Plenty's Nate Storey: "Kale outta Compton"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Nate Storey, co-founder of indoor farming unicorn Plenty, to talk about tearing down and rebuilding farms (3:40), the problem he’s trying to solve (6:40), breeding food for transport (8:50), building a farm in Compton (10:45), leveraging Hollywood (13:40), how he got into agriculture (17:10), leaving his first startup (22:10), what an indoor farm looks like (24:00), the industry boom (31:10), luring infrastructure investors (33:45), falling costs (37:30), how traditional farmers have responded (40:45), and putting orchards inside (44:00).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.5	Because what you don't want is coal-powered lettuce.
0:06.8	Exactly.
0:07.9	Coal-powered lettuce is not what anyone wants to bite into.
0:28.6	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:42.0	I am your host, Danny Forts and the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times coming to you live-ish from a farmhouse in the middle of an artichoke field. I'm not kidding.
0:48.6	Yeah, so we are right near Monterey, California, just a couple, just for a couple days. Mrs. F. found us in Airbnb to get a bit of change of scenery, which is, well, it's certainly that.
0:55.3	And to be honest, I had no idea what artichoke plants actually look like until today.
1:00.6	So now I do.
1:02.5	Hashtag knowledge.
1:03.9	Anyhow, speaking of plants, that is exactly what we are diving into this week.
1:09.7	That's right.
1:10.2	This week's guest is Nate
1:12.4	Story, who is the co-founder of Plenty, which is an indoor farming startup, but not just any
1:20.2	indoor farming startup. It is the best funded one in the world with folks like SoftBank,
1:27.3	Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, many, many other
1:30.9	billionaires.
1:32.8	They just raised a bunch of more money, $140 million, which pushes their total cash to
1:38.9	date to more than half a billion.
1:41.7	And, of course, only the most original, originalist, that's a word, the OGs of
1:49.2	this podcast, will remember that I first interviewed Story's co-founder Matt Bernard
	...

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