Venture Everywhere Podcast: Akash Nandi with Charles Baron
Charles Baron, Co-founder and CPMO of Farmers Business Network, catches up with Akash Nandi, Co-founder and CEO of Tendrel on episode 27: Harvesting Technology.
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The host of episode 27 of Venture Everywhere is Charles Baron, Co-founder and CPMO of Farmers Business Network (FBN), a platform that helps family farmers maximize their profit potential with data and technology, direct-to-farm commerce, and community. Charles catches up with Akash Nandi, Co-founder and CEO of Tendrel. With the goal of empowering frontline workers and optimizing decision-making, Tendrel is establishing the necessary data infrastructure to transition manual labor tasks from analog inefficiency to data driven optimization. It's a tool designed to integrate with the existing workflow of operations without the disruption of introducing new hardware. Charles and Akash discuss the significant shifts that data science and technology are bringing to the agricultural and industrial sector, moving beyond traditional practices into a more efficient, sustainable future.
In this episode, you will hear:
Tendrel’s aim in boosting frontline labor decisions with a global data platform with software-centric solutions.
Data analytics role in transforming farming into a catalyst for growth, efficiency, and sustainability.
Optimizing CEA workflow and workforce efficiency by capturing worker data.
Challenges in the agricultural sector, such as resistance to new technology and shifting from hardware to software approaches.
Utilizing cloud-based rules engine to streamline operations while respecting existing workflows.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:20 Charles: Hello everyone, welcome to the Everywhere podcast. My name is Charles Baron. I'm the co-founder of Farmer's Business Network. And today we're gonna talk about agriculture and agricultural technology with Akash Nandi from Tendrel. I've been a friend of the Everywhere team for many years. I've been an LP in some of the funds and looking forward to the conversation.
00:00:39 Charles: Happy to tell you a little bit about Farmers Business Network, where that's come from and, be exciting to hear about Tendrel and Akash's story. And so just a quick bit on FBN. We're a network of farmers. We started about nine and a half years ago and a way to connect farmers online, give them more information, more market access, and more power and transparency in the market. And have since turned into a network of nearly 80,000 farms across the US and Canada, and we are a platform for farms.
00:01:08 Charles: So basically a farm can use FBN to buy products like crop protection, livestock supplies, biological fertilizers. They can sell their grain through FBN, they can get sustainability premiums through FBN, and they can get financing through FBN, through the FBN Finance Platform. And at the roots of FBN was a data analytics platform that we built when we started.
00:01:28 Charles: And so that's been able to empower a lot of the systems that we offer. And it's been a tremendous process building the company, but we have several hundred employees and operations across the US and Canada and about 27 logistic centers where we serve farmers with direct to farm delivery.
00:01:43 Charles: With that, we'll kick it off here and get into the story of Tendrel. Akash, welcome. Tell us about Tendrel.
00:01:51 Akash: Thanks, Charles. Great pleasure to meet you. I'm a huge fan of FBN. I think as you hear our story at Tendrel, you'll see how it was more than just a little bit of an inspiration to us. But at its core, Tendrel is the answer to the question of, how does frontline labor evolve in an era of increased automation and artificial intelligence and profound demographic shifts.
00:02:13 Akash: And what I've seen over the years is that oftentimes the backbone of our economy, whether it's growing our food or running our factories, managing our warehouses, these massively foundational industries have been left behind by a lot of our technology. I found that you can forget robotics and AI. There's not even the foundation for the training data for those types of revolutionary technologies.
00:02:38 Akash: That is really what led to the genesis of Tendrel. What we built is a universal data platform for frontline industries. What we found is that the trick is you need to build something that is extensible and customizable and flexible enough so that you can work, not only throughout every link in a vertical supply chain, but be able to port across these supply chains.
00:03:00 Akash: That's really the only way that you can hone in on the bottlenecks and iron out the kinks of these bottlenecks to be able to have a more productive, effective, and sustainable way of feeding ourselves. To go a little bit into how we thought about that technically, the trick is really about, thinking about configuration as opposed to code. What are the atomic elements that you care about? What are the workers, the locations, the resources?
00:03:25 Akash: And leaving that for your users, your customers to define. I'm not a farmer. I'm never gonna know as much about farming as any of our clients. And so we trust them to know how to architect their operations. What we do is give them the tools of the Lego blocks to do that. Where we come in is really the underlying rules engine to automate a lot of the nuance in the moment to moment decision making, shifting from reactive to proactive.
00:03:50 Akash: And this is a concept that my co-founder and CTO, Mark, has been iterating on for the past 30 years. We'll dive more into that later on in the podcast, but that's the foundation of what we're trying to do at Tendrel.
00:04:02 Charles: Great. So a universal data platform for, frontline industry. So describe the product a little more in some of the applications. So how does this take life? And if I'm a greenhouse operator or a producer of some type, how do I interact with Tendrel? Tell us about the product experience.
00:04:18 Akash: The product itself was defined by some of the unique challenges faced by the industries that we're looking to work with. Oftentimes these are fragmented, old school industries, whether it's farming or manufacturing. What we wanted to do was build something that met our customers where they are. And typically where they are is limited bandwidth. They're not interested in shiny toys or taking on technological risk that they're looking for a painkiller.
00:04:45 Akash: And that's ultimately what we wanted to do was find the most acute points of pressure in these systems and relieve them. What that means is that we don't have a hardware component to our business. It's entirely based in the cloud. It's all software because we wanted to meet our customers where they are. We wanted to adapt to the workflows and their behaviors. For instance, if folks are using a clipboard for scouting, rather than try to introduce a fancy, new scouting robot, instead we'll put an iPad in their hands and start digitizing and capturing some of that latent data.
00:05:18 Akash: And so there are really two steps to a Tendrel deployment. The first is configuring. What does your operation look like if you were to map out the critical resources and workers, locations and tasks, we then upload that to our system. It allows us to start tracking core data elements in their operation. And where things get more interesting is what we do with that data.
00:05:40 Akash: So as we gather information on what are the bottlenecks and the worker skill sets and average time at task and error rates that matter to your process, how can we start iterating on that? Figuring out how to put the right worker at the right place at the right time. How can we start managing your product better? How do we start building a little bit more predictability into your processes so that you're not always chasing down fires? You can start acting a little more preemptively.
00:06:07 Akash: And how we typically deploy is with a wedge use case. We start not by trying to digitize an entire facility across hundreds of workers, but find what's the subset? If you picked one thing that you could shine a spotlight on, what would it be? We'll configure that use case, we'll deploy it to an iPad, an Android, ruggedized handheld, and we start collecting the data. And from there, it's all iteration and feedback from our customers.
00:06:31 Charles: Well, I think something for people who are maybe newer to agriculture or the differences that exist within agriculture. So obviously, I think people are familiar with the concept of a farm and a conventional farm that's outdoors and growing crops in the sun and you're dependent on the weather and you're dependent on the rain. That's the vast majority of agricultural productions operations in the United States, typical family farm.
00:06:54 Charles: And in open field row crop production or commodity production, you are completely exposed to the weather and you're completely exposed to a lot of the vagaries of nature that you're trying to manage when you raise a crop, which is completely different than in Controlled Environment Agriculture or CEA as it's known, which is the world of greenhouses and indoor production. Very common in either high value specialty crops, orchard, ornamental crops like cut flowers, high value crops like cannabis, the world of some very specialty crops like strawberries and others.
00:07:24 Charles: Now increasingly with indoor vertical farming, you see much more of a movement to develop a CEA and especially abroad. You'll see a lot of indoor agriculture in Europe, in environments that don't have the same soil or environmental conditions that can support open field crops.
00:07:39 Charles: When you think about that, when you visit a greenhouse operation, the greenhouse operation can have dozens or hundreds of employees doing very, very precise tasks on a very highly scheduled program. There's a lot of coordination. It's a workflow. It's really closer to manufacturing than it is to growing outdoors. And there's a tremendous degree of precision that goes into every element of the crop from the water to the nutrition, to the light cycles, to the rotation and growing cycles of crops.
00:08:06 Charles: What are some of the applications where people are finding or using Tendrel? What are the specific use cases that customers are really honing in on for you so far in the start of your journey?
00:08:16 Akash: Yeah, it's a fascinating space, CEA, and it's worth noting this gradation even within that. So you've got low tech greenhouses, which might be a polyurethane hoop house in Guadalajara. And then you've got super high tech cutting edge, LED lit glass houses, Venlo Greenhouses in the Netherlands, and everything in between. But you've hit upon this core concept, which is it's the same fundamental issue. You've got hundreds of people doing dozens of distinct tasks on thousands or hundreds of thousands of plants.
00:08:48 Akash: And at its core, I mean, this is controlled chaos, controlled in the best case. And what we wanted to iron out with Tendrel was the misconception that manual labor is the same thing as unskilled labor. The fact is for those distinct tasks, you've got vastly different skill sets. So being a good tomato harvester might mean that you're pulling down 400 kilos of fruit per hour. And that is a high strength, high mobility task. Whereas being a good deleafer, that's a high dexterity task, plucking individual leaves off of the plant to maximize fruit production.
00:09:22 Akash: And the fact is none of that nuance, none of those skill sets are quantified today. Right now, if you were to go to any farm, I would hazard, you would have the same process, which is a standup in the morning with dozens of workers, and you blindly allocate those tasks. You say, okay, you, five people are doing leafing. You 10 are doing lowering. 15 of you, doing harvesting, and you pray to God the job gets done.
00:09:45 Akash: And a lot of the time it doesn't. What we want to do is start ironing out some of that nuance and identifying, okay, what is a person's superpower, so to speak? Is Charles a good harvester? Is he a good deleafer? Should he be retrained or promoted? Should he be shifted to the pack house across hundreds of workers?
00:10:02 Akash: And if you can do that, the implication is that you can start running your operation with a much higher degree of fidelity. To answer your question concretely, what we've started to do with our customers is build out that nuance for their workforce, whether it's in a warehouse or a greenhouse or a pack house. It's the same core concept, which is, can I figure out not just time at tasks? Something is rudimentary, is knowing how long it takes someone, but what was their error rate? What is their productivity?
00:10:29 Akash: And in doing so, starting to allocate your people with a degree of intelligence. And this is a dual benefit. Obviously as an operator, it means that you can do more with less. You are able to put the right person in the right place, the right time, you're firefighting less and reacting less because you've got a game plan ahead of you. You know exactly what skills you have and what work needs to be done. That's the power of data.
00:10:54 Akash: However, for the worker, I think there's a really profound, if not always overt benefit, which is you start to recognize them as more than just a cog in the machine. You start to see what is my path to progression, what are my skill sets, and hopefully leverage that to be able to do better for yourself, whether it's hitting your piece rate bonus or getting more hours or getting promoted, being noted as a subject matter expert.
00:11:19 Akash: The core concept being that now you're no longer a cog, you're no longer starting at zero, but you've got some core skill set that you can leverage. And this would have profound implications well beyond agriculture. This is billions of workers across the globe who are currently treated as a cog in the machine.
00:11:37 Charles: Are you building the actual applications in the greenhouse for greenhouse management systems or is it more foundational? How would you interact with a greenhouse customer? Or are you integrating with existing software? Where does one get involved in the sequence with your system?
00:11:51 Akash: You're hitting upon two core layers of Tendrel, and I'll start with the foundational platform. That is where the data resides. That's where the rule engine resides. That's where all the intelligence takes place. And that's fundamentally the core competency of our team. It's where they've spent the most time. It's where we've deployed before. And it is what will ultimately supercharge a lot of these industries.
00:12:13 Akash: But that data requires some method of collection. It needs a behavior in order to measure not just data points, but also the movement of workers and product and processes.
And so we've got an end application that we've built on top of our platform. That's what can be deployed onto mobile handsets.
00:12:31 Akash: And we've built all of this as an Open API First platform so that ultimately others can build on top of it as well. You hit upon a core concept, which is, there are dozens of point solutions, probably hundreds of point solutions in just the world of farming. And then you've got even more when it comes to different blue collar verticals. And for us, we don't want to be everything. Like I said, there's going to be specialists for each of those end tasks.
00:13:00 Akash: And so to date, we have deployed our own end application, but the intent is to start integrating other flows of data because there are some facilities that have data streams. The problem is they don't go anywhere. They're siloed, they don't lead to action, and therefore, they're not really creating any value.
00:13:18 Akash: For us, the real value of Tendrel is being able to aggregate every data point that you've got, whether it's collected on our end application or not, to create a cohesive view for these operators, to be able to leverage environmental data, product data, and worker data, whether that's being collected through WMS and LMS time clock, ERP doesn't matter to us. What matters is can we turn that raw data into intelligence and thus action.
00:13:47 Charles: But some of the customer stories you were telling me before about the different types of operations you've been working across from Mexico to Pennsylvania, what are these customers like? What kinds of operations are they? And what have people been finding success with Tendrel so far?
00:14:00 Akash: Yeah, we went multinational a lot sooner than I'd expected. The company was founded in August of ‘22. We had our first customer that November, multiple customers six months after that. And so we've been having a lot of fun deploying and there's been a lot of organic pull as well. So we are currently in the US, the United Kingdom, Mexico. And it's pretty remarkable because you find a lot of cultural distinctions well beyond just language, but the way that people interact with each other and the way they view work.
00:14:28 Akash: But what's equally striking is just how similar a lot of these operations are, and perhaps more profoundly, how similar the people are. A lot of the time, these are hourly workers coming in, trying to do a job to do better by their family, sometimes sending money back home (remove this from audiogram). And so there are a few core consistencies, which is we don't want to inundate these folks with some fancy new toy.
00:14:48 Akash: At the end of the day, they're there to do a job. And we try to keep our deployments as lightweight as possible so that they can complete the task at hand, do their job well, and hopefully in time, leverage Tendrel for a bit more agency and mobility in their work. But that's a multi-year endeavor.
00:15:08 Akash: When I think about the immediate impact, and I'm happy to dive into some specifics, it's how can we start driving greater productivity and visibility and predictability for our operators? And these operators can be small, family-owned facilities, single site, doing one crop, and we're working with some of the largest food producers and operators in the world. And it's the same problem at different degrees of complexity.
00:15:34 Akash: When you're running a single site, you're dealing with probably dozens of workers and dozens of tasks. When you're thinking about this from an enterprise level and a network of facilities, you're not just thinking about the different crops you've got, you're thinking about, how does this impact my packhouse and my processing centers?
00:15:50 Akash: What is the implication for transportation, logistics and my retail partners? And so what we found historically is that the more vertically integrated you are, the more sites you have, the more acute the pain is from having that lack of visibility, that lack of quantified skills, that lack of infrastructure.
00:16:08 Akash: But to hone in on a couple of personal stories, there's one family owned farm that we're working with that they've been doing this for decades. They've got a brilliant COO, who's got a PhD in agronomy, but he's never really been afforded the tools to leverage his full skill set. He was one of our first customers, and when we deployed Tendrel with him, he found these really useful, unique use cases that we wouldn't have stumbled on ourselves, including one that helped track product disposition, aging, and location in his cooling facilities.
00:16:40 Akash: And leveraging that, he was able to make smarter sales allocations. He'd look at his phone and know exactly what he had, how old it was and where it was, and he reduced his waste on a weekly basis from 15,000 pounds of product to less than 500. There was no change in weather or seed genetics or crop husbandry. It was simple data-driven visibility that allowed him to make smarter choices. And that's fundamentally what Tendrel is about. Empower these experts to do more with what they've got.
00:17:11 Akash: And then on a more personal basis, a story that I'm probably most proud of in all of our time at Tendrel, there was a tomato harvester who was working at one of our facilities. She was on Tendrel, and we recognized her through the data that we saw that she was a superstar in hiding, her reliability, her productivity, her consistency.
00:17:30 Akash: And we showed a spotlight on her. We said to the management, hey, look, this person can do a lot more than just harvesting tomatoes. They recognize that they worked with her and today she's a food safety manager, leveraging her true skill set and uncovering that previously hidden potential.
00:17:45 Akash: And that was a very self-contained, very personal story. But for me, it's emblematic of why we're doing this. It's a microcosm of the impact we can drive on both sides, for both the company and the worker in leveraging all of this latent data.
00:18:01 Charles: Let's transition a bit to how you guys got here? Tell us a bit about the story of about 18 months, started the company about 18 months ago or so. So it's still very, very early. So I imagine these are first deployments, first few customers getting the system stood up, but tell us the story of where the company came from and where are you going from here in terms of the next phase of growth as you've just announced your seed round.
00:18:21 Akash: Yeah.
00:18:21 Charles: Congratulations.
00:18:22 Akash: Thank you.
00:18:23 Charles: Where do you go from here?
00:18:24 Akash: Yeah, I'm happy to tie a little bit of my background into this as well. I will tell you very honestly that I stumbled face first into the world of agriculture and frontline industries. The path here was meandering and only in retrospect can you really connect the dots. But through my experiences in big data and building robots and working on a farm, it's really what led to the genesis of Tendrel.
00:18:46 Akash: I'll be very honest and say that I started in the total opposite end of the economy. I started my career in investment banking, and I'll tell you right now that wasn't my cup of tea. I say, I started to find my groove a little bit more when I joined Netflix back in 2015. This was still when they were mostly a DVD and licensing business. But over my years with Netflix, saw firsthand how having ground fruit granular data can remake an entire industry.
00:19:10 Akash: Over my time with Netflix, I saw them grow from David to Goliath. I missed that lean mean building of the challenger. And that's what led me to grad school to pivot into the world of startup. And my first startup was a company called Root AI where we were building robotics, tackling the biggest bottleneck in modern day specialty crop agriculture, which is oftentimes labor, not having enough of it, not having visibility on how to allocate it.
00:19:35 Akash: And Root was very much the technologist's answer to this challenge, which is if you don't have enough people, build a robot, which is a little bit easier said than done. But it was a fascinating mix of computer vision and dexterous robotics and path planning AI to replicate a person's ability to harvest ripe fruit. That's really how I got much, much deeper into this world.
00:19:56 Akash: I joined Root when it was just a couple of employees and the founders collecting training data on a camera on a stick. I ended up dropping out of grad school, joined them as their first CFO, then COO the entire time as we scaled to 25 people. I was the only non-engineer. So I had the pleasure of doing everything that wasn't building a robot. That meant spending a lot of time with our customers, deploying pilots, seeing what their operations were like, all the way to the eventual sale of that company to a large agricultural producer called AppHarvest.
00:20:24 Akash: AppHarvest is when I really start to get my hands dirty in this world. It was the first time that I lived at one of these facilities. So I moved from Boston down to Kentucky. I got a place in Lexington and I spent my days at our flagship facility in Morehead, Kentucky, which was one of the largest, most advanced greenhouses in North America. It was 60 acres, so imagine 50 football fields worth of plants. It was 200 plus workers, 720,000 plants. They could produce 45 million pounds of produce out of that one facility.
00:20:55 Akash: And this was the first of a number of facilities in AppHarvest's mission to decentralize the food production supply chain, co-locate production closer to consumption. It was a very ambitious vision. It was a bold vision to your point on CEA. I believe it's a necessary step in being able to feed ourselves in the face of more volatility, climate change, decreased labor, but it was also an incredibly complex operation.
00:21:22 Akash: And what I saw firsthand, there was a lack of infrastructure to run an operation that complex because 720,000 plants, it's not like working with sewing machines or cars. These are very fickle biomechanical machines where if you don't do the right task at the right time, they suffer and so too does your product. Therein was my shift from hardware to software. I think more philosophically from automating people to augmenting them.
00:21:51 Akash: The truth is, I think robotics will play a bigger future in how we feed ourselves, but that's a somewhat distant future. There's still technological hurdles, still scaling hurdles to cross there. And in the meantime, and for years to come, people are going to be the central resource when it comes to feeding ourselves. And what I realized is we need to figure out how to better manage not just the people, but the processes, the product, the allocation of our most precious resources in this endeavor.
00:22:20 Akash: It's how I met my co-founder, Mark Keller, who'd spent a decade at Amazon building exactly this type of workforce and workflow optimization infrastructure that allows Amazon facilities to run like a Swiss watch. The question was, can we replicate that magic? Can we democratize that type of infrastructure so that even if you were on Amazon, if you were a small family-owned farm or a multi-site manufacturing center or an e-comm fulfillment warehouse, could you run with greater efficiency? And that was how we started Tendrel back in August 2022.
00:22:54 Charles: Okay. What comes next? Now that you've raised your seed, what's the next evolution for the companies?
00:23:00 Akash: The most fascinating element of the past year and a half has been seeing the organic pull and the organic discovery of novel use cases. The magic of this platform really is in the configuration where we haven't provided our customers with a rigid application that solves one problem. What we gave them is a toolbox, a set of, I think to them as Lego blocks, and they can assemble and reassemble and reconfigure as they see fit. And that has been, I think, the most eye-opening element and the greatest validation of this platform in that we've started to uncover insights and deploy to processes that we couldn't have fathomed.
00:23:39 Akash: We started off, as I said, thinking about crop care and harvesting, and we got pulled into the pack house and then into quality scoring, scouting and assembly lines. And what we found is that there's more commonalities between verticals than oftentimes within them. If you're working on a pack line, that might have more in common with a meal kit assembly line and thus a furniture assembly line than a different set of tasks within agriculture.
00:24:06 Akash: And so the next couple of years is really about establishing that broader footprint across key industrial blue collar industries. And I'm thinking of these foundational verticals like food production and processing, manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and starting to ascertain what are the common through lines here? What are the common behaviors? Because oftentimes the labor moves between these verticals as well.
00:24:35 Akash: You might move from a tomato harvesting gig this year to a kit assembly line next year to a warehousing gig the year after. You're really chasing the opportunity. And each time as a worker, you start from zero because there's no resume, there's no LinkedIn to quantify your skillset. And so a core element for us is not just expanding our footprint across verticals, but beginning to create that worker profile. Every time a worker spends time on Tendrel, we capture that data and it will move with that worker.
00:25:06 Akash: So let's say for a food processing center, they have a brand new worker, but this person worked at a farm that had Tendrel the year before, they can see basic scoring on their core skill set, their absenteeism rate, their core skills that can inform how do you allocate this person and not start from zero. And obviously as an operator, it gives you a little bit more edge in being able to run your operations. But as a worker, there's a little bit more agency and even dignity in starting with that baseline.
00:25:37 Akash: And so, my core focus over the next few years for our entire team is, that customer discovery. And I'll call it out right now. If there any folks listening to this now that have some of these pain points, a lack of visibility on their workforce, their workflows, product, process, if they’re running on pen and paper or just have siloed data streams, reach out to me on LinkedIn through the Tendrel website that's spelled tendrel.io. There's a contact us form and let's hop on a call. Let's talk about what your tech stack looks like, what your operation looks like, and figure out what the figuration would look like for your site.
00:26:15 Charles: You obviously talked about you guys looking to expand beyond the world of greenhouses, but in the world of agriculture, are you focusing and staying in indoor ag before branching out? Or are you experimenting right now with multiple other industries? Who's the ideal customer for you right now, this year?
00:26:32 Akash: I'll say that who, we’re probably not a great fit for, and that's likely RowCrop. RowCrop has had some tremendous innovations from the very first John Deere tractor well over a hundred years ago, where there's increased automation, there's much more infrastructure around being able to manage those fields with a high degree of precision. It is the highly variable crops that are better fit for us. And that's not just CEA, but if you think about any orchard crop, think about vineyard crops.
00:26:58 Akash: Those start to fit the same behavioral patterns as a greenhouse, where you've got dozens or hundreds of tasks, hundreds of workers, thousands of plants, each one that requires unique care. And you want to be able to make sure that you're maximizing your productivity. And so we're starting to go broader in the world of agriculture for those specialty crops, those fruiting crops in particular.
00:27:21 Akash: And then we're also starting to look more into the world of packing and processing. So you see a natural evolution as we start to push downstream in this food supply chain, where one of our end goals is being able to identify the bottlenecks in how we feed ourselves, something like 30% to 40% of the food we grow never reaches our plates. Where are those kinks in the supply chain? Where can we start ironing out that loss so that as you think more holistically about food, as you think more holistically about this entire industry, we can start acting with a bit more diligence and intelligence.
00:27:55 Akash: One of the big motivating factors there, the Food Safety Modernization Act being pushed through in the next, less than two years. We need more traceability on who touches our food as it moves through that supply chain. The FDA is implementing really strict data capture and right now that infrastructure doesn't exist. Finding customers who are looking to implement this infrastructure to work within the realm of that regulation is another motivating factor for us in terms of being able to work much more broadly across this industry.
00:28:28 Charles: Okay. We'll launch into the speed round here for you, Akash. Now that you are successfully closed your seed and off in the world, you get to answer a founder's speed round. Okay.
00:28:38 Akash: Right on.
00:28:40 Charles: So let's see here. Okay, what's a book you're reading or a podcast you are enjoying?
00:28:45 Akash: I've created a ritual around reading every night. I'm reading a fiction book called Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, fascinating escapist reading, a really great way of understanding different ways of perceiving the world. No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings on the culture of Netflix.
00:29:00 Charles; All right, good. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:29:03 Akash: Japan, for sure.
00:29:05 Charles: Favorite productivity hack.
00:29:08 Akash: My father was a trauma surgeon, then an emergency room doctor. He taught me the importance of triage.
00:29:13 Charles: There you go. All right. So where can people find you? Where should everyone reach out if they're interested in Tendrel, your agricultural operation, or just an industrial producer with big data problems.
00:29:25 Akash: Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. And then as I mentioned on our website, that's Tendrel, tendrel.io. We've got a Contact Us form. I would love to learn more about what problems you're facing and how we might be able to work together. I think if I were to wrap up some of the key topics that we covered, Charles, the idea here is to build a data layer that's much bigger than just thinking about people or even farming or food.
00:29:50 Akash: It's about thinking about how, does work in the physical world evolve in a world with more automation, more robotics, AI, and people all interacting? And that is really what Tendrel is about, it's orchestrating that delicate dance.
00:30:03 Charles: Cool. Well, it's been fun talking. Akash, great to meet you. I hope to see you at ag events, maybe around the country or bump into you at a farm somewhere. I enjoyed the conversation. So thank you all for listening and follow up with Tendrel at Tendrel's website or find Akash online. And if you are a happen to be a road crop producer or a livestock producer in America and you were interested in FBN, fbn.com is where you can learn more about FBN. So thank you very much. Enjoyed the conversation.
00:30:30 Akash: Thanks, Charles. I'll talk to you soon.
00:30:34 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.