Danny Bernstein left Big Tech to fund farm-bots | E2310

**Danny Bernstein** (0:00)
There are over 400,000 farm jobs that were posted last year, and less than 1% of them received a domestic applicant. These are jobs that domestic workers do not want to do. That's categorical and clear.

**Lon Harris** (0:10)
Nobody wants to really pick stone fruit in the height of summer in 110 degree heat.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:16)
They don't want to do it. They need to do it, because they want to provide for their families.

**Danny Bernstein** (0:19)
Strawberries, it's as much as 60 or 70%. And table grapes, it's 80% of production crop.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:25)
It's labor.

**Danny Bernstein** (0:25)
Strawberry harvest, I call it the white whale of AgTech. We have basically built this space to bring agricultural technology and sort of deep tech folks into a rural region to actually solve these problems.

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**Jason Calacanis** (1:25)
All right, bonjour, bonsoir, mon amis. It's your boy, Jay Cal, here in France. I'm in Paris. The world tour continues in a couple of weeks in Hawaii. What time is it for you in Austin?

**Lon Harris** (1:35)
It's 8 a.m. Our guest is in Salinas, California, so it's about to be even earlier over there.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:40)
Which means it's 6 a.m. It means we should be respectful of our guest. Why don't you introduce him and let's get started.

**Lon Harris** (1:45)
Sure, we're talking to Danny Bernstein. He's the founder of The Reservoir. This Jason, it's a fascinating thing. It's a pre-seed and seed incubator and studio for AgTech Startups. But their core product is you get physical access to a working farm. We're going to be talking to Danny from Reservoir Farms in Salinas, California. That's his 40-acre Agricultural Innovation Campus. Danny, thanks so much for being with us so early in the morning today.

**Danny Bernstein** (2:13)
Yeah, you know, farming starts with the dawn. So here we are. It's good to be with you guys. Yeah, we actually have a trial that's about to happen this morning. So this is an early start here at the Reservoir.

**Lon Harris** (2:24)
Had to get up and slop the hogs and then do a podcast, you know.

**Danny Bernstein** (2:27)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:29)
Well, thanks for coming on the show, Danny.
Obviously agriculture is being, not disrupted, but it's certainly, maybe it is being disrupted. I'll leave it for you to tell us. But how do you wind up running a gentleman's farm there and deciding you want to do the Y Combinator or Techstars of agriculture? How did you come up with the idea and how's it going?

**Danny Bernstein** (2:50)
Yeah, it's going well. I mean, the background, so I spent close to 20 years in Silicon Valley, and I was at Google for 10 years. And when I was at Google, I saw that sort of period of abundance where the company would have multiple applications even for the same problem. Google famously had what, six different messaging apps.
And so I started to think about, well, where is technology needed more? Where are there a lack of solutions for really critical problems, sort of critical imperatives? And so I left Big Tech and started to study complex outdoor industries and landed on specialty crop agriculture as an area that needed a lot of the same kind of principles, energy and thinking that Silicon Valley has developed and really honed and perfected. But could that be applied to an area that needs it more?

**Jason Calacanis** (3:38)
Specialty crop agriculture, specialty crop agriculture, SCA.

**Danny Bernstein** (3:43)
That's a lot of words.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:44)
Yeah. But what does it mean? I mean, we can guess here. Yeah. What is it?

**Danny Bernstein** (3:47)
So you can kind of break agriculture into two buckets, but specialty crop, so you have broad acre, which is like corn and soy. That's actually like big ag, subsidized ag, programmatic ag in the United States. But specialty crop agriculture is actually where our micronutrients come from. That's fresh produce, fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, etc.