Harry Tannenbaum (Mill) - Setting the Goal at Delight
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Harry Tannenbaum is the co-founder and president of Mill, a technology company combining hardware and AI to reduce waste and recover value from everyday materials, starting with food. Mill’s residential food recycler is now in tens of thousands of homes, creating the foundation for Mill Commercial, which pre-processes and analyzes food waste streams on-site, helping organizations reduce waste, gain operational efficiencies, and unlock new value from what was once discarded. In this conversation with Adjunct Lecturer Emily Ma, Tannenbaum explains his approach to creating products that customers rave about and companies that scale to the point of changing entire systems.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders is produced by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at the Stanford School of Engineering, and published on eCorner by STVP. STVP empowers aspiring entrepreneurs to become global citizens who create and scale responsible innovations.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought to you by Stanford E-Corner and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. |
| 0:07.0 | My name is Emily Ma, and I welcome you all back to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program's |
| 0:12.0 | Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, co-hosted by the Business Association for Stanford Entrepreneurial Students and the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford. |
| 0:20.0 | Today we are joined by a very special guest Harry Tannenbaum who is |
| 0:25.5 | the co-founder and president of Mill a technology company combining hardware to |
| 0:29.8 | an AI to reduce waste and recover value from everyday materials starting with food |
| 0:34.7 | mill's residential food recycler is now in tens of thousands of homes, |
| 0:39.5 | including mine, creating the foundation for Mill commercial, which pre-processes and analyzes food waste |
| 0:45.9 | streams on site, helping organizations reduce waste, gain operational efficiencies, and unlock new |
| 0:51.6 | value from what was once discarded. Prior to Mill, Harry led the centralized analytics group and e-commerce business at NEST, |
| 0:59.0 | which launched the first learning thermostat and became the leading brand for the connected home. |
| 1:04.0 | During his time at NEST, Harry helped to scale the business to more than $1 billion in annual revenue. |
| 1:09.0 | Following Nest's acquisition by Google, |
| 1:11.6 | he was a director in Google's hardware organization |
| 1:14.6 | focused on e-commerce and subscription offerings. |
| 1:16.6 | He received his bachelor's in economics from UCLA, |
| 1:20.6 | and he's a surfer and was raised in San Francisco. |
| 1:23.6 | So welcome home to San Francisco Bay Area and all the work that you do and you and I are very passionate about food waste. |
| 1:32.3 | But what is this thing about food waste that we want to talk about? |
| 1:35.3 | So I'm going to hand the clicker to you because we're going to have you sort of walk us through why you're so passionate about this topic. |
| 1:42.3 | Well, I'm really happy to be here. Can you all hear me? |
| 1:45.0 | It's an honor to be here. I was signing the wall of speakers, and I just want you to know that this isn't like a revenge fever dream for me. |
... |
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