Building startups, teams, farms, and big machines
I joined Fyto as the Founding Engineer when it was founded in 2019. It was a wild, six-year journey full of ups:
- Learning about myself in my first full-time job, including some of my superpowers: executing and attacking projects from start to finish, designing machines (structures, motors and bearing design, electrical integration), seeing the big picture of what's best for the company and genuinely enjoying doing the most important thing no matter what it is
- Building a machine from start to finish with a team of 2 at first - mechanical, electrical, software, hydraulic, etc. all included - to building a 52'-wide and then a 160'-wide machine with a team of 6-8 engineers
- Raising a $15 million Series A and growing from 2 to 25
- Building one of the (the?) largest outdoor duckweed farms in the world, in the Central Valley (and working 12-hour days in 110+F heat along the way)
- Teaming up with some of the best folks in the world and balancing remote farm sites and team members
...and yet it ended in failure. There's a lot I learned about why. Maybe I'll add a specific section about that later. In any case, these are some of the lessons I'll carry with me:
1. The only real way to test market fit is to sell your product to your customer. No, seriously. Between pre-orders and pre-purchase agreements, there should always be a way to test your market hypothesis.
2. If you bring value to your customers that they don't need or don't currently pay for, then it doesn't help your company be a comapny. At Fyto, we thought we would bring a lot of value to the farm - not just protein but local production and efficient, sustainable wastewater remediation. In the end, those weren't things that people paid for and it didn't help pay the bills.
3. Regulatory challenges - tackle them with gusto as quickly as possible.
4. Team culture is formed and changed by each person. It needs to be fostered actively. Nothing replaces in-person interaction but sometimes you have several sites - the culture between sites needs to be actively fostered too.
Fyto's "launching point" - which we termed Fyto Kitty Hawk.
Fyto's "Bot 1" - 25'-ft wide, tethered (wired), built for ~0.1-ac or so
Fyto's Bot 4 - 160'-ft wide, EV-converted linear irrigator, built for 10-ac
Pounding poles for your startup represents half the fun! Not pictured: unloading our machines with telehandlers and forklifts, using tractors and skid-steers, mixing feed rations for cows, and others!
Designing for the outdoors - not easy. Skip the RJ-45.