The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. Today's episode is with one of our newest portfolio companies, which is applying nanoscale material science to fruit and vegetables. In this episode, we cover everything from how that affects what we taste and what we see at the grocery store, to farming and both local and international food supply chains, to how nature, the ultimate complex system works. And then more generally, we talk about how material sciences advances are playing out differently today,

Starting point is 00:00:42 thanks to a few interesting things. And just why we, okay, I heart material science so much. We have with us today A6-Z partner Malinka Walioladi and James Rogers, who is the CEO and founder of Appeal. Formerly appeal technology and now appeal sciences. And that's appeal with APE-E-E-L, not AP-P-E-A-L. We like our puns. Well, it's really appealing and interesting what you're working on. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Starting point is 00:01:06 I couldn't resist. I hope we have a fruitful discussion. Oh, no, God, stop right there. The investment memo that I wrote up was full of puns. I actually spent extra time thinking about apples to apples to avocados of avocado. Yes, I did. Okay, let's talk about the fact that the pitch, the graphs on their slide, this is what I noticed. We're color-coded by the fruits.

Starting point is 00:01:26 And so, okay, we're giving a lot of insider knowledge. Let me just tell our audience what the hell we're talking about, which is that you guys work with food technology. And in particular, one of the first products that you guys have out is a protective layer. Actually, I'll let you describe what your product is. We use food to preserve food, which sounds really abstract. And so to make it more tangible, effectively what we do is we take uneaten plant material. So things like stems, leaves, scrape skins, orange peat.

Starting point is 00:01:54 meals, banana leaves, whatever's available. We blend those things up, and then from those blends, we extract very particular subsets of molecules. When you say you blend those things up, it sounds like a smoothie. Yeah. You know, it's not half a banana and a quarter of a strawberry or something like that. We actually know down to the isomer what these materials are when we create these blends. We then extract those really particular subsets of materials. I turn them into powders, so they're lightweight, they're low cost to distribute.

Starting point is 00:02:18 And then we ship them to wherever we'd like to use them. We reconstitute them in liquid form. and we dip fresh produce into that solution and we allow it to dry. So what, first of all, does that mean I'm going to be eating like a strawberry that's covered in this weird material? What's actually happening is what we're doing basically is taking materials from inside of that strawberry, the structural building blocks, the components that give the produce its actual structure.

Starting point is 00:02:44 We're extracting those and then we're reapplying them to the outside of the produce. And so the materials that we actually apply are imperceptible. So I wouldn't taste it. Yeah, you actually can't taste it. It actually tastes much closer to the fruit when it was actually picked originally. What it's really doing is providing a protective layer that preserves its shelf life and it's freshness. That's exactly right. I'm asking about strawberries in particular as an example because the one thing I know about strawberries apparently have the highest concentration of pesticides of any fruit. Like you have to like wash it like three times and I'm OCD so I wash my strawberries like five times.

Starting point is 00:03:16 So I get the disgusting layers off to make it fresh and healthy. Yeah, it's really tough. I mean, strawberries are in a really difficult position. And actually a lot of agriculture is this way in that the way that we grow food, the way that nature produces things is through a systems approach. It's got this huge complex system. And part of the system is growing things. And part of the system is breaking down things and recycling them.

Starting point is 00:03:40 And it's got this whole machinery that's built up. The problem is for us in commercial agriculture, we don't care so much about the breakdown. We don't really care about the system. diversity. We just want to contain as many variables in that system as we possibly can. And so what you end up doing in things like strawberries in particular, really sensitive, delicate fruit is that even before you get started, you go out and you tarp the field and you hit it with something like, you know, methyl bromide or chloropichron or, you know, hot steam, which just carpet bombs everything that's in the soil. And now you're able to plant your

Starting point is 00:04:16 fruit. And so it won't be attacked by any of those things that were out there naturally. but that leads to the ability of certain pests and pathogens to get into that system because there's no kind of natural defenses that are out there. So it's really kind of interesting, you know, by solving one problem, you create other problems. Long-winded way of saying there is, you know, significant amount of pesticide usage that's just required in order to get you fresh, high-quality produce to your table currently. The trick about what we're doing is that it's not some sort of synthetic. material that nature's never seen before. We're just using the exact same building blocks that nature uses every single day. And we're simply repurposing them for a different application. So I want to say something that's probably not very popular in this room, which is, that sounds like a

Starting point is 00:05:05 high class problem to me, because I've been to countries where you actually don't get a lot of fruits and choice and what you eat. Like, you actually can only get certain items certain times of year. And so it's certainly very useful. It's preserving food. But like, what is the benefit overall? When you think of the food ecosystem as a whole, like what does it really do for us? So it's interesting, you know, say it's a high class problem. And indeed, you know, preserving fresh berries is definitely a high class problem. You know, if the joke at, you know, at the retail level is that the berry consumer spends twice the number of dollars in the grocery store as a non-Berry consumer. Is that true?

Starting point is 00:05:40 Is that true? Wow. And so it's, according to Driscoll's, that's true. Wow. And so in that sense, yeah, absolutely. You could actually put numbers to it. Preserving berries is a high class problem. The interesting thing about that, though, is that perishability affects every single kind of produce on this planet.

Starting point is 00:05:56 And that means that it's either feast or famine in most parts of the world, particularly if you only have a, if you're a smaller farmer, you only grow in one type of crop. So my example I always pick on is, you know, if you're a mango farmer in the developing world and you're- I love mangoes, by the way. It's my favorite thing. If you're from South Asia, you have to love money. Yes, exactly. I love, and they're so seasonal. You can only add them at certain times a year.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Really tricky. So the problem with perishability is really that everything is seasonal is also perishable. And that means that if I'm growing a particular commodity in a portion of the world that does not have access to a market where I'm able to turn that commodity into money, then it doesn't even matter if I'm growing that food. I'm not able to earn economic returns for my labor. And so what ends up happening is you end up having nature doing its thing, growing all of this. this produce that's inherently valuable. But because of the perishability, because of the inability to get that produce from the place that it's produced to the market where someone's actually willing to pay for it, you return none of the economic value for your labor. So it's all about

Starting point is 00:07:05 market access. So in the case of mangoes, if I'm a farmer in India who's growing mangoes and I am a consumer in the U.S. who wants those mangoes, currently I probably really can't get them. It comes really down to transportability and transportation costs. So, for example, in the case of avocados, you know, the price of shipping a box of avocados to China is more expensive than the box of avocados itself. Because because of perishability, you have to air freight them in. It's not just the distance and the cost, but because of the perishability, it requires a faster method. A certain mode of transportation. And you can actually, you can look at it in really interesting ways.

Starting point is 00:07:43 I mean, the way I always think about the world is that, again, I keep going back to this, all produce is seasonal and it's also perishable. And so you can look around the world around where produce is available at different times of year where it's able to be grown. And then you know the overall shelf life of that commodity. And you know how fast the boat can move. You know how fast the plane can fly. And so you can draw basically, you know, a circle around those production regions and show where produce is available basically at what cost throughout the year. What we're able to do is dramatically extend the shelf life of that produce, which dramatically expands the overall radius of availability of fresh produce, which opens up new export

Starting point is 00:08:24 markets for customers. That actually goes in both directions, too. If you're a grower in California or the Midwest, you can now sell to China, like your avocados. Oh, yeah. But on the flip side, if you're a grower in India who has avocados, you can now sell them to California or the Midwest or anywhere else. You're totally correct.

Starting point is 00:08:43 that this absolutely goes both ways. And it's actually really fortunate that it goes both ways because if you're a smaller farmer out in the middle of nowhere and you've got a thousand mangoes and your neighbor's got a thousand mangoes and your other neighbor's got a thousand mangoes, you can't sell a mango to your neighbor to save your life. Just a race at the bottom because you can't, you have no margins. And they rot. And they just rot.

Starting point is 00:09:05 And that's the, it's, you know, said to me once for fresh produce, the tyranny of time. And that really resonated with me because if you think, you. Think about the position a small-older farmer is in when a trader comes to them. That trader has the best leverage in the world because they know that they can just sit outside the farm until the mangoes rot and then say, oh, you either sell them to me now or sorry, I'm leaving. And so the small-hunter farmers often left in a situation to say, well, I can either earn two shillings per mango or nothing. And what we've found in talking to small-hundred farmers is that if you can extend the shelf life of a mango by an extra week, they can earn a-a-scent-a-scent-a-farmes. they can earn an extra three to five shillings per mango. So it's amazing. I mean, it's amazing, right?

Starting point is 00:09:49 You think about being able to just by preserving produce an extra week, be able to earn two to three times more for that exact same commodity. That's a dramatic improvement in the amount of economic value. Those small holders are able to capture. So, you know, a few times you've mentioned small farmers. Let's talk about the economics of farming in general and produce and food. So people talk about big food of the capital B and a capital F. You know, I know there's a lot of politics around that topic, but politics aside, what does the ecosystem for farm and food production look like? There's small farms. There's middlemen. There's big farms. Like what's the, what's the landscape?

Starting point is 00:10:24 Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, right, there's there's producers, you know, which is a really a large number of disaggregated relatively small farms. There's some huge, huge farming operations, but a bunch of really disaggregated small farms. And then there's a relatively concentrated number of growers shippers that typically grow some portion of the crop that they're shipping. But then they aggregate or buy from a bunch of those disaggregated growers. Then there's the, you know, growers shippers who are handling most of the transportation. And then there's retailers, basically. And that's going to be food service channel or just a general retailer. And then there's really the end consumer.

Starting point is 00:11:03 There's some kind of side alleys in there and kind of different niches. But that's kind of the general organization. The problem with some of these, they just don't have the electricity, you know, whatever, infrastructure to support coal storage. The way you extend the shelf life of fruit is very coal storage. I'm super happy you brought that up, Malika, because if you look at spoilage rates in the United States and, you know, the numbers are kind of all over the place, but they're between a third and a half of what we're growing. Holy shit. That's a lot of bad food going bad. Well, and it's particularly ridiculous when you consider the amount of resources that go into producing that food, right?

Starting point is 00:11:35 The numbers are around 80% of freshwater going into irrigation, you know, all of the pesticide usage that ends up, you know, running into the water streams that ends, that's, you know, putting pesticides on fruit that we're not even eating, all the human capital that goes into it, you know, all the fertilizer, all this stuff. And then ultimately a massive, massive amount of it's ending up in a landfill. And the funny thing about that is actually horribly unfunny is that that's in the U.S. We've got this incredible technology and incredible supply chain. And the way that we've been able to get down to, you know, a third or, you know, 40% of our produce being thrown away is that we've been able to use refrigeration. We'll use low temperature technology to basically slow everything down inside the fruit. And that works, that's worked that's gotten us to about, you know, throwing away a third if you call that working. Now, so you start talking about trying to be able to reduce losses, which can be, you know, 80, 90% of a harvest in the developing world.

Starting point is 00:12:31 If you want to just piggyback off what we've done in the quote unquote developed world, you're trying to say, oh, well, everyone should just implement a cold chain. Well, that's really hard to tell a farmer to do in the developing world where there's hardly roads, let alone an electricity grid, let alone the capital equipment necessary to do the refrigeration. And so I often think of it as distributing refrigerators in a packet to treat their mangoes and get an extra 10 or 15 days of shelf life out of those without needing to do all the infrastructure development necessary. I love this theme. We did a podcast recently on drones. I was literally thinking the same thing. And it is about how certain technologies can help you leapfrog the lack of infrastructure and essentially create this gonzo infrastructure essentially. And it's interesting. It plays out from both mobile, where you have entire countries leapfrogging, existing PC infrastructure to go to mobile straight and be mobile first. In this case, like in the case of Zipline and drones and Rwanda, it's literally leapfrogging that there's a lack of roads. Medical infrastructure. Yeah. I literally was thinking on this. saying Limes, which is using technology to compensate for the lack of traditional infrastructure. Like with Zipline, you're having them drone deliver medical supplies to compensate for the fact

Starting point is 00:13:41 that they don't have roads and medical infrastructure. You guys are compensating with your technology for the fact that they don't have, you know, electricity, coal storage infrastructure. You mentioned mobile. It actually does, does all link together. It does, but it's fascinating that you use the word compensate because, yes, technically it is a sort of compensation. But I think the interesting thread to me is that it's actually an opportunity for an entirely

Starting point is 00:14:00 new system that bypasses existing systems. It's actually a way to to go outside. When you think of like the full stack startup, I mean, not to get all crazy riffy, the thing that's really interesting that makes companies like Lyft and Uber work versus the traditional taxi services companies, according to Chris Dixon's full stack, you know, startup thesis, is that you're essentially bypassing existing systems in order to do it. So it's just a really fascinating theme in general when I think about how innovation happens. Oh yeah. I mean, that's exactly how I think about it as well. You know, one of the ways I look at our product as well as infrastructure in a packet. You've got really poor roads. And now you're able to get that produce

Starting point is 00:14:32 a certain distance before it goes bad. Well, if you double the shelf life of that produce, it's effectively like doubling the rate that you're able to travel on that road. If you kind of think about it that way. And essentially opening up entirely new ways of competing with people who have an entrenched position in existing infrastructure. Absolutely. And the other, I think, interesting point around that is what we've done in the United States is that we've built up these supply chains around the intrinsic constraints of the piece of produce. And this whole supply chain has been established, just understanding this is the limitation of that piece of produce. You show up in Nigeria and you give somebody a packet of material that's able to make their tomato last twice as long.

Starting point is 00:15:13 They're not going, how does this affect the temperature that I'm supposed to store my tomatoes during cold storage? They go, whoa. And you're actually building from scratch as opposed to to trying to wedge into an existing supply chain. So although it's difficult and challenging for particular reasons to deliver these technologies into developing countries, the white space or the opportunities are actually really, I think, an interesting kind of proving ground for what the ultimate power of the technology really can be. I agree.

Starting point is 00:15:42 And it's redefining technology to me in an interesting way. Because when I think of the typical cold chain, I remember anecdotes from companies that were doing like thin film electronics and they would do like these sort of thin film disposable sensors as a way of putting really cheap RFID tags in order to tag the status of where it is in the supply chain and keep a certain temperature level and be able to monitor it continuously. And there's all these interesting, probably very useful, complicated technologies in the existing system. But what you're essentially doing is bypassing that with an entirely different, very natural form of technology, which brings me to my next question, which is,

Starting point is 00:16:16 what is the technology in the quote traditional or non-traditional sense that we're talking about here because it's kind of interesting. Like you're essentially describing shredded plant parts. I think there's just an important distinction to be made and that classically the technologies that we employ in agriculture, I think, are what I would. So I've kind of gone through this kind of mental exercise of what is a chemical and what is a molecule? That's a really interesting mental exercise. Yeah, right. Well, for I guess nerds, I guess. Why does the difference between a chemical and a molecule matter? And this is my definition. But what I've landed on is, you know, for, for, for, For millions and millions of years, nature has used the same building blocks, and it's just

Starting point is 00:16:56 basically broken them down and recycled them into different forms. Very efficient thing for nature, she, him, it to do. An incredibly efficient thing. It's actually, you know, one of the only, you know, non-zero-sum games that I can really think of. I think it's beautiful and elegant the way that it's been put together. But it's done pretty damn well without us for millions and millions of years. And then we came along and said, oh, nature, you've got these beautiful, well-thought-out,

Starting point is 00:17:18 well, thought out systems in place. And what we're going to do is we're going to, we see the mechanism that you're using to do that. We're going to develop a new chemistry or a new molecule that's going to interfere with that particular machinery. The problem is that those processes that we generally interfere with are really valuable processes. That's why they've stuck around for so long. And so they're used by many, many, many different types of life forms. And so it's incredibly challenging to poison one bug without poisoning every single bug that's out there, even the good ones. What nature's done is not generate, you know, kind of a poison to kill things.

Starting point is 00:17:52 It's used the exact same molecules. It's just combined them in different ways to form different structures. And those structures generally provide protection from the external environment, whether it be the scales on reptiles or the, you know, the skin on the leaf of a plant. It's like a whole new form of combinatorial innovation. If that's what you're saying in Silicon Valley, then that's exactly what it is. I mean, in a way, there's a lot that goes into it. And empirically, actually, like, this is not a new idea what we're doing, right?

Starting point is 00:18:25 Monks discovered in the Middle Ages that you were able to dip apples and beeswax and they would last throughout the winter. Those are pretty incredible innovation at the time, especially considering lack of access to refrigeration. The same thing is true of beauty products, like being able to layer on layers of oils or it's the same kind of thing with skin and preservation because skin is perishable. Skin is very perishable. Actually, probably the number one question I get in is. can I use this on my skin? I was about to say, when I saw your pitch, I was like, my mind, I mean, you jumped into all kinds of makeup products.

Starting point is 00:18:53 Yeah, yeah. It's a really interesting future product line. Nature has provided us this incredible toolkit of different molecules that are available to us and that us as material scientists are in a fortunate position now with today's technology to be able to isolate those materials from nature, look at them as if they were a Lego, and say, what would this be useful for? And if I combine it with this other Lego and I let these things dry together, will they form a structure that could give me some really interesting properties? What are some of that? I mean, when you say that that way, it's a beautiful, a simpler explanation of what you're doing. But actually what you're doing is actually pretty complex and complicated. It requires a lot of hard science. What are some of the challenges you have to overcome to be able to create those Legos and building box or combinatorial innovation?

Starting point is 00:19:39 Yeah, right. So for me to be able to sit here and abstract to the 30,000 foot level of analogy of Legos, I have to have a team of 62 very, very talented individuals composed of, you know, over 50 scientists. And 15 of those are PhD scientists. All in material science or different? Across disciplines. Okay. Chemistry, biochemistry, material science, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering. So across a wide range of disciplines.

Starting point is 00:20:07 And it actually requires each of those disciplines because one discipline is looking at how do we extract these materials, how do we purify these materials, which is one discipline. And how do we take and confirm what these materials are, which is analytical chemistry? How do we then combine these things in different ways to form interesting structures? That's material science. How do we analyze these things? That's more than the physics realm. How do we have enzymes make these things for us? That's biochemistry.

Starting point is 00:20:32 I'm going to come work for you. You should definitely. It's really incredible. But what we've been able to do basically is rally this group of incredibly talented people around this core focus of leverage nature's operating system to solve problems that nature's solved before, basically by just blatantly copying what nature's doing. A lot of people sometimes I feel they overuse that analogy of an operating system, but I think in this case, it really applies. I mean, there is no other way to describe it. Well, for us in the physical realm, like nature's operating system are the laws of physics and we just want to use that system,

Starting point is 00:21:07 understand as much as we can, and then take pieces and let the operating system operate on them. It feels like a different type of x-ray vision, where instead of just looking out the object and seeing, okay, that's a water bottle, knowing down to the molecule what it's made out of why it has the properties it has and how you could impact those properties by changing what the water bottle is made out of. It's not unlike how artists or photographers see the world differently when they paint or capture it on film. You just look at scenes very differently because you bring your craft at a very deep x-ray level. That's cool. We got some materials artists. Yeah. It's very artistic to me.

Starting point is 00:21:44 At the end of the day, what you're doing is super interesting. So what are some of the other challenges? I think it's iteration cycle, frankly, when it really comes down to it. I love programming computers because I'll write some code and I'll get a debug error. It says you did something wrong. You need to fix it. You know, the challenge in material science, you know, I'm just broadly speaking about material science here, is when you want to hit compile, it might mean six years of Ph.D. work to compile the system

Starting point is 00:22:08 that you might get one data set out of. And that iteration time really kills a lot of, I think, companies that are looking at getting into materials-based company. How do you guys overcome that? I mean, you can't bypass it altogether. So a number of members of my team, you know, spent their PhD basically learning different techniques, technique development to basically access new understanding of some fundamental set of molecules. And so I think at our core, we have this kind of respect for not just using off-the-shelf technology, to get general information, but really committing to understanding and learning a new technique or developing a new piece of equipment that can help speed up some of those iteration cycles and material science. If you come by and visit our office, you'll see a large number of systems,

Starting point is 00:22:54 analysis systems that we've built ourselves, that we've had to make the investment of time and money in that you would say, well, oh, no, no, no, you just need to keep it in the fence, keep it in the fence. But when you're just hitting the fence and you don't have that feedback mechanism, And you can't tighten that loop. You lose the iteration. And then when you lose the iteration, your probability success drops plummets dramatically. So we've really made the investment in developing our own tools for characterizing these systems. So when you have that infrastructure for characterization or rapid prototyping, do you then make a tradeoff in your ability to then scale things?

Starting point is 00:23:29 Because then you're not using existing scaling things. I'm thinking of the analogy of semiconductors. And when people use to prototype custom chips versus going to a major fab. That this is, we're at a really incredible time in history right now where you don't have to do that for most of this stuff. You don't have to do that anymore because you can buy an Arduino unit for $12. Yeah. And you can program what you used to have to solder a PCB board to do. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:53 This is true in the material science of the food that you're working on. For us, our entire office runs on Raspberry Pies and Arduino units that control controllers to measure different stuff. And the great thing about that is they are scalable because you just go buy another. $40 computer that has a wireless card built into it that you communicate from halfway around the world, hook a couple custom built peripherals into that, and you've scaled that system. So I would, I think I would have agreed with you, you know, five, six years ago. Yeah. But with basically the advent of frankly, the Arduino unit, we've really been able to scale this. I mean, and 3D printing. So, I mean, all of our time lapse systems are built with 3D printed components. What's a time lapse system?

Starting point is 00:24:33 It allows us to monitor the physical aging of fresh produce as a function of time. This is like super nerdy if we're going to geek out. Let's geek out. I spent a lot of my PhD work using transmission electron microscopy tomography to view things on really, really short length scales on nanometer length scales and really look at things in really fine detail. And the time lapse photography for us, for me, feels like a different kind of microscope. It allows us to kind of view the world without time in terms of produce aging. which really has led to some really incredible realizations about the physical aging process of fresh produce that's led to some really interesting developments at the company. You're literally compressing and adding an entire new dimension to your view because of the cheapness of being able to do 3D printing and all the other things.

Starting point is 00:25:20 We would not have been able to do this more than eight years ago probably. I started in material science as well and I eventually moved on more to more of the software because of the problem that you just mentioned, which is it's hard to. iterate and I always thought that material science was sort of confined to R&D. There was a really good time for material science. I think a while ago it's semiconductors, but I thought today it's mainly R&D. So, but I think because of some of the things you just mentioned, it's becoming possible to build a company based off a material science today more and more. Yeah, where it's not just like a tool or a future, but it is a, it is a core of a product. And I think the most exciting things in material science in general are things like, you know, flexible electronics, the future of that. I mean, to me, all these things are

Starting point is 00:26:02 interconnected because the thing that held a lot of this innovation back before in the past was that there was a lack of supply chain for materials or the ability for different groups to work together or systems to rapidly prototype and then figure out to scale. And when you have all these different companies now coming into the space, just material science being taken more seriously as a core enabler for new types of tech, it's kind of phenomenal. It's possible. See, the funny thing to me is material science has been fundamental to us as a species. Look at how we've defined our ages. A stone age. The bronze age. The iron age. Steel age, right? Silicon Age. We define our development as a species by what material set we have available to us. I don't think it's

Starting point is 00:26:44 that surprising that material science is becoming really interesting again because, you know, I view material science is bridging the gap between what's available and what's useful. How can you combine what's available to give you something that's useful and give you some new set of properties that enable some new advancement. The fruits are almost inconceivable of material science innovations. I mean, think about if someone... Oh, wait, you're saying fruit in an

Starting point is 00:27:09 analogy sense, not like the actual literal fruits. Okay, let's be clear. You know what, actually in this sense, it could be... Exactly. It could be figurative or literal in this case for once. Imagine you're living in a society today and you event steel. You're... It's everywhere.

Starting point is 00:27:25 It's everywhere on this planet. And so although the opportunities for gain in material science are just, I think, unfathomable almost. It's incredibly difficult to do because material science is generally, or is such an interdisciplinary field. That's exactly what I love about it so much. If I could go back and do school all over, I would do material science in a heartbeat. The challenge is you can do so many different things in materials.

Starting point is 00:27:48 You can be doing the chemistry. You can be doing the characterization. You can be doing the measurement. You can do the property stuff. You can do structural. You can do so many different things. And I used to say, I don't care how you make it. I just need a little have you show me the structure on paper and I can tell you what it's useful for.

Starting point is 00:28:02 But that's a big problem, right? When you start talking about supply chain and building a business, okay, great. My skill set is around knowing what molecules can do and how to characterize them. I have no idea generally how to make them. And so without being able to connect those skill sets, people who know what to do with them and the people who know how to make them and then manufacture at scale and then, you know, do all this other stuff, is really difficult to come together. It's still a very hard problem.

Starting point is 00:28:28 I wouldn't disagree. In general, what are some of the interesting things you think are happening? Because I feel like people talk a lot about materials like graphene and what are the things that are happening in the industry that are high level interesting to you in that space. I would probably say probably the main breakthrough that will change a ton of technologies all across is battery technology. Yeah. Right. As if we can get higher storage, lighter, longer lasting batteries, that will change a lot. Right.

Starting point is 00:28:52 It will change everything from drones to VR to like literally every industry. But it's unclear if there will be a private company innovation or if that will be created out of a government lab somewhere. Right. One of the things that's really interesting about material science is unlike a lot of the other disciplines, maybe because it is cross-disciplinary. It is the one where I still think a lot of government-led innovation funding is the most important because they are the heads, they're the most interested in really thinking of the next generation of materials. Well, and they're training the people that are going to do the work.

Starting point is 00:29:20 Yeah. Right. I mean, all of our team, I mean, we couldn't have hired straight out of undergrad and test them to do it. They're what they do for us now. I mean, they needed the training that came from government-supported programs to do the core fundamental science that underlies what we're doing. For me, I think the part that I really get excited about is in the field of additive manufacturing. I mean, I look at a 3D printer now and we use them in our office and, you know, we're extruding a thermoplastic elastomer, you know, out of a heated nozzle. And we're just, you know, basically making a structure and letting, you know, melting it and letting it dry.

Starting point is 00:29:55 and I look at that and go, wow, who's going to develop the HP of 3D printing with the different inks that are all from material science understanding that allows you to print a fully functional device? And we don't do that now. And maybe with a combination of laser centering, some other stuff. But if you start thinking about combining chemistry and mechanical engineering and robotics, which give you the 3D printing with material science, which gives you the ink, I think the opportunities for doing local manufacturing are just kind of incomprehensible. The great example I think of is this initiative, a lot of people from NASA to Autodesk that I've been working on, which is bringing 3D printing to be able to recreate entire new structures in space so that you can actually build what you need. That's like local manufacturing on crack.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Yeah, no, exactly. And I think in the future you're going to have a fancy 3D printer in your home. And how wealthy you are is going to be what type of 3D printer you have. If you're really wealthy, you can print the latest and greatest. iPhone. If you're not so wealthy, maybe you can only print shoes or something like that. Well, let's close on talking about your our vision for the future of food. What do you guys see the future grocery stores looking like? I mean, does this change what shows up on our shelves? That's actually the thing that probably gets me most excited. You know, there's a reason that if

Starting point is 00:31:14 you held up a dozen different kinds of produce, that most people could name those common dozen kinds of produce. But if you think about the genetic diversity that exists on this planet, there are millions and millions of different kinds of produce. The reason that you're not able to identify them is that you don't live in a region in the world in which they're grown, or you don't live in a region to which those products are able to be imported into. And so, you know, when I think about what happens is, you know, what plant breeders do basically is when they're breeding a new crop, they're looking down the list. And number one thing on their list is transportability and taste, you know, Tritian is like level 12 or 13 on the list. You know,

Starting point is 00:31:55 it takes really significant investment for big companies to be developing breeding programs. And those breeding cycles are like eight years long. And so you need to do super, like massive investment to come up with these new varieties. And so one of the divisions of the future that I get really excited about is the opportunity to extend the shelf life of a crop so that smaller produce variety can make it into it, make it into a grocery store. And this is the same value proposition for a small organic grower in the United States as it is for a smallholder farmer in the developing world. Same thing with an organic farmer in the U.S. And one crop that we worked on that we never thought we'd work on are called finger limes. And check them out if you haven't picked

Starting point is 00:32:35 things up in the air shore. They're natively from Australia, but they were brought into the United States about eight years ago now. It's good. The U.S. government didn't make them record a video to apologize for bringing them in. Sorry, I didn't make that joke. Do you guys remember what happened with Johnny Depp and his ex-wife now and bringing their dog to Australia. But anyway, go on. That's pretty great. Delicious with shellfish. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:56 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So they're really interesting. They're actually another branch of citrus. But you cut them open and they look like caviar pearls. And each of those little pearls has a citrus flavor to it. I know that my finger limes, caviar limes are cocktail limes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:33:09 But they're really these incredible little citrus fruit. And the challenge with them is, you know, they brought them in the U.S. They grow a bunch of them. But the shelf life of the... these things is like five days maybe. A supply chain that only lasts five days doesn't get you into very many stores. It's just not really commercially viable. And so we've been able to extend the shelf life out to like 25 days. What's normal in terms like, so I grew up part of my life in Sri Lanka. I mean, what's normal here, apples, bananas, berries is actually really rare there. And what's

Starting point is 00:33:36 normal there is like papaya, mangoes, rhombutong, all these things that people have never heard of. And some of them are just incredibly delicious and more so than anything you'd find here. You just don't get access to them here. So like in some, if, if you're just, if, future world. You can move that around. You can move that around and what's, and you know, what you'll eat is is not the most transportable food. It's just the best fruit. Right. Exactly. It's no longer constrained by only time or transport. Exactly. And not just the best type of fruit, but the best grower, right? And fruit that's grown in regions that, for example, strawberries that's grown in Watsonville and bread in Watsonville. And now you're transporting that

Starting point is 00:34:11 down in New Mexico to grow. That fruit was optimized for growth in Watsonville, right? That genetic variety might not be the best one in Mexico, but because doing a breeding program in a bunch of disparate places to match a local geography, it's so cost prohibitive, you just go with that. Produce that's better suited

Starting point is 00:34:30 to the growing environment that it's actually in. You can actually improve yields relative to what they'd be if they were bred in another environment. And it just allows new entry points, like you said, for all different types of new players.

Starting point is 00:34:40 It's democratizing access on both ends, and this is a theme that I love. But the other thing that, you know, earlier you mentioned how you can do a map of all the fruit around the world and map the times and their perishability. And it reminded me the image that popped into my mind is this map that makes this rounds on Twitter that's really popular of countries organized by the most popular social network. It's essentially a way of showing this

Starting point is 00:35:00 dissolution of borders and movement through technology. And what I love about what you're describing is you can now essentially remake that map that you described of all this produce and by perishable life, by shelf life and location. And essentially just move it all over. And essentially just move it all and make time not matter. Yeah, or not matter as much. Or not matter as much. I don't want to exaggerate it, but that's a pretty big effing deal.

Starting point is 00:35:24 James, thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks.

The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Produce or Perish! (What We Eat)

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