You are listening to the Draper Fisher-Jervinson Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar,

brought to you weekly by Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University School of Engineering.

So let's give Pam a big welcome to Stanford University, Pam.

Welcome, Dave.

Thank you very much.

In 2004, AgroQuest won the Top 100 Private Company Award, and I noticed that my talk,

10-minute talk, was sandwiched in between two Internet security companies, and I was groaning and saying, oh my God, the whole program is people aren't going to be interested at all in what I have to say.

And the conference organizers said, oh no, we all have to eat.

And that is true. And all of you should be very interested in what's happening in our food system because it's quite dynamic and there's a lot of changes and I'll touch on some of that today.

And of course, tell you some of the lessons that I learned being an entrepreneur.

My major goal since I was about eight, so I'm a little bit weird.

I was interested in bugs since I was young and studied entomology my entire

career, entomology being the study of insects. And I grew up in a family that was organic

gardeners, 40 acres in Connecticut, very green family. My father was an energy efficiency expert

and my mother's a master gardener who does everything organic. And so I decided I wanted to have a career pursuing developing products that were going to be

safer than chemical pesticides.

And I started my career from graduate school getting a PhD in entomology and then went to right

out of graduate school to Monsanto company.

And a very exciting program I was allowed to start up to look for new solutions for insect control.

And I was pretty much given a blank sheet of paper and said, just find something new.

And had a really good time there for seven years, but Monsanto ultimately decided they wanted to pursue genetically engineered plants,

engineering the insect control proteins and the genes that code for those proteins into plants,

...