I am not a fan of Larry so take the next sentences as an odd way to confirm bias and maybe this is why I am responding to it now..
Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Isn't this rehashing the disrupt-vs-reform issue? I guess I am concerned that people are surprised every time someone like Ellison does it.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
Is it laziness, or is it hubris? In a world where some people are told what they do is so good they essentially have infinite wealth, it's hard to convince them that any specific decision they make is an error.
For me, “disrupt” is forever tainted by all the startups whose only real innovation was aggressively breaking the law until they were too big to police.
Any time a billionaire demonstrates interest in the disruption of a critical industry, I get nervous. Humans are just too damn susceptible to the “product is subsidized until the disruption is firmly entrenched” play, especially when the feedback loop to uncover deficiencies in the new approach is measured in years and decades.
I think a baseline for both disrupt and reform is an understanding of the problem space and existing solutions first, maybe more-so for successful disruption.
I think that if you know the current state of the art you have a higher chance of making an incremental improvement. I don't know if it changes your odds of coming up with a revolutionary improvement. We just recently had the story of the student who developed a faster hash lookup because they didn't know it would be impossible.
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble. The point is that there is a competition for the best solution in terms of money.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
The weirdest part to me, especially with that kind of money, is the lack of bringing in external expertise. There are a lot of ag experts that are up to date on the latest greenhouse, climate, and plant science. Many colleges in the US started as agriculture schools and still have strong agriculture programs. With Ellison's money it is baffling why they didn't bring in a team of these experts to point out the basics like "use ag tech from similar climates", "test ag tech in smaller facilities first", and "gather local farming knowledge". Why in the world would someone put a medical doctor in charge of an ag tech venture?
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
Yes it has. I mean, it hasn't worked out in every case, but between Tesla (Ford/GM/Chrysler), SpaceX (Boeing/Lockheed Martin), TikTok (Youtube), Moderna (Pfizer/Merck/GSK/Sanofi), Uber (Taxi industry/Medallion system/Dispatch companies), Stripe (PayPal/Visa/Mastercard), AirBnB (Hilton/Marriot/Expedia/Booking.com), and OpenAI (Google DeepMind/IBM Watson/Academia), I think there's enough of a case to be made that being young and ignorant of the existing incumbent entities has worked out in a couple of cases.
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
One of the beloved early figures in modern agriculture had no money and no formal education, yet his work developing improved plant varieties earned him international fame.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
There’s also a ton of money being spent on ag tech. My parent company spends billions per year on ag tech. We have drones tracking cows in fields, sensors tracking animals, mixing food, feeding them, monitoring them… tons of other stuff (I’m not on that side of things). This is one of the subsidiaries: https://www.microtechnologies.com/
It's remarkable because there are a ton of vertical farming setups in and around large cities in unremarkable warehouses that got this right, but they're having issues with small greenhouses and $500mm.
There is an argument for the blank restart, intentionally ignoring all knowledge gained up to now, to possibly get past a local maximum.
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.
There’s something to be said for fresh perspectives, sure. There’s also something to be said for hiring farmers to teach you how to run a greenhouse. You need to know the rules before you break them.
Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted.
It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
What he wants is automated food production in his creepy autonomous Hawaii sub-nation, which fits with all the other Atlas Shrugged "hidden valley" dreams of the SV ultrarich.
He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations.
it wasn't a philantropic or revolutionary attempt. it was his venture to grow his luxury fruits for money- which is struggling because he is hiring friends with no agricultural background.
I've seen this time and again in this space. Thick out the MiT openag project. Same thing, nonsense.
The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
Easy to grow plant. Hard to make living, if you don't subsidise it with other work or income.
Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general.
Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
Except it's not especially hard? I, and I'm sure many of us, have decent little home gardens.
For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
I've worked in many an ag company: All the ideas Sensei supposedly has are in in way innovative: places like Monsanto/Bayer had been trying to do work in those directions a decade ago, and it's not as if they were short of people that understand agriculture. But as far as I am aware, most of the efforts in those companies have been scaled back.
The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.
That seems like a perfectly fine way to start a disruptive venture. Tesla started as a way to grow luxury EVs for money, except real experts got acquired.
Yeah seems like you'd want to either copy, poach, or acquire the talent at Oishii, no? They look like they know what they are doing, although it's not consumer cheap yet, and the economics might never be.
While I disagree with a majority of Larry Ellison's opinions, this is a venture that I think must be celebrated regardless of failures. There is such a lack of any green tech coming out of Silicon Valley that this one must get its due promotion. The front of agriculture and innovation is difficult but none of the technology is being used to sow hate amongst ourselves.
Why does Silicon Valley need to be doing the innovation here?
Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
Even beyond green, it's nice to see things being tried in the real world that aren't just scammy/$ grabs. It's not quite as cooperative as the digital, but rather more relevant.
As a former agronomist this makes as much sense to me as starting a database company where no one understands databases. Without an agronomist how do you know what could be possible from what is clearly impossible?
Didn't China burst this bubble already? Vertical farming, etc. Western aligned farming is currently in a big downturn due to BRICS constantly breaking production records. And they are using Chinese machinery. The world is catching up to American farming yields. China is decoupling from American farming and they have been investing a lot in all the infrastructure for that.
American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis)
There are a lot of Chinese doomsayers out there, about how they are about to collapse (zeihan). Then this, farming, or Deepseek comes out. I think their demise is over exaggerated.
Deepseek or whatever farming tech they may be developing don't amount to a drop in the bucket when it comes to their looming demographic collapse.
China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration.
The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
Ellison's strength, I felt like, has always been in the field of sales and ruthless contract negotiation rather than technical innovation - a "golden touch" that doesn't benefit disruptive scientific innovation, but might instead prove more fruitful if applied to an a mature technology that just needs to proliferate out there in the world.
There was an interesting article on him linked from The Diff newsletter today. It seems a large part of his strengths are strategic M&A.
"1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition.
2. It works.
3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year.
4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4
6. Divest losing tens of billions in the industries where this strategy doesn’t work (see adtech, oracle data cloud - few billions in acquisitions just closed down
not even sold)
7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures
Readit News
Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
[edited]
Deleted Comment
... how often does that happen? Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service.
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
We are fixing this."
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
Deleted Comment
Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
https://lbcas.com/burbanks-life
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/
Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted.
It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations.
He doesn't care squat about the world in general.
The folks who are successful don't call themselves tech people, they're farmers. To be successful in this business you need to eliminate the hubris and just be a farmer.
Yes.
That is not to say that farming is not due for some revolutionary redefining.
But it will be farmers leading the change, not software people
Say apples as mentioned elsewhere 1,40€ to 3,60€ kilogram price now in mid winter in supermarket... 14% VAT. Then whole supply chain, stores cut, losses... And all the work that needs to go into each tree, collecting those apples and so on... Food is amazingly cheap. Margins are very thin in general.
Much simpler to sit in air-conditioned office or remote work and make more money.
- silicon valley joke since at least the dot com bubble
For fruit trees you have to do literally nothing to get just massive amounts of fruit that tends to constantly scale up as the trees grow. Highly recommended.
Lots of other stuff is completely easy mode as well. Leave potatoes out long enough and they start trying to sprout! 'Potato boxes' are another super easy high output plant anybody can do.
The fact of the matter is that agriculture startups have as nasty a failure rate as most other kinds of startups, but they take far longer, and far more money, until we reach the point that it's clear that they've reach said terminal state. I could name a couple that have been running for 6+ years with no revenue, and where insiders claim there's minimal prospects of the effort going anywhere, but there are some VCs that are happy keeping said 100+ employee startups running with no output anyway.
You've got that famous quote from Edison about failing at make a light bulb.
Or you think everyone who studies cancer and doesn't cure it should think of themselves as failures?
God forbid you have a kid who wants to get better at something and you tell them to not bother because they're already a loser.
Deleted Comment
Agricultural techniques and tech are constantly improving. There's already a lot of money to be made improving all aspects of food production, incentivizing tons of non-SV companies to invest.
Deleted Comment
They have farms in Hawaii and Ontario with an office in LA.
It would be nicer if it was not saddled by hubris and a lack of domain knowledge
It would be great if it were not such a colossal waste
American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis)
https://www.barrons.com/articles/farmers-trump-trade-war-agr...
https://farmonaut.com/usa/urgent-u-s-farmers-face-financial-...
China is projected to see its population decline by somewhere near 400 million people over the next 75 years. Given their deep seated xenophobia, and limited and largely unsuccessful efforts to attract and integrate immigrants over the past couple decades, there's also no way they're going to replace even 1/10th of their population loss via immigration.
The predictions of "Collapse" may be somewhat early and perhaps hyperbolic in the short to medium term, but there's just no way they aren't going to face some extremely significant economic challenges when they lose 1/3rd of their workforce and have a population pyramid that looks like an upside down triangle over the next few decades.
"1. Larry Ellison has an insight which leads to a breakthrough initiative which has the potential to reposition Oracle to the forefront of the industry, completely bypassing the competition.
2. It works.
3. Larry Ellison checks out to go sailing or play tennis or something for like a year.
4. Oracle gets into trouble. New entrants and existing competitors are eating away at its market share, and Oracle is losing head-to-head.4
5. GOTO 1."
https://www.notboring.co/p/who-is-larry-ellison
7. Doesn’t matter, still have billions to spare and can eat huge failures