AgBiome Co-Founder on Flat Corporate Structure, Microbial Discovery, and Pandemic Trust

Eric Ward [00:00:00] Population that will agree that central planning at the national level has been proven a failure multiple times over. Why is it that every company works off of a central planning model? If that is the case, I'm Tim Bickett, a grain and cattle risk management advisor from Worthington, Minnesota,

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] And you are listening to the Vans Scroll podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we do an interview with my friend Eric Ward, who is one of the founders of a very unique company called AgBiome. I'll let Eric describe what he does, but this entire conversation unfolds in some really unusual ways because Eric and I end up talking about how their company is structured in order to avoid the bureaucratic hell that comes with most corporations that grow to a large size. They have a really interesting way of managing employees, of encouraging employees to think about their development and even the way that an employee has to go and ask for a raise by getting feedback from their fellow employees. This is a really interesting conversation. And then we also get into some conversations about science and vaccines and the Purple Tomato, which was just written about in the New York Times, and Eric was on the board of directors for this small little company that figured out how to create A GMO that what they think many consumers will want and why it's an important addition to the new crop sphere in the United States. So I hope you enjoy this interview. I'm quite excited about it. During the conversation, Eric and I talk about Legacy Interviews. This is where some of the listeners have hired me to interview their loved ones. It could be a small child, it could be a spouse, it could be one of your parents. I sit down and have a deep conversation about the values that are important to them, stories of their childhood, and why they made the decisions that they did.

Vance Crowe [00:01:58] And I package this up and send it to you in a video so that you can hold onto these memories of your loved ones in their own words on video. I do them both over Zoom, or if you're in the St. Louis area, we can always set up an in-person interview. And if you're interested to learn more, you can go to store Articulate Ventures and you can there purchase it and learn a lot more about it. The other thing is, if you listen to last week's podcast, I published a talk I gave at the Arkansas Farm Bureau. I was really surprised by the number of people that reached out to me saying, not only did they really enjoy that conversation, but they were asking me about doing talks at their organization. If you are interested in having me visit your organization, my late fall, early winter is starting to book up. So if you're interested how act now by going to Vance Crowe dot com. There you can find out a little bit about some of the talks that I'm giving. Not all of my talks are listed there, but it'll give you a general idea and then also a way to contact me telling me about your organization when your event is, this is fun and exciting time. I'm really glad to that you're around here for it. And I really hope you buckle in and enjoy this interview with my good friend Eric Ward. Eric Ward, welcome to the podcast.

Eric Ward [00:03:21] Thank you for having me. I'm a, as you know, longtime fan and we've known each other since, well, at least since before I was aware that this thing existed, but I've listened to several of 'em since and I know several of the folks that you've had on, so I'm highly flattered to be in their company.

Vance Crowe [00:03:38] Well, it's always fun to interview your friends, although it's a little bit difficult because there's all the all the standard questions that I would ask somebody we already know about, but I think it's a good frame to start off with. You work for with at the head of a company called AgBiome. What is that company? What do you guys do and what is your actual role there?

Eric Ward [00:04:00] Wow. Yeah, the last one's probably the hardest to answer. We, so AgBiome started about eight years ago, and we discover microbes from the microbial communities on our planet that have useful properties. And our core business is identifying bacteria that can protect crops from diseases, insects, nematodes, and the like. So, you know, simply put, what we do is go out into the world, we collect samples of all different kinds, soil plants, animals, you name it, take 'em back to the lab, reduce them to just the microbial matter that's within them. So that's basically a couple of filtration steps. We archive those things and alter cold freezers. So now we have these like undifferentiated pools of all the microbes that were in that sample, and then we can go back to those and identify individual strains of bacteria by, you know, pretty traditional microbiological techniques. And then the, I think the thing that we started doing early on that was maybe ahead of the curve compared to other people was we sequenced the genomes of every one of those strains that we isolate. So we're now bumping up toward about a hundred thousand of those where we have a complete genome sequence, which means we know effectively the entire genetic composition of every one of those strains. And then we can use that as a basis for picking strains that we want to test for useful properties. Like, can they kill an insect?

Eric Ward [00:05:32] Can they control the plant disease? Can they kill a nematode, et cetera. So that's sort of the discovery end of the business where we got going. We now have developed our first product, which is a biological fungicide called howler that's been on the market for about a year and a half, getting good up uptake from growers. It has really good properties, it performs as well as synthetic chemicals do against some critical crop disease combinations. And so we built up a commercial team around that to produce, sell market, that product. And then we have a, you know, pretty deep pipeline of additional products coming too. So we're, you know, if I want to steal a term from the IT world, we're a full stack company because we go all the way from a discovered product to actually produce it and commercializing it, which is, you know, relatively rare in our space in ag biotech, a lot of companies historically got acquired by somebody when they had a technology somebody wanted. And we, we made the determination pretty early on. We wanted to create a real sustainable presence in the crop protection space that was gonna make a big impact on, on growers' lives and, you know, ultimately on, on consumers' lives as well.

Vance Crowe [00:06:46] You know, I remember I visited your lab like three or four years ago, and I was struck by the idea that you guys were doing all this work. You had laboratories, you had offices, you had lots of people working, they were very busy, and yet you had nothing to sell yet. And I remember thinking like how nerve wracking that must be to be running a business, to be, I don't know if you're racking up debt or you're, you know, you're, you're doing something, someone is spending money that has not yet been accumulated. What was the experience like of running a startup where you're spending all this money and building all these things before you even have something to sell?

Eric Ward [00:07:23] Yeah, I, you know, that's, I think a pretty standard phenomenon for people that work in a company that's backed by equity capital. So we have some, you know, very generous and supportive investors that go back to the start of the company and that the assumption is that you're going to spend a significant amount of that equity capital to build value and eventually the business will be worth enough that they get, you know, a good return on their investment. That's sort of the fundamental idea. We had a big advantage, which was we were able to do some partnerships with major companies relatively early in the trajectory of AgBiome that actually offset most of our negative cash flow. So we were actually cash positive I think in year three or four, and those were, you know, our basically r and d partnerships where we perform specific r and d tasks and collaboration with the big partner who then gets some limited commercial rights in a specific field around that r and d and that, that brings money in the door to help build the research platform that we've built. It also gives us what's usually referred to as external validation, which means that, you know, people that are non-experts can say, Hey, well big company X wanted to work with these guys, so therefore they must have something going on. And it also, it puts the onus on us to keep our technology and our science at the cutting edge so that people do wanna work with us. Otherwise, you know, we don't really have very much to offer.

Eric Ward [00:08:53] So that's been a significant part of our revenue stream, certainly all of it before we launched how, and it'll continue to be a significant part of it for the foreseeable future because we, we like doing these partnerships for all the reasons that I said. We've also been able to use that model to get value from our discovery platform outside of our core business. So a good example of this is we, we created a, a little entity that worked specifically on discovering novel genome editing tools, generally speaking of the, you know, CRISPR related stuff that I'm sure you've heard a lot about because we had like thousands of these things in our microbial collection. So that team worked hard on identifying those, pulling 'em out, showing that they worked. And then we did a, a really a great deal with a company called Elevate Bio up in Cambridge back the end of last year, where they got exclusive rights to all that technology for human therapeutics, which is not, that's not our background at all, right? We don't, we basically have nobody who knows anything about that in the company, but we're now able to capture value in that partnership with Elevate for whatever they do with that genome editing technology for cell therapy, for gene therapy, you name it. So that, you know, that's one of the ways that we've been able to capitalize on, on the, the broad scope of the work that we've done without losing focus on, you know, we're gonna stick to our knitting and our core business and crop protection.

Vance Crowe [00:10:27] So when you're doing crop protection, you've gone out, you've isolated one of these microbes in the soil, you don't actually know which ones do nothing at all, which ones do things that are positive, which ones that are, do things that are negative. So is how, how does this work when you're trying to figure out which ones are you doing like, alright, let's just go ahead and test sample one through a hundred thousand to figure out which one kills the bugs.

Eric Ward [00:10:50] Yeah, there's a fair, there's a fair amount of that that does go on. That's, you know, what's technically, typically called random screening. You just pick stuff out and test it and see what works. So there's always a measure of that that goes on. You can try to bias that in various ways to improve your odds. So one way to bias it is maximize the diversity of the stuff that's going into that random screen. So this is, this is really taken a page out of the book of the way chemicals are screened the way, you know, traditional crop protection chemicals are discovered the way a lot of synthetic molecules like in, in pharmaceuticals are discovered. You try to cover as much like space as you can when you're looking for activity. So that's one way you can bias it. Another is you can look at strains that, you know, have activity already, whether they came out of your own activities, your, your own screening, or whether they're maybe products that are on the market or something in a patent. And we can, in a really super quick way go across our whole genome collection. So let's say we get an initial hit, it looks like it has decent activity on insect X, we can now take that genome and compare it to all the other ones in our database and all the public ones and say, okay, what else is out there that looks like it? And get to a, a subset that are relatively closely related and then screen all those guys in the next wave. And that, that allows you to drive really quickly to like a, a optimum of a, a local activity peak you would call it.

Eric Ward [00:12:21] So rather than saying, okay, the first found guy is our best one, if you know that there's a holt bunch of other strains related to that first found one, why wouldn't you just test those two? And because the odds are pretty clearly, you know, one over and whatever, and the number you screen are that, that that first one had the highest activity. So that, so we do a lot of that stuff and that, and that that increases in power as you get more positive data, right? As you get more hits in your screens and as you increase the size of the genome database that you're working off of. So we're all, we we're of course getting more positive data and hits all the time, and we have pretty big campaign underway to kind of massively increased the number of microbial genomes in our collection as well.

Vance Crowe [00:13:11] So, you know, from an outsider perspective, if you don't know anything at all about crops or about trying to get rid of insects or fungus, you might think like, Hey, there's, there must be hundreds of thousands of chemicals. Why aren't we just going and pulling things off the shelf and spraying insects with them and, and moving on. Like, why are we doing this? What seems like, yeah, it's not even a needle in a haystack. The needle in a haystack actually literally doesn't capture how small of a, of a thing you're going after. So why do this as opposed to just grabbing things off the shelf?

Eric Ward [00:13:46] Yeah, it's, you know, it, the, the motivation to do it has gone up over the last couple of decades. If you look at the history of crop protection chemistry, which goes back, you know, roughly speaking in the modern era around the end of World War II through about the year 2000, the incumbents in that industry, which include, you know, my former employer, which used to be called and a couple mergers later, now it's Syngenta, you know, buyer, BASF, Corteva, which is the old down DuPont, the all those companies did a really good job of identifying new, what we call mode of action chemicals at regular intervals. So those are new ways of killing the thing that you're trying to kill. And the reason you have to do that is because guess what evolution says that anything you put out there, you're gonna select for resistance to eventually, right? This is just like human pathogens becoming resistant to antibiotics, which is a widespread problem that people talk about. So we've kind of hit the end of the line on traditional crop protection, chemical discovery. It doesn't mean there aren't more out there to find. And of course those companies are still working hard on that, but for a whole bunch of reasons, the the discovery rate has fallen off rather dramatically. So in a world where, you know, you need to keep coming up with new modes of action all the time, where else can you turn? And a natural place to turn is to the microbial world, which is sort of unfathomably vast.

Eric Ward [00:15:19] You know, the best estimate is there's probably something like a trillion individual species of bacteria on earth, and those things are swapping DNA all the time at a community level. So they're probably evolving faster than you could even collect them. So it's, it's probably literally true that that's an infinite resource of potential activity. And the other thing we know is both from the pharmaceutical industry and to some extent from the crop protection industry, those microbes make a ton of biologically active molecules. And they've been at it going back to, you know, the, the start of life on earth, a few trillion through few billion years plus. So there's been this giant selection experiment that's been going on for stuff that can kill other things for a long time in all the environments where microbes hang out. So why not try to tap that as a source of, of activity to solve this problem? So that, that was sort of the two headed premise behind founding the company. And I I, I'll give primary credit to my best friend and close colleague Scott Ness, who's also at AgBiome, he was really the one that that promulgated the, the, the start of to to start a company around this idea back in, in the summer of 2012.

Vance Crowe [00:16:42] I mean, it sounds like you're doing something absurdly complex on the science side, but then also to start a company, get out there and get financing, figure out what all the regulations are, how do you even bring together a group of people that are capable of doing, you know, this level of complexity that all comes together in one single company?

Eric Ward [00:17:04] Well, it's, you know, Dan mso, our who runs our business development, always talk, calls it building a plane while you're flying it, right? There's a fair amount of that that goes on. So we're, you know, you not everything just comes together. Okay, boom, there it is. It's more like you identify what the rate limiting steps are at each stage, prioritize those and work on those. So, you know, step one was, can we identify a sort of core group of people that are gonna wanna help get this thing going once we launch it? And one of the benefits of having worked in this industry for a while and having been in this geographical area, so I'm in the Research Triangle park vicinity in North Carolina, as you know, where there's a ton of talent, a lot of connections going way back, pretty straightforward to identify people that maybe wanna work with you again. And then Scott had terrific connections in the venture capital and, and public markets world as well from his previous experience. He, he had helped start a company called Paradigm Genetics back in 1997 that went public and he was able to make some phone calls to specific investors early on that that got us somebody to lead a an initial investment around very quickly. That's probably not the typical experience, but I think increasingly venture investors are interested in putting money into teams that have had some kind of success previously, right? They see people that wanna do it over again and they understand that plan A typically doesn't work.

Eric Ward [00:18:37] So whatever the initial, here's what we're gonna do. Business plan is that you can invest in it looks perfect, will at some point get alter, if not go completely off the rails. What you really wanna invest in is resilience and grip and the ability to pivot and make good decisions on the fly and adjust as necessary. And, and, and so, you know, big news flash, it all comes down to the people, right? That's how it always is. So I think that the thing that gave me the most confidence at the start was we, we attracted a few people that we knew pretty well that wanted to help start this thing with us and were willing to pour their heart and soul into it right out of the gate, realizing there's an unproven premise, but you know, you, you get there event if you, if it's a fundamentally good idea, if you got the right people, you believe in it, you're gonna get there. It's, it's nonlinear and painful sometimes, but, but it, it does happen. So

Vance Crowe [00:19:36] It seems like with what you're describing about things failing or at least like your plan, having to get thrown out, you'd have to be incredibly conscientious because a lot of people, when the thing doesn't manifest the way that they had imagined it, the ability to just keep waking up and trying new things is overwhelming. It's, it's something that's draining. Are you naturally a highly conscientious person industrious, that wants to get things done?

Eric Ward [00:20:03] Yeah, I think, I mean, I I gave you the health warning before we started. I hate talking about myself in public forum where I would be considered to be opining about my own goodness. I think it's really important to be surrounded by a team where that goes on, because there's no one person that's gonna carry that ball continuously. Yeah, right? I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this in teamwork before too, you're having the absolute shit day at, but the other guys like, come on man, you know, we're gonna do this even if it's not an overt statement like that, but just by the way they're carrying themselves the way that they, they show up, you get that feeling off of them. So he, it's important to have a be surrounded by a group of people that you can derive energy from when you need to, but are also, if you're in a leadership role, you're well aware of your obligation to bring energy to them too. You can't just be the guy that always needs to get propped up, right? The energy sink is, is is tough for anybody to deal with at any stage in their life, no matter what they're doing. And it's probably lethal to a startup environment if it's there on any kind of consistent basis. You have to, you're, you're living on belief in the early days and you just have to stick with it and then, you know, start to, I never, you start to rack successes up, of course, right? You, you know, it's the old plan, small wins thing, right? You're gonna, every, every little thing that goes well, you celebrate the living shit out.

Eric Ward [00:21:37] So

Vance Crowe [00:21:38] I never imagined before I had a child, like, you know, anytime I was ever working on something, if you get down or something doesn't work, like you can always just hit the, the reset button and then you're back again the next day or you can hit things going again. But when all of a sudden you have a child with pressure that's never going away, you don't get to be like, all right, I'm done with that habit or I'm not doing that thing, I'm just leaving it behind. Now you've got a thing where that is going to be, you know, pressure and you know, for all the right reasons, I never imagined how much harder it would be to continually go back to that well and generate energy. And I think like it's hard to describe to somebody that's not had that, but it really is extremely taxing.

Eric Ward [00:22:23] Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting, a lot of people have drawn parallels between parenting and leading people in an organizational context and it's, it, in the worst case that can get construed as some sort of paternalism and, you know, infantalizing the people you work with. I, I don't think of it that way at all. It's more like, it's exactly what you're saying, consistency of behavior is at a huge premium and you know, that's something we aspire to as a parent and it's definitely something you aspire to as a leader as well. You don't wanna be the, you know, lemme rephrase that. I don't wanna be the mercurial guy. I'd rather be, you know, somewhat positive all the time rather than be like going nuts awesome. Once in a while and then a complete asshole, you know, if some are all at the time other than that, and you know, it's something to work on, right? I can't claim I'm anything close to the aspirational state for that, but that's, that really helps. And it, it gets exactly at what you're talking about every day. There's more stuff you gotta do. There's a guy here, Jerry Bell, that runs Bell Leadership Institute and he, he says something to the effect of, you don't have to solve all your problems today because they'll still be there tomorrow. Right? So it's like, you know, just, you can't, you can't let it overwhelm you.

Vance Crowe [00:23:49] You know, AgBiome has a very interesting way that you're set up and it's really important to me to think and learn about how you guys have set up your corporate culture, because I talk all the time about bullshit jobs and about how much of the human energy and innovation is just dissipated as heat. So this concept by David Grabber bullshit jobs, I'm sure you and I have actually talked about this, but for anybody that doesn't know, he basically says automation has actually already overtaken much of modern American working life. It just has come in the form of emails and telephones and your ability to get so much work done so much faster than you ever could before. Your Excel document now can tabulate things that used to take you days or weeks or even months to put together. And so, but the normal corporation has not realized this because the way that you get power in a large corporation is that you have a larger and larger budget. Your budget signifies your status. It signifies a lot of things. So a manager gets into a relationship with the people that they're managing where they're saying, look, I know you don't really have 40 hours a week of work, but I need you to keep coming in because I need that budget line. And as long as you keep pretending to do work, I'll keep pretending like I'm, you know, managing you and giving you good feedback and, you know, you can just fill up your time with going to endless meetings and you can fill it with, you know, wasting time on your computer.

Vance Crowe [00:25:23] And this leads people to a sense of meaninglessness in their work. And I, I definitely saw this in corporate America. I've seen it in several different, whether it was international organizations all the way to corporations. And I actually began to believe that this was an inevitability. I thought like, this is just the way corporations are because you have to have the hierarchical structure. But you have talked to me a lot about how you and your partners and really your employees have come together to collaborate and figure out another way to structure the employee employer bureaucracy to still be able to manage people and get things done, and yet not have so much work and energy and human meaning dissipated in the heat of a traditional hierarchical bureaucracy. So as the, as I lay that out, how do you explain to people how your organization is set

Eric Ward [00:26:17] Very carefully? No, it's, I'm, I'm partly joking. I think one of the dangers of what we've done is people define it in the negative. You don't have bosses, you don't have a traditional hierarchical org chart. And it's actually a live discussion in the company. Now, what are the core elements of what we do that are kind of inviable and we must preserve and steward and nurture as the company grows? 'cause we have aspirations for the company to grow very significantly. The, I think the one way to think about what we do is if you, from a high level, we're trying to capture the power of self-organization in a positive sense. So I think it's a fair statement that probably everybody that listens to this podcast and probably even a much larger population that will agree that central planning at the national level has been proven a failure multiple times over. Why is it that every company works off of a central planning model, if that is the case, makes zero sense. And there's a very dramatic demonstration of this. And there's a book called Brave New Work by a guy named Aaron Digman, who kindly visited our place about a year and a half ago.

Eric Ward [00:27:51] And he's, he has a picture of an organizational chart in there, and the question is from what year did this organizational chart derived? And so if you think about everything over the last century in a company, exactly the stuff you're pointing out, you know, the it piece is probably the most obvious, but so many things have changed about the way people work and the way companies function in the last a hundred years. But organizational charts look identical. And I think the one he has is from like National Cash Register in 1909 or something, but it could be, you know, you pick company X today, it's the same thing. There's a box at the top, there's about 12 boxes under it, and there's a whole bunch of boxes under that. So what what we're trying to do is capture the maximum engagement of everybody in the company. That's really the end goal. How you get there, it almost doesn't matter. But our belief was that avoiding some of the same things you just talked about with the bullshit jobs is a, is a requirement for that to happen. It doesn't ensure that it will happen, but it's a boundary condition to prevent it from happening. So if you set up that kind of a structure where people are incentivized to complexify their jobs in order to create bigger budget centers in or have more people working for 'em, you're gonna end up with all that bureaucratic bloat that seems to end up everywhere. See seemingly inexorably, you know, I think there's significant exceptions to that rule events, but they all, you know, they're not, they're exceptions, right?

Eric Ward [00:29:29] It's not the, it's not the way most people think about it. So sort of organizationally, what we've tried to do is create a, a structure that's pretty rigid for a short period with respect to achieving goals within projects. So we have a so-called accountability chart, which means that if you're working with me on this project and this other person is responsible for the goals of those projects, we're accountable to that person to get our pieces done within that project. That person is not, however, our line manager who has kind of sole control over our destiny within the company, which is often what happens in bigger companies. They, where they're, they basically set your salary, they are have some significant input on hiring and firing authority. They're gonna be your primary mentor for your career development, you know, you name it. And we've tried to task those functions out more dis in a distributed way across the organization. And the goal of that is that everybody has a really good boss because I know you, you saw this in, in your corporate setting previously. If you work for a quote unquote good boss, life is great, right? I mean it's, you're, it's like you're working for a different company than if you're working for a not so good boss, or even worse, a really bad boss. So rather than saying there are bad bosses in the world, therefore we're not gonna have any bosses, which makes like zero sense.

Eric Ward [00:31:00] But I think a lot of people think that's how we got to where we're at. Instead we've said, let's try to outsource or distribute the functions of a really good boss so that everybody has a similarly positive experience. And implicit in that is we don't fix that. The thing is not locked down. It, it can and should be able to change relatively quickly when it needs to, right? Like the, the best case would be we have a shift in what the company needs to get done. For whatever reason a crisis arises, a new opportunity presents itself and very quickly we can redeploy resources to, to address that. And that's very hard to do in a fixed structure. People naturally gravitate toward constancy. And this isn't, I'm not like damning specific people or there's like, there's these dumb people out there. It's like human nature when stuff's good, don't mess with it, right? It's like, and it, I think there's a pretty powerful evolutionary basis in that. So getting people comfortable with change is not really ever gonna happen. All you can do is sort of mitigate the pain around change. And if you, if you get people used to doing it and understanding that it's not gonna affect their personal stake in their own welfare, when that happens, it makes it a lot easier to do. And so that's, so what does that

Vance Crowe [00:32:28] Look like in practice when you're talking about people don't have one solid, you know, standard boss instead we've kind of, you know, disaggregated it or put it out into yeah, into the wider company. What does that look like in practice?

Eric Ward [00:32:41] Well, so there's this, you know, basically accountability lead for whatever your act, your primary activity is or activities that you're involved in. So that's one person or a couple people you're involved with. We have a, a role that we call an agent, which is really the, you can think of it as kind of an ombuds person between you and the company. And their, their role is to deeply understand and steward our core beliefs and help promulgate those help people that are newer to the company navigate what to do and where to go and how to find things out. And, you know, basically be the, the network of, of knowledge within the company and critically they, they can help when you're in a conflict with another employee because those arise frequently as they should if you're in any sort of an innovative environment. And a lot of times people aren't comfortable resolving those themselves. We try to select for people that have the ability to do that, if not the desire to do it. But the fact is, a lot of people are pretty uncomfortable having a face-to-face conversation where they're gonna, you know, disagree really strongly about something and then try to come together and make amends afterward. So the agent in, in the best case can help, you know, lubricate that process by whatever way, coaching somebody before that conversation, listening to their concerns, maybe giving 'em some suggestions about how to move forward, that kind of thing.

Eric Ward [00:34:18] And then they also play a role if the person's in a, you know, in the worst case in a situation where they're under some sort of disciplinary action or performance review, the agent serves as if, if you will, an advocate for that person. It doesn't mean that they're gonna disagree with the company's stance about that person's performance, but rather they're gonna help the person process the information that's coming at 'em and act on it constructively. 'cause that can be a pretty overwhelming experience if you're, if you get put in a situation like that. So that's, and those are all things that like a line manager would do normally, right? Like you and I are fighting, we can't stand each other, even though we work in the two offices next to each other. We would both go complain to our bosses and say, bans is a jerk. Eric is an idiot, he never listens. And then the two grownups solve the problem while we get to behave like children and not solve it. So what we try to do instead is get people to, you know, be the adults that they are in every other aspect of their life and, and work on that stuff and resolve it. So that's, that's a chunk of what the agent does. And then this is all, these are long-winded answers, aren't they? No, this is awesome, man. I'm loving this.

Vance Crowe [00:35:34] I I I have no problem letting you go long live. Good. This

Eric Ward [00:35:37] Is great. Well, yeah, and then the, another role we have is what we call a development partner. So that the development partner, rather than the here and now stuff, which is what the agent does, is what do you want to do with the rest of your life? And that's a big deal for people that are in their early part of their career in particular, but it should be a big deal for everybody. What do you want to do? What do you want to get better at and why? And think really deeply about it. And the development partner helps the people put together first formulate a goal, whatever that is. And that goal, of course can change, it can be daunting to set a goal because it means you may not get it.

Vance Crowe [00:36:18] Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:36:18] You may not get it. You're eliminating all these other possibilities from your life, you know, you name it, there's a million reasons people don't like to do it, but then put together an actual plan to get there. And that's over and above just, well, I'm gonna go to some random conference and hang out. It's more like, well, I'm gonna go to this conference because I wanna learn about these specific things. I wanna meet these people, I want to get practice in this sort of interaction, whatever it is. And, and that's true across the company that, that everybody has a development partner. I I have a development partner, it's our board chair, you know, so, and it, just because I'm in a later career stage doesn't mean there aren't all kinds of things I wanna work on, you know, behavioral changes that I wanna make in myself that will make me more effective in the job that I need, that kind of stuff. And so everybody, we, we expect everybody to have a plan like that. And a, a strong incentive to have such a plan is, it's pretty damn hard to get advancement in the company if you don't have a plan like that, right? So it's pretty, you know, that's, that's a way to get people tapped into it. So we don't do, you don't have any formal titles in the company at all. People pick a descriptive title in most cases, and they're free to do that. Scott has joked since the beginning that he, his is lord humongous from the first road warrior movie. So, and, and if you want to get ahead in the company, we call it a career milestone, career development milestone.

Eric Ward [00:37:50] You, you need to have a plan for what, what you're implementing in order to do that. So I don't wanna,

Vance Crowe [00:37:58] I I, the way you're, you're, you're like, I, I think what the way you're structured reminds me that this is probably a comparative advantage. So I don't want you to have to give away everything, but I remember the day that we talked about if you don't have titles and if you don't have this like linear progression to make people feel like, ah, I'm moving forward, there is one way that people feel like they're moving forward and that is that their salaries increase. Yeah. And you guys have come up with a very interesting way, although it would take a certain type of person to be able to do it. How does one get a raise inside of AgBiome?

Eric Ward [00:38:34] Yeah, so that's this career development milestone thing. And what we do is you, the first step is you self nominate for it. And we, we went to that several years ago to try to correct, correct a an issue we were seeing, which is that we used to say anyone can nominate anyone else, which sounds great. The issue is if you're sitting there laboring away at what you do, improving how you do it, perfecting it, becoming an expert every day, and you've been sitting there for three years doing that, and no one's nominated you, you can pretty quickly be thinking, Hey, what the hell am I chopped liver? What's going on here? Right? Versus if you have to self nominate, it puts you in the driver's seat of developing your own career. And that's deeply uncomfortable for some people. Highly acknowledge that fact. It doesn't mean that you're best friend, colleague, coach can't say, Hey, why don't you nominate for a career development milestone? You've, you know, you've been doing all this great stuff. So after they nominate themselves, then they have to go through a round of feedback, which that by the way, they should be doing anyway. That's kind of part and parcel of what we do, is everyone needs to be continuously seeking feedback about their performance from the people that they work with. And, you know, it doesn't happen universally. It's aspirational. It's another one of those things it's uncomfortable to do. So people need constant motivation to do it, but at least when they want to get a advancement in the company, they have to do that.

Eric Ward [00:40:10] So they go around with a targeted set of questions that they put together, typically with their agent, and harvest feedback about their performance. If they read things about themselves that seem complimentary and like they maybe have hit sort of a step change in what they're doing, then they take that to a committee that's called the Advancement and Performance Committee. And those folks take an initial look and say, well, yeah, this looks pretty good. Do you want to go ahead? And if the person says, yeah, I want to go ahead, the next round is the entire company is informed that that person has self nominated. So anybody now can weigh in with feedback so that they can't cherry pick the feedback that they got for themselves. Assuming that goes well, then the committee decides whether or not to go ahead with a, a career development milestone. And then that pack a, a condensed package of information is passed to a compensation committee, which then determines an appropriate salary raise for them. And in a final step, the person reports out to the company the feedback that they got. And that can be done in a oral presentation at one of our all hands meetings. It can be done in an email summary. Everybody hears really good things about themselves. They also hear things about themselves that they want to continue to work on, and they share that with the company so that everybody sees the importance of embedding feedback into that process.

Vance Crowe [00:41:39] This is extremely holistic, right? And, and to me, I think, wow, what, what an amazing thing. But I have to imagine that it creates a selection pressure that is also negative in some way. There's probably certain types of people that you would love to have in the company. Yeah. But that style of management doesn't work. Tell me a little bit about that.

Eric Ward [00:42:02] Yeah, that's, it's sort of a, i, I don't know how to phrase it exactly. It's like a lost opportunity cost for us. And we, we discussed this a fair amount. There's a fine edge between ambition that is sort of raw ego drive for self betterment at the expense of others and ambition. That's, I just want to kick ass and do great, and I want to do it with a whole bunch of other people. And the people in that latter group, you know, I know you, you've talked to Jim Wrd a couple times and his whole game B thing is predicated on a hypothesis that there's enough people in the world of the type that he wants to work with in this game B setting. And I, I agree, I believe there are enough people, they're really hard to find, like really hard to find, right? And that's just the reality. And so what we're giving up is people that are more on that continuum, the ones that are a little more edgy, you know, in the worst case, they might have a somewhat of a tendency to self aggrandize or climb over you to better themselves. We, we lop that curve off maybe a little bit earlier than would be optimal. But the net result is we just basically don't have hardly any of that behavior, you know, or, or relatively little of it. I mean, I'm sure people in the company are gonna listen to this and go, God, man, this guy's bullshit.

Eric Ward [00:43:34] He doesn't know what's going on. I mean, I just, I from so, but realistically, it's, it's a relatively apolitical environment, and now it requires continuous effort to, to keep, to, to maintain that. I do believe that there's a, almost like tropic property of, maybe it's a tribal behavior ultimately that will cause people to look for separateness, that'll cause people to seek hierarchy. You know, there've been a lot of philosophical and political writing about this over the years. Jim Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winner from University of Virginia, basically was the kind of founder of public choice theory in one of the last speeches he gave was talked about this concept of parental. And so rather than like a big organization being paternalistic and imposing its will on people, and big organization in this case would be like, at the national level, his thesis was that there's increasing number of people that wanna be treated that way. The, the they, they're looking for a parent to basically tell them what to do, right? So one of the sort of corollaries of our management system is people have to be willing to take on responsibility where appropriate. And it can be hard to get people to do that consistently. They're, they're gonna ask for permission almost by default. You have to force 'em to not ask for permission. You have to force yourself not to solve their problems for them.

Eric Ward [00:45:10] And it's, you know, it's, it's challenging.

Vance Crowe [00:45:12] Yeah. I think this is a problem that is transcended time. Like I don't think there's anything new about this. I think totally agree. If you go back and read in the Bible, you know, the Israelites were wandering around in the desert. They were free people, and they went and they said, we want a king. And the prophets were like, no, no bad idea. You do not want this. They're gonna enslave you. They're gonna make you do all kinds of things you don't want to do. And they're like, yeah, but we would feel a lot safer and a lot more comfortable if you gave us a king. So they got it. And sure enough, that king instantly turned into a tyrannical power. And I don't think that's a mistake that that's in the Bible. I'm sure there's other old writings that are like this. And it's just something about human nature that makes people like that, which reminds me of what we're going through right now, right? Where there is so much of a drumbeat for people to trust the science, right? And it's this concept of there is this truth that's out there, there's a group of people that know what that truth is. And if we would all just listen to them, then we'll be, okay, what, where do you think this, this, this goes? Is this different than, I mean, it, it seems to me like this is obviously,

Eric Ward [00:46:24] It's a

Vance Crowe [00:46:24] Really a drumbeat. It's really, yeah,

Eric Ward [00:46:26] No, I think it's a super good observation. I think that's a subset of what I was just talking about. You know, people wanna, they want to have a higher authority that they can devolve any responsibility to in a lot of cases. And it's, you can see that personification, that can be, you name it, you know, whoever Biden, Trump, fauci, you know, pick your camp, right? People want to pin their hopes on this person is having all the answers. And this, this trust the science mantra is it, it kind of gets under my skin, you know, I see all the yard signs, you know, we believe in, and I, the science is dynamic and it's changing all the time. And if there's one thing we've learned over the last 18 months is that epidemiology probably is second in line behind economics and its ability to have any predictive power. And number two, we didn't know shit about how respiratory viruses are transmitted. You know, the sad state of affairs is we had tens of thousands of people dying of flu every winter, and nobody really knew what the population dynamics of that, that transmission was, right? Which is kind of bizarre when you think about it. It was just like, yeah, whatever. 50,000 people die every year. It's like car accidents. It's just built into the thinking, so you don't really worry about it. So then this thing comes along, which is, you know, admittedly way worse. And we're not really in a situation to deal with it. And I think the biggest, I think the biggest fallout is gonna be, historically the US population had pretty good trust in entities like the FDA or the Centers for Disease Control.

Eric Ward [00:48:09] And you know, this, that, that served the country. Well, when there those organizations are behaving in a high functioning way, they completely abrogated their responsibility in any sort of visible way to, to the non-expert like me, like I just read last night, newsflash, you know, I get the new New York Times news alert on my email. The c the FDA is gonna accelerate the timeline for giving full approval to the Pfizer BTech vaccine. It's gonna be now Labor Day instead of later in the fall. And this is like an internal elite thing. Pardon my French, I know that this is gonna have an E next to it. Now what the fuck are they waiting for? Something on the order of, you know, if you assume about a third of the people vaccinated in the country got the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, that's more than 50 million people now been vaccinated, vaccinated. What data set do they need that allows them to say it's no longer being used under an experimental use exemption? It just doesn't make any sense. And if, if that's, you know, now it's like, oh, well if we give it official approval now everybody will wanna take the vaccine. People had no idea what analysis goes into that decision. You know, even relatively well educated people, I'll put myself in that population, unless you wanna do a real deep dive, it's pretty hard to figure out what they're doing. And that goes back to the initial approval of those vaccines, right? The decision was taken, the non-decision was taken. They weren't gonna do human challenge trials.

Eric Ward [00:49:41] There were people lining up that said, I'm willing to get infected with the virus so that from a small data set, you can figure out if this vaccine works. No, we can't ethically do that. God forbid if we infect a few hundred volunteers and one of 'em gets sick, that's, meanwhile there's 3000 people a day dying while they're sitting around twiddling their thumbs saying, for all these ethical reasons, we can't do a human challenge trial. So I, that, that kind of stuff just drives me nuts. 'cause that if you want to, you know, if you want to trust science, then do science.

Vance Crowe [00:50:16] Yeah, it's, I mean this is very interesting and, and a novel take. I was talking with somebody over the weekend and they made a really interesting point to me, which was, you go to get the vaccine, you sign a whole bunch of things that say that the, the Merck and Johnson and Johnson and, and Pfizer, none of them are responsible for this. You are responsible for this. And yet if you are sitting there saying like, wait a second, if if I can't go back, if something goes wrong on this and it's all on me, then I choose, no, I'm not going to do this. And yet then they're being told like, you're a part of a death cult. You know, you are, I heard Stephen Colbert last night comparing it to, I don't even remember the, the, but basically saying you're in, you're a part of a death cult and you are embracing death to to die for your savior. And it's like, are you, this is, you can't have both of these things happening. You can't say the individual is 100% responsible for whatever happens here. And simultaneously say you have no authority and autonomy or decision to make here. And if you make the one that's different than the one that we want, we're gonna berate you. These two ends will never be squared. And it's, it's only going to cause more conflict.

Eric Ward [00:51:31] Yeah, I totally agreed. I just to, I'll bring it back around to organizational behavior. I think one of the things that we've tried to do at our company is to avoid setting up contradictory incentives. That's what happens so often, you know, in the same, going back to the sort of corporate hell paradigm, we all want you to work. You, you work together as a team. You guys are a team, and then December 12th rolls around and it's performance review time and the manager has to stack rank his team of 18 from highest to lowest. And the top three are gonna get a 7% raise. And the bottom three are on a list that somebody puts in a file for the next time they restructure and they're gonna get fired. You know, and it's, it's just this like how can you say those two things with a straight face? So I think that you pointed out a really potent example of that, right? It's like you must take this, it's your social responsibility sign here 20 pages later that if it's your social responsibility, it's your ass. If anything bad happens to you, you know, it's just, it's weird, right? And you know, there've been, it's all about incentives. There've already been studies showing that people, people's resistance breaks down when they can just walk in the door to do it. Like they literally get flagged down off the sidewalk. They don't have to plan to go do it. They'll do it if they get paid a hundred bucks to do it. You know, there's all kinds of ways to motivate people to do this stuff. But putting long fine printed forms about all the various ways they could die in front of 'em isn't probably the best way to motivate people.

Eric Ward [00:53:03] And by the way, a lot of those forms are gonna be there after it's approved. You won't have to sign it, but you get, you get the flu vaccine every year. You get the, here did you get the thing about Ghislaine Barr syndrome? You know, it's like, great, thanks a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:53:18] So what do you think about the way that information is being handled, right? So inevitably if we post this interview and we say anything about the vaccine, there's gonna be a CDC warning on there. There's certainly modulation of information and you have the challenge of you want people to not be able to hijack the system and use fear and, and disgust and political rage to, to cycle out bad information. But at the same time, we don't really always know what is good information and what is bad information. So I like, what's your take on on how to handle this, this kind of seesaw here.

Eric Ward [00:54:01] I, you know, I don't know, I'm probably not a great person to ask about this. I'm a, I'm a passive participant in social media largely. I pretty avid Strava user. You know, I like to just put my workouts on there, which somebody pointed out to me as the most intrusive social media. 'cause it puts an exact map of where you were every time. But I, I don't really pay attention to a lot of the stuff that's on, you know, YouTube that's getting flagged or Twitter or whatever. I, I think those are a net positive still because it's just more stuff out there. There's more platforms. You know, I grew up, I was born in 1960, so I grew up in the era of, you know, there were three networks in PBS and there you had a local newspaper and maybe if your parents were better educated and had extra money, you got a Sunday, New York Times or something and that was it. Right? And so I, I think it's fantastic. You know, we live in this wonderland of information now you can, but I, I am sympathetic to the fact that you have to be like really discerning and you get, you encounter the boundaries of your own ignorance on a daily basis. If you're really going deep on stuff. Like I'll get interested in something and realize after reading for 10 minutes, it's like, well, okay, if I want to devote the next four months of my life to this subject full time, I could maybe become minimally conversant in it. And so at that point I'm just like, okay, I'm out. You know, I drew my conclusion. So I like to kind of have the, you know, firm conclusion, weekly held way of approaching stuff.

Eric Ward [00:55:36] 'cause there's always new information that can come at you that'll change your mind pretty dramatically potentially.

Vance Crowe [00:55:42] Yeah. The Dunning Kruger effect is like wild when, when

Eric Ward [00:55:45] You start

Vance Crowe [00:55:45] To realize it's not just everybody else that overestimates what they think they know it's me. Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:55:50] Because

Vance Crowe [00:55:50] When

Eric Ward [00:55:51] You start

Vance Crowe [00:55:51] To really internalize that, and you know, you had mentioned before about your employees, you really are want them to have development plans. You want them to make a choice. They could be anything. Their optionality is, is wide. But if you don't choose something, you won't move towards it. And Right.

Eric Ward [00:56:08] That's

Vance Crowe [00:56:08] The same way with information. I, I was at Airbnb this weekend and they had about 20 DVDs that you could watch. I almost never watch movies anymore. My wife and I sit down and we're on like Apple TV or you know, Amazon Prime, and we flip through so many choices that I can't decide on anyone. So we give up. Yeah,

Eric Ward [00:56:28] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:56:28] But I noticed that we watched like three movies at our Airbnb because there were 20 selections. And out of those 20 I would be like, oh, I'll watch that one. It's the best out of these options. Totally.

Eric Ward [00:56:39] And

Vance Crowe [00:56:39] So this wave, this massive amount of information, I think in many ways makes me look at far less than what I

Eric Ward [00:56:46] Used

Vance Crowe [00:56:47] To. Yeah. As opposed to more, it's, it's, it's the paradox of the human mind

Eric Ward [00:56:52] And it it, there's this paralyzing effect. Right. Did, did you read the book? I don't remember the title. Aziz Ansari, semi canceled comedian, I think he's been rehabilitated after that, wrote a book about dating and he talked very, very specifically about this, how romance in the modern world, if in a, in a Tinder world, you have such a plethora of possibilities at your fingertips, there's always something better. Like why would you stop and choose this one person? 'cause you know, there's like thousands more out there and he cites data from, you know, like the 1930s that some vast percentage of people that got married, like grew up and lived within like five blocks of each other in New York City. Right. Because those are the only people you met. Most people are perfectly happy they went on to get married and have kids. You now are, you know, their kids are using Tinder. Right. So I think it's the same effect where you just, you can get paralyzed with this barrage of choices coming at and that this has been, you know, well studied. Of course. It's

Vance Crowe [00:57:54] Funny you say that. So I do all these Legacy Interviews with, with older people and like there's been a trend within these Legacy Interviews where people wanna do it with their spouse or they do one and then their spouse does one and they do one together and it's really endearing. But because these people are all, you know, 60, 70, 80, you find a lot where they are. They, they grew up together, they met in middle school, and it's exactly what you're saying. They believe with a hundred percent certainty that they found their soulmate. This was the one person on earth that they could have lived with. And that could, but it really comes down to the fact that, well that's because you had limited options and when you made that choice, you fully committed to that choice. And so you manifested the thing that you were looking for. You, you could have chosen not to. Yeah, certainly I'm not doing interviews with people that didn't do that, but there's something really powerful about way slimming down your options. Not actually making you feel like you didn't get what you wanted, but actually making you far, far more content with what you have.

Eric Ward [00:58:56] Yeah, totally agreed. And, you know, taking it back to just intake of information, I think that's a, you know, I don't know whether this is true, but I think having bridged the world, the pre-internet world and the internet world, which my generation was lucky to do, you know, I had to for, you know, my PhD thesis, I had to go to the library and get like microfiche cards out of biological abstracts and put 'em in the reader, you know, take you hours to find something. It it, it gave you the, the ability to intensely focus and go deep on something. Like, I, I literally don't know if I could complete the work that I did in today's world. I give my kids so much credit for being as focused as they are. 'cause there's all this stuff coming at you. But if you, if you develop that, that ability to focus early in whatever way, then having all these inputs that you can, you know, integrate and turn into your own sort of narrow casted channel of shit that you care about, that's a fantastic thing to have. So I, I see nothing but positives coming from even the big tech companies. I, at some level, I could give a flying, fuck what Google knows that I searched for. Like, they, they send me ads that are more relevant to what I wanna look at, or I've got an Instagram feed, I follow a bunch of espresso machine shops and bicycle riders and stuff like that. And so I get all these cool answers. I didn't know that existed. It doesn't mean I'm gonna buy it every time, but I'm fine with that. Right. I don't see it as some sort of dark conspiracy to, to own all my information.

Eric Ward [01:00:33] I, I do think it's important that people understand that the business model of those companies is not to serve the customers, to serve the advertiser. Right. And I think that's lost in a lot of people. So, but beyond that, I, it's all good.

Vance Crowe [01:00:48] So recently you were interviewed for a New York Times article about something I knew nothing at all about, which was the Purple Tomato. So what in the world is a purple tomato and why would anybody want one? And Yeah. How did that all come about?

Eric Ward [01:01:03] Oh wow. Yeah. So Kathy Martin is this really terrific scientist at the John Innis Center in Norwich, England, where I had the privilege to work for a while. I had known her previous to that. And she came up through the ranks of developmental biology and understanding the biochemical pathways that lead to the synthesis of pigments in flowers actually in snapdragons was the model organism. And what she hit on as a fantastic idea was to take two regulatory genes out of Snapdragon and put 'em into tomato, which those two regulatory genes, you can think of 'em as like switches that flip something on, they turn on this pathway for what's called anthocyanin biosynthesis. And she did it in a way that it specifically turned out on enough fruit. And anthocyanins are the chemical compounds that give the purple color, for instance, to blueberry skins or eggplant skins. They have a variety of health benefits attributed to them. You probably know a lot of people like to eat these dark purple fruits, blackberries and the like, you know, people trivialize it as antioxidant, it goes way deeper than that. They have various effects on human metabolism that appear to be positive ingested in higher quantities than most people's diets have. 'em. So Kathy's idea was, look, people eat a hell of a lot more tomatoes than they do blueberries. Why don't we make a tomato that makes blueberry levels of anthocyanin? And that's what she did. So there's purple tomatoes out there.

Eric Ward [01:02:35] People are gonna say, well that already exists. Well actually, if you cut any of those open, they're sort of greenish red in the middle. It's just the skin, the peric carp that's purple. And you have to do this genetic engineering trick to turn that pathway on across the flesh of the fruits of things purple all the way through. And I, they, Kathy along with a, a close colleague of hers going back to grad school days, Jonathan Jones and other scientists there at the Sainsbury lab in, nor she's also a, a friend of mine, decided they were gonna start a small company that would own this technology and try to commercialize it as a GM crop that had actual consumer benefit as opposed to the GM crops. Most of which out there now confer like insect tolerance or herbicide resistance to corn or soybean, which consumers don't care about unless they absolutely hate it for reasons that they don't maybe completely understand, but they hate it. Anyway, so that was the, that was the idea. It's sort of a Sisyphean challenge to try to put a crop on the market that's genetically modified that people actually like. And so I got asked to be on the board of that company something like 14 years ago now it's a overnight success story obviously. And we now that what, what's changed over the last few months as the USDA altered their rule structure so that they more stringently adhere to their mission, which is determine whether genetically modified crop is a plant pest. And they eliminated a couple of the things that had been done as a matter of course by the big companies who could afford to do it, like doing a field trial.

Eric Ward [01:04:12] So for instance, tomato, it's not weedy, it has no wild relatives in North America. And presumably there's nothing about turning the fruit purple that's gonna turn it into this pestilent weed species that's gonna take over the planet. And I think that's a reasonable presumption to make. So now the USDA only says, we just wanna review whether the thing is a plant pest risk, which is all they ever had been doing anyway. But the standard had been you do multi-year field trials and all this other stuff, which we basically didn't have the institutional will to do at any reasonable rate, obviously 14 years later. So we submitted what's called a request for a regulatory status review that's ongoing now we expect, like early next year the USDA will say, Hey, this is, this thing is now considered no longer a regulated article. It's passed through our scrutiny and anybody can grow it without notifying USDA, which would be required now if you were to grow it. So we have a plan in place to put together a limited release of seed for 2022 growing season. There's a website, here's the paid promotional, it's big purple tomato.com, you can go on there and register your interest, say, and we're gonna try to get seed into the hands of avid home gardeners who would like to grow this thing and do kind of a bake off among probably different varieties. So the purple traits been put into different varieties of tomato that have different agronomic properties, different taste properties, get people to say, Hey, we like this one the best or this one didn't work very well. And then the following year do something more like a real, you know, commercial launch.

Eric Ward [01:05:47] So that, that's kind of the genesis of it and where we're going with it. And you know, we may attract some corporate interest at some point that companies typically will say, we can't possibly do that 'cause consumers don't want GM crops. Well, I can tell you right now, you know, from a very difficult to find website, there's a couple hundred people that sure as hell do want 'em. And we're, we're operating off the Y Combinator theory of it's way better to have a tiny passionate customer base than it is a big inco lukewarm customer base. That's how we're starting out.

Vance Crowe [01:06:17] To me, the, the the GM battle is largely over. I mean the, certainly you have the Chuck Ben Brooks and the Megan West Gates that were listed in that New York Times article. Sure. Those are the people that either run the non GMO verified project or the one that's kind of, you know, scary doomsayer about GMOs. But it, it truly will take something like passionate tomato growers that wanna put something out there and then have their friends over and they're excited and they show it to 'em and they cut it and they open it up and they eat it. And I think this is a really fascinating way to do this. And I also think that this applies pressure to the government to get rid of what I consider to be like a, a, a complete invention by the large corporations to create these giant moats of regulation. You know, if your Monsanto, which no longer exists anymore, you think like from the outside world, they think, oh man, look at all these activists. Look at how much pain those activists caused Monsanto and they did in terms of lawsuits over chemistry, but not over the regulation. Because what end up happening is that you have all these activists that say, oh, they're unsafe. You've got to test these more. This is, you know, this, they're just so dangerous to humans. So then Monsanto will come along and be like, all right, well why don't we just add, you know, two or three more years of testing on there knowing that each year testing might be anywhere, like all the way up to $10 million a year. So now you've just added 20, $30 million into the regulatory process. And if you're a little tiny company that's trying to do it, then you don't have the option to get your product all the way to market.

Vance Crowe [01:07:52] You must sell to the large companies. And so they created this moat where they said, the only way over this is if you use our drawbridge. And I think it made the it, like you said in the article, exactly like the activists made the companies into exactly what they feared, which were just large dominant giant organizations.

Eric Ward [01:08:12] Yeah, I have no quibble with that at all. I I just loop it back to the organizational bureaucratic structure discussion from earlier. There's zero incentive in most companies for the regulatory groups to make themselves leaner and more effective. So you've also got an incentive of, well, I'm gonna have a bigger budget center if I can complexify this thing. Right? So that's where having kind of real singular commitment to the larger corporate goal, the larger corporate goal should be, we want to get out a really high quality product as fast as we can because that's good for everybody. But you know, that's what you run the danger of losing as the organization gets bigger and more complicated. I'd rather optimize my silo instead. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:08:59] I, I remember vividly when, when the announcement came out that Bayer was buying Monsanto, the regulatory people going around saying, you know what they really wanted, they really wanted our regulatory team because, you know, we are so good at, at putting things through. And it was like, it's just that you guys built a system and knew exactly how to navigate it and could just keep brute forcing the, the problem. So anyway, man, I'm really excited that you guys have done this. I think it's, it's a net positive for the world. And I, for one, I grew Harry Clee tomatoes, so yeah, I would be very interested in growing Purple

Eric Ward [01:09:34] Tomatoes. Yeah. So we're actually working with some of the same parental wine that Harry uses in dressings the purple trade into those. So, you know, we should be able to produce something that's very similar to some of those varieties, but has this, this purple phenotype and it, it just shows up when they ripen. It's just like, instead of turning red, they turn purple. It's pretty cool.

Vance Crowe [01:09:56] Well, Eric, we're gonna round out here, but before we go, you are, you're just wrapping up summer, you've got, you know, all sorts of wonderful weather in North Carolina. How are you gonna spend these next few weeks of summer?

Eric Ward [01:10:13] You know, my big excitement is over, I've gotta tell you. So I, one of my sons got married last Saturday out in Marin County, so Gerie and I were out there for about nine days leading up to that, which was just fantastic. And the wedding couldn't have been better, more heartwarming on all kinds of levels. So that was, that was great. And then I've got the, the next milestone events on my calendar are the, you may be familiar with the Band Dead End Company, which is three of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead plus John Mayer and Jeff Menti and O Teal Burbridge and their tour launches here in Raleigh down the road on the 16th of August. I'm going to that. And then I was kindly invited by a friend to see him in Chicago at Wrigley Field a month after that. And then I'm gonna go see him in Denver with my daughter dirty. And I are in October, so I'm sort of living the post, you know, post hippie follow the Grateful Dead lifestyle. Although in this case it involves plane rides and stuff.

Vance Crowe [01:11:24] It's not, it's not in

Eric Ward [01:11:25] A bus with not in a bus that's hot boxing all the way to the concert. So,

Vance Crowe [01:11:32] So I'd be remiss if, if we didn't at this very end, and I know from the stats about, about there's only about 20% of the audience left here, so this is just kinda you and me and the hardcores on the podcast.

Eric Ward [01:11:43] You

Vance Crowe [01:11:44] Introduced me, gave up, you introduced me to a, a really great man named Tom Corey, who recently passed away. Oh wow. And I think it would be, we'd be remiss to not to, to not record a, a quick memory of him. Can you give just a, a quick bio of Tom Corey and who he was to you?

Eric Ward [01:12:02] Yeah, so Tom was, my father-in-law passed away about seven weeks ago now, I guess, and pretty interesting dude on multiple levels. He was the sole child of Carl and Gertie Corey, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1947 for seminal work they did on, on human metabolism. And really, they were really the first hardcore in vitro biochemists, the first people that figured out how to purify an enzyme and work on it in a test tube. And wa they were at Washington University in St. Louis, which was the mecca to train in that discipline. And something like three more Nobel Prize winners came out of their lab at, they moved to Stanford before they got 'em, but all those people were trained there. So Tom was their sole child. Tom grew up in St. Louis Mo married my deceased mother-in-law. Bell had two daughters, one of whom is my wife, Gerie. They moved out to California for a bit, came back and then Tom spent his whole career at a company called Sigma Aldrich, which subsequently got purchased by the, by Merck, KIA, the the German Merck back several years ago. But he grew that into a powerhouse specialty chemical company. And the biggest impact he had on me was, was getting me really interested in more general business aspects. You know, I met him when I was a graduate student. I was training hard to get my PhD.

Eric Ward [01:13:34] I thought I was gonna be a scientist and I I real, I always had predilections toward other topics. I wasn't like a super narrow focused, you know, go a mile deep on one thing kind of person the way you have to be to be a successful academic. And so just interacting with him was a really important part of my development. And, you know, it's, it's, it's tough to have him gone, but he lived a big happy full life and had a big, huge impact on people. But probably the best example of that was the little impromptu non memorial reception that was put together at his house. And by word of mouth, like 200 people ended up at this thing, you know, it was like massive traffic jam on the street and it was a bunch of former colleagues of his and, and people that just knew him from around town. So that was, that was pretty neat. And, but yeah, yeah, you

Vance Crowe [01:14:26] Interjected me to him and I had several really great experiences. It was like somebody that just was willing to tell you exactly what he thought had had a level of foresight and precision that was really amazing. And, and I had a chance to go to the memorial service for him and, and the house was opened up and you notice that he had all of these interests. He had maps around his house, he had books of chemistry sitting out and photographs of him and his family. And I just, I just thought it would probably be very worthwhile to mention him. He was the CEO of Sigma Aldrich and really grew that into a national treasure. And just like when Monsanto was sold to the Germans, I sat down with Tom Corey and he told me exactly what was going to happen, how the Germans would take over, what their strategy would be, how the company would change. And I remember the things he was telling me at at the time, I was like, that's preposterous Tom. This, this is not, there's no way. And I wouldn't say we got to an argument, but we were definitely like, no, you are wrong. And, and him being quite confident and quite happy that he was, he was going to be right. And what do you know, a year later he was exactly right on literally everything he said. So he was a fantastic man and I'm, I'm really deeply grateful to you for having introduced him and I thought it'd be worthwhile to memorialize him here.

Eric Ward [01:15:47] No, thanks for that thought. Yeah, to be fair, he was the, he was the German acquirer more than once, but the American going and buying something else. So I think he, he knew the playbook pretty well.

Vance Crowe [01:16:01] Well, Eric Ward, I would have you on again, anytime. Thank you so much for, for stopping by.

Eric Ward [01:16:07] Yeah, it was a real pleasure and thanks for leading the conversation and what I hope was productive and interesting directions for other people. I enjoyed it thoroughly. So I, I really appreciate the opportunity to, for the chat. Thank you.