is a huge difference in flavor and nutrition as you correctly point out and the idea of optimizing for nutritional quality is so overlooked.
You can grow high taste varieties and low taste varieties in greenhouses. Which variety you choose is a simple ROI calculation like in any business. A big problem in the US today is that greenhouses have been built in Canada and Mexico and the produce is trucked a long distance. This results in significant quality degradation vs growing locally. We aim to fix this in the US and in other countries.
[1]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sunset-continues-to...
2) Vine crops (Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Peppers) and berries. No cannabis.
3) Greenhouses are supplying the US market from Canada and Mexico today. So they are already price competitive. Greenhouses are complementary to field farms as a) field farms do not produce during the winter; and b) greenhouses supply higher quality varieties.
By "Dutch greenhouse", I meant industrial-scale glass greenhouses [1] that have evolved in the Netherlands over the last 70 years and, more recently, have been built in other countries primarily by Dutch greenhouse construction companies. These greenhouses are 20+Ac in footprint (similar in footprint to a Tesla Gigafactory) and have a wide variety of actuation - heating, cooling, lighting systems etc.
Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois. I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about personal knowledge management (PKM), personal organization, software development & IT, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products
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PKM gurus be peddling PKM...
Different strokes for different folks.
1. Become a professor in CS at Harvard. Achieve big career successes in prestigious technology companies. Build a network of SV founders and VCs.
2. Raise the f*king seed round.
That’s not to take anything away from Matt. He’s clearly an accomplished individual and his advice is still sound. But he hasn’t included the glaringly obvious reason why he got funded - he was a professor in CS at Harvard and has had a string of prestigious roles in industry.
As you rightly identified, "VCs I've spoken to want to turn up the heat and take the business to the moon, planet-scale growth or self-destruct". This is the standard mental model within the VC industry - that only 1 in 10 of your portfolio companies need to moon in order for you to return your promised 20% IRR to your end investors. So push all your companies to either moon or implode. Taking VC cash and aiming for the moon is SV dogma hence your SV friends insta-calling you nuts. There's no doubt that this model has been responsible for significant value creation but it's certainly not the only way to create huge value.
Another category of equity investor is: individuals with cash (Angels, Family Offices). There are many within this category that are investing like VCs i.e. moon or bust. But there are also many within this category that are looking for long-term growth i.e. lower IRR with lower risk of failure. By the nature of them investing their own money, they will typically have more skin in the game than a VC and will able to provide more mentorship to you.
We took seed capital from several different sources including VC (including Founders Fund) and angel investors. The angel investors have been BY FAR the most helpful. It's the classic 80/20 - most angels are completely disengaged, a few have had a transformative effect on our company.
One more point, if you do decide to sell shares for money then do it when you are in a strong position so that you can get the most favourable control terms. There are the standard economic terms (valuation) that everyone talks about. But the control terms are just as important - be willing to take a lower valuation from an investor that is willing to have very founder-friendly terms.
And another point, you can always consider debt financing if you have relatively stable cashflows. But at the early stage this usually comes with all sorts of strings attached which is why in the majority of cases a the early stage, founder-friendly equity financing is preferable. But keep an open mind here.
1. Relocating to an obscure town in Texas to work intensely with ambitious engineers on hard space exploration technology.
2. Building a truly breakthrough software system (eg metaverse/gaming/crypto) with ambitious engineers in a fully distributed company?
I find it hard to see how a company doing (1) would lose against a competitor doing (1) in a distributed fashion. I also find it hard to see how a company doing (2) would lose against a competitor doing (2) in an onprem fashion.
If you need cash then go and pitch some investors. Either you’ll get some cash or you’ll get a reality check. Both have value.
Being outside the US doesn’t stop you pitching US early stage investors and then flipping the company to move there (if that’s something you want to do).
I ask because we have (what I believe to be) a very interesting engineering problem to solve but a lot of the recruiters out there will plug the hedge fund and fintech jobs because those guys are willing to pay absolute top of market and therefore pay more in commission to the recruiter.
I wouldn’t get caught up thinking about titles because they mean different things to different people. There’s really interesting work out there for someone of your experience and increasingly more interesting startups in the Uk. You just gotta look a bit harder for it.
We are searching for a ‘principal software’ engineer to join our team. I think we have a different engineering setup to many startups because it’s very multi-disciplinary in nature: plant science, ml/optimisation, software engineering, sensor/embedded tech. So our idea of a principal swe is someone who spends some of their time as an ic and some of their time helping others to upskill in software engineering - this could be junior swes or senior plant scientists. I know that for other companies ‘principal engineer’ could be a product owner role or it could be a chief architect role or it could be more of a floating mentor.
Yes - but this mainly comes down to the varieties that you grow. You can grow varieties that are very tasty and are usually sold in the premium tier. And you can grow high-yielding tomatoes with less taste.
>Personally, in my area tomatoes are cheap enough to not think about the price, but the products widely available from supermarkets taste like water
Where are you based? High-tech greenhouses already supply a lot of premium-tier produce in Europe but there is an undersupply in the US/Asia.
Lol - yeah the production of cannabis is not yet legalised in The Netherlands.
This is a great article on the Dutch greenhouse industry (unfortunately behind paywall): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...
>Dutch tomatoes have a reputation for being bland ("water bombs"), is making more flavourfull ones just product focus? Like picking the right varietal, picking them at the right time, delivering quickly, etc?
I've heard this before too. Maybe this was a thing at one point in history but it's not true any more. If you go into a supermarket today in Europe then all the tomatoes on offer will have been grown in greenhouses. The low-end stuff will have been grown in Spanish/Moroccan low-tech greenhouses (plastic tunnels). The higher-end stuff will have been grown in Dutch glasshouses.
We are now building a commercial-scale facility in the US which will produce 50,000kg of fresh produce daily. And then we will scale from there.
Our goal is to accelerate the deployment of new greenhouses around the world to increase the availability of healthy locally-grown food and to secure our food system for the future.
Find out more about our mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDJ_QdUaap4
If you want to find out more about us or generally want to geek out on tommies then give me (founder) a shout: david@optimal.ag
1) There's a race to the bottom with services in terms of pricing. For example, NHS GPs have strict time limits within which to provide a particular service. These time limits have reduced over the years and so individual doctors are capable of providing a better service but are can't given the constraints. People rarely are willing to pay more for a service unless they know that the quality level will be higher. With services, it is not clear that a higher price will translate to higher quality.
2) Most services are not chosen based on quality. They are chosen based on perception, brand, reviews, pricing and a whole host of other things. Often the most profitable services are the ones who can manipulate these variables best rather than the ones who actually provide a great service. If there is a sole accountant who is fantastic at accounting but poor at marketing and review collection then they are going to struggle and may end up joining a firm who constrains their time such that can only provide the minimum viable service.