S10E129 Whit Allen / SpectraGrow - From Turntables to Vertical Farms: The Rhythms of Innovation and Sustainability in Agriculture

0:00:01 - Harry Duran

So, Whit Allen, founder and CEO of SpectraGrowth, thank you so much for joining me on the Vertical Farming Podcast.

0:00:06 - Whit Allen

Hey, I'm excited to be here, Harry. I'm glad we get a chance to connect this way. We've connected through social media and stuff before, but it's great to do this virtual face-to-face. I like it.

0:00:18 - Harry Duran

Yes, and because of the beauty of having video and then the people who are just on audio are missing out. I get the benefit of seeing your setup and obviously I can't resist but comment on your background there. I see the turntables, I see the rockets. So let's get a little DJ set up there and regular listeners to the show will know that my probably my first passion. I've been DJing since I was 16 and we had a nice little chat leading up to this conversation about our love for music. So maybe let's start there. You know where's that coming from, because I'm literally staring at my Rocketeer, because they're behind the monitor as well, so it's funny to see that.

0:00:54 - Whit Allen

That's awesome. No, I mean, I was even thinking back to where it all started was probably getting my first tape recorder when I was like eight or nine years old. You know pre.

This is pre Sony Walkman and making mixtapes at you know, age nine like recording stuff off the radio or off records and then taking that through high school, you know, and making mixtapes for friends and stuff. And then. But college was where it really became. It came a career for me for a while. One of the first, my freshman year, first weekends going to parties and seeing bands or DJs playing and thinking I can do this so much better, you know. And so immediately a buddy and I started a mobile DJ business. We did a radio show. I ended up then getting some gigs at different nightclubs and so it became a thing that I'm now getting back into. Now that I'm empty nester and a little less family responsibility, I can set up the home office now the dj set up.

0:01:59 - Harry Duran

So very cool and I see you, is that you've got the techniques 1200s in there as well you know, it's actually a relu version of it.

0:02:07 - Whit Allen

So it's the relu 800, 8000s, but it's mimics, because gotta remember when I was djing it was. This was in the second half of the 80s, right? So it was cds were just coming out, right at the end of my dj, and vinyl was everything that I ever knew. So now I'm having to learn the new software and how does it work, and all that.

0:02:31 - Harry Duran

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I started on the 1200s and then to learn on vinyl, beat mesh on vinyl and then dabbled in CDs a little bit. I really couldn't get into cause it was more like the CD mixtures at the time and then sort of bypass. I wasn't as deejaying as much during the cdj's time. So then I kind of jumped straight into like laptop the tractor dj so I dj with that. So now getting back into vinyl and learning that basically you just show up at a usb nowadays and you just show up and you plug that into the cdj's and they're just like beasts. They're like two thousand dollars for each deck. They're not cheap, so it's not something you can just buy just to have as a hobby. But you got a pretty sleek setup there that stand. Is that something customized? It's pretty modern looking there.

0:03:13 - Whit Allen

Yeah, you know I found that that's a company out of Germany that you email them exactly what your setup is, the brand and if you're in battle mode or regular mode, and you give them all that and they, you know they send it to you with the right cutouts and everything.

0:03:27 - Harry Duran

Nice, very cool. I'll have to get that information from you later so I can hit that up. So yeah, I think the listeners are wondering why we're talking about DJs. How about DJing? But it's interesting because, if you think about tying the thread all together, I remember the first time I saw someone DJ when I was like 16. And what fascinated me was the fact that this person was controlling the energy of the room and I was like whoa, wow, like whatever he plays something good, crowd rises, they get up, they dance. He plays something bad, slows it down and just kind of that tempo.

And my first foray into podcasting was because I had created a mobile app called Know your DJ. Oh, wow, created a mobile app called Know your DJ with a friend of mine and I wanted to start a podcast to learn to basically interview DJs and get promotion for the mobile app and quickly shifted gears when I realized how hard it was going to be to track down these globetrotting DJs for an interview and that started me off on the podcast. And then I started my agency and then, because I had that, two skill sets long form conversations I've done over this. Actually 10 years is going to be with this that first podcast junkies where I interviewed, I shifted gears. I said let me interview podcasters instead of DJs, and that was my first show. And then we own a podcast production agency. We launched over 120 shows and so in 2019, regular listeners heard the story.

But I was given a book by Peter Diamandis which talked about vertical farming, which led me to Dixon Despommier's book on vertical farming, and I was like, well, I know how to have long-form interviews and I'll just make it the most obvious name possible Vertical Farming Podcast and just kind of like, learn about it on the way and focus on the stories and origin stories which I love of CEOs and founders, and it's taken on a life of its own. It's now the number one podcast in this super niche of vertical farming and obviously it's taken me to conferences and even countries. I've been to Dubai and Germany just to attend conferences as well. So it's been a really wild journey and we'll get into your backstory as well, but that's sort of how everything came together.

0:05:24 - Whit Allen

That's cool. Well, I think there is natural connections between DJing and SpectraGrow. For example, I remember I took a course called Truth, love and Marketing here in Boulder and it was a nine-month intensive and it was for people launching entrepreneurial ventures and one of the exercises was to describe your creative process and it was interesting. So we were looking at SpectraGrow and creative element there, but it was a little bit muddled in how to define exactly the creative process. So the leaders suggested well, look at some other creative processes in your life. And I immediately went to DJ and music and it was so easy to describe my creative process there. And then I saw the parallels in my life about how I bring that creative energy to launching an entrepreneurial company and how we market, how we sell, how we talk about what we do.

0:06:24 - Harry Duran

And have you always been in Colorado? Is that where you grew up?

0:06:28 - Whit Allen

No, I actually grew up in Texas.

0:06:30 - Harry Duran

Okay.

0:06:30 - Whit Allen

With. It was a very international upbringing in the sense that my stepdad had his own company selling, like bio-organic fertilizers, different agricultural products, and all of his customers were outside of the United States. So he had customers throughout Latin America and Europe and Africa, and so the selling of those products was really on like a family to family basis. It wasn't so much you bought the best product, you bought from who you trusted like who-.

0:07:05 - Harry Duran

Yeah, the relationship.

0:07:06 - Whit Allen

The relationship and so, growing up, it was natural to have people from, let's say, ghana, africa.

There were customers that would come stay in our house when they would come to visit my stepdad and then vice versa, family vacations were really business trips and so, even though I grew up in Texas, I grew up with a, I would say, much more of a worldview, plagiarizing Socrates, feeling more of like a citizen of the world than so much a Texan or an American. But it was, yeah, texas in the city and then also a little bit with a foot in the country as well, because my stepdad's hobby and his business was farming and ranching and stuff. So I grew up with a half city life, half country life.

0:07:51 - Harry Duran

Did that pique your interest, or was it already an interest in business and entrepreneurialism and agriculture? Was that activated there through that experience?

0:08:00 - Whit Allen

Well, it's interesting, the entrepreneurial side was the agriculture. It's kind of funny. Agriculture for me was just something normal. Didn't everybody grow their own food? Yeah, to follow in his footsteps and go into his business, and I didn't want to, I wasn't interested in it. I mean, look, I grew tomatoes at home and I grew plants and it was just kind of a normal thing to do. But I was interested in electronics because, like I mentioned the tape recorder, but then even like in in in school, like it was into the industrial arts.

So you know electronics and woodworking and metalworking, but the electronics was what really fascinated me and so I was like, no, I'm going to go the electronics route. I'm not going to do the agriculture thing, but the entrepreneurial piece definitely. Yeah, that was a big inspiration for me around that. I mean, I'd say my first business was when I was 12 and had another business at 15. And then I mentioned the mobile DJing business when I was 12 and at another business at 15. And then I mentioned the mobile DJing business when I was 18. And so it's been a big impact in how I've approached life.

0:09:14 - Harry Duran

So we'll get into the founding of SpectraGirl, but I'm curious about the jobs you had prior. Is there any? When you think about the experiences you had, do you feel like looking back now that they sort of prepared you for what was to become SpectraGrow?

0:09:27 - Whit Allen

Everyone does have something. There's something I really yeah, I really benefited from and I think, yeah, launching SpectraGrow is just really the culmination of all those experiences. First 10 years of my career was with a big Fortune 10 company, but I was given a very you could say entrepreneurial, but within a big company maybe the word is intrapreneurial. I was given the chance to create a business from scratch for one of the product lines in Europe, middle East and Latin America. So I created an international business for this product line that had not existed before international business for this product line that had not existed before.

I think one of the things that people find super curious when I mentioned my next experience was I did do a startup where I was recruited by headhunters from the venture capital group that was funding the company and so did a stint selling products into the data center world. But what was interesting was hired a lobbyist in Washington DC to help me raise Department of Energy grants for it, because it was clean energy, it was fuel cell technology, and so part of our pitch was the clean and green aspect of how to make these data centers much more energy efficient, and the lobbyist that I hired he and I tag teamed so really well together that I ended up going to work for him, and so I had a career for eight years as a cleantech lobbyist out of Washington DC.

Oh wow, and that was a really incredible experience in so many ways. I mean just personally like understanding how government works a lot better, but even in kind of linking this to SpectraGrow, it was really getting how to help our clients focus in on a very easily understandable pitch of value proposition of something that could be super complex, but we may have an audience one day.

That was a PhD researcher in the field and we might have to go really technical, but the next day we might be pitching to a 25-year year old Hill staffer with a history degree and trying to make that same value proposition, and also to both sides of the aisle. And so from like a marketing standpoint, that was a it seems like a strange segue, but it really sharpened my skills in value proposition development.

0:12:05 - Harry Duran

Yeah, it seems like sometimes when you think about lobbyists they sort of get a bad rap If you think about tobacco lobbyists, coal lobbyists and the people who are just out there trying to like get the ears of the folks in DC. So what do you think was a positive aspect of building those relationships in terms of, like you mentioned, understanding like how things work there as well, and maybe like to folks who are not familiar with what happens behind the scenes or behind these closed door conversations, can you sort of give a little peek into like what exactly does happen there and maybe one or two highlights of that experience?

0:12:38 - Whit Allen

Well, now again to set the stage, all of our clients were involved in some sort of clean tech, so it was either LEDs or renewable energy or some technology there. So what was interesting was recognizing but also helping illuminate what the benefits were to people on both sides of the aisle, Because so many times we from the news media, we try to polarize everything. Well, this camp, if this camp is for this other camp, can't be for this. They have to be against it, because we always have to have this polarization.

0:13:15 - Harry Duran

But that's not true.

0:13:16 - Whit Allen

I mean, it's really not true If you really get down to everybody on both sides of the aisle want good things for their constituents, for their people that they're representing, and so the main thing for us was just to highlight the benefits for their constituents. And there's plenty of benefits for cleantech, regardless of your political ideology, so it's not as bad as the media likes to make it out to. There is a lot of people that do really have the same goals, and so it kind of gets to that thing that some people do talk about now a little bit, that our differences are so small and our commonalities are so deep that if we focus on the 98% of our commonalities, things actually do work pretty well. It's only when we spend all the time and energy and focus on the 2% differences that we create all the polarizations.

0:14:16 - Harry Duran

Yeah, and there's something to be said, I think, for growing and nascent industries to serve as sort of an education to the people in the constituents in DC. They can't be on top of all the latest technologies and they can't understand the impact and the possible benefits of some of these new technologies, like everything that's happening you mentioned LEDs, obviously, everything that's happening with indoor farming and CEA and explaining to the USDA about the Farm Bill and this is now a farming initiative as well and to try to see how the industry can benefit from some of those programs as well. So I think there is some value in having people who can speak that language and communicate to them the benefits and be that spokesperson for a growing industry.

0:15:00 - Whit Allen

I think you said it perfectly well. I mean my job in that eight-year segment of my career. I was an educator. I was simply, like you said, people that are really busy, they don't have time to know the granularity of everything that exists out there, but being able to concisely present, yeah, what this technology can do for your constituency, and 20 seconds or less, often in an elevator, in the halls or in the halls of Congress, walking down the hall.

0:15:32 - Harry Duran

So talk to me a little bit about the origin story for SpectraGrowth. Where are you at the time? You know, was vertical farming indoor farming, on your radar, or how did that come about?

0:15:43 - Whit Allen

So at the time, I was working for a distributor of electronic components here in Denver and I had a couple of different roles. I was brought in to help with one of the business units and I was also brought in to lead the sales team because, I mean, I kind of had both skill sets I had a lot of sales management experience and I had background in electronic components and one of the first things I did was I created an LED component business unit. I had learned a lot about LEDs, my lobbying days and I saw a great opportunity, and so I built that business unit. One of the markets that we were focused on was horticultural lighting, and so we were starting to have a lot of customers, and so I think there's two key points about the origin story of SpectraGrow.

So the first one was in 2017, my company and two other companies that we were collaborating with on some different projects in horticultural lighting we went to a horticultural lighting conference in Denver, and the idea was we were going to go there and look for customers, but halfway through this conference, we're sitting there kind of passing notes while somebody's speaking and we're kind of telling each other like everybody's missing out, like we've got all this great technology that we're providing to other LED industries and it's not being applied here. Like there's so much more we could do, we could build a better mousetrap. And so by the end of that day we got the three companies that a group of us that had gone together represented. We got the three companies to say, okay, well, let's see if this idea has some legs and we'll incubate it. So we didn't start the company right off the bat. We kind of just made it like a little business unit within our company, incubated it for a while. So we were building some prototype products. We'd go out and show it to some potential customers, get some feedback and see if anybody liked the idea.

But the second key milestone or key aha moment for us was when we went to Altius Farms, which is here in Denver. It's a rooftop greenhouse. I think it's the largest rooftop vertical aeroponics greenhouse, at least in North America, but maybe the world. And we went and talked to them and they said, well, yeah, there's some challenges we've got we'd like to solve here. But they said we'd like to do it in a prescribed way. Let's bring in Colorado State University and let's do some tests and let's try some different things and let's see if we can address some of these challenges.

I mean, their goal was to how to keep high levels of productivity throughout the wintertime, so they could be a full 12 month business productivity throughout the wintertime, so they could be a full 12-month business and at the end of that project this is where we kind of had our aha moment of what is really our why. Going to Simon Sinek's why question, it became really clear that our ideal customer is many of the people that in the vertical farming industry, for example, they're trying to do really good things in this world. They're trying to address food security, trying to address food miles, water shortages, changing weather patterns they're trying to address those. But they're running into unforeseen obstacles along the way that we know can be solved with technology that we have and like that, aha was one of those. I can't stand that Like. I can't let this happen. I can solve this. These people need to keep doing these good things in the world and I don't want them to get blocked unnecessarily when I know we've got the answer to solving those challenges.

And so the end result of that project with Altius and Colorado State University is that we leveraged our optical engineering expertise that we have in-house to solve what we see quite often in vertical growing systems. So when you're looking to maximize your yield on a per square foot basis so we're thinking inner city farms, urban farms, where real estate's at a premium everybody's going to these vertical growing structures and the industry wasn't quite prepared from a lighting perspective of how to deal with that. Because not only do you now have to look at where you're getting photons, where it used to be, you could just look at a flat greenhouse, one flat row for acres and acres.

And you could look at lighting from just a two-dimensional perspective on the horizontal plane. Now we've got really three dimensions. We've got a vertical plane and the horizontal plane across the entire space of the farm, and so we realized that with our optical engineering expertise we can create beam patterns to get the photons where they need to go. And then you can even also think of plants as a three-dimensional object too. Right, they're growing over time and so you know no longer does what worked here when the plant's this big, you know work here, and so that aha of at by the end of that project really set us on our path, kind of our niche focus, I mean it's. We know that we're competing in an industry where there's at least 300 different LED lighting companies I could name that are playing in the horticulture space. So we wanted to be very intentional about what is the specific value that we can bring uniquely compared to others, and how does that match with our why, our mission, our reason for being?

0:21:33 - Harry Duran

Yeah that's helpful with our why, our mission, our reason for being. Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks for that in-depth origin story, because I think it's helpful to see how the gears were turning when you were at this conference, knowing what you knew about what the technology can do and seeing obviously there was gaps in what people, how they were using the current lighting solutions and where there was a need for something like SpectraGrow. And so, as you were building this out, how would you explain, when you were starting to work with new clients and obviously you were doing the trial as well who would you say is an ideal client for a SpectraGrow system?

0:22:10 - Whit Allen

So I would say that it could fall in one of two categories.

It could be the farmer that is wanting to build a farm, probably mid-sized to smaller farms, and is wanting to use a vertical growing technology. I mean, and there's so many different types. I mean there's towers, there's walls, there's barrels, there's oscillating gutters, there's pipes, there's all different things and especially when they're not looking at a greenfield space where they could just design it exactly the way they want it, so many of our customers are trying to build farms in existing buildings that have all sorts of constraints Maybe they have low ceilings or they have strange posts and barriers and shapes, but yet they've got a great mission. I mean, a lot of our customers are doing commercial farming, but a lot of them are doing non-profits, you know where they're trying to address food security in their neighborhood or their region or their town. And so the combination of kind of fitting into existing buildings and using the vertical growth technologies, that's an ideal customer for us, because what we're really good're looking at how to get photons all the way around these structures in a complete 3D fashion.

The second ideal customer for us are the manufacturers of the growing systems themselves. So, whereas in a farm, like maybe in a greenhouse, you might see our brand on our fixture in the farm, but there are other companies that are building these growing systems where they've asked us to help with the lighting design that's integrated into their system. So you might not see our brand on it, but it's, you know, spectrogro inside, if you will. You won't see us on Amazon, though you know spectrogro inside, if you will. You won't see us on Amazon, though. We're not focused on consumer market and our products are really designed for a professional, commercial installation. The only time you see us you might see us in a consumer application is that second example, where we're designing the lighting system that gets integrated into a growing system, and some of those are used in consumer applications.

0:24:34 - Harry Duran

And I was looking on the site, there's obviously you've built in some Bluetooth controls as well. Is that really important when getting these systems set up?

0:24:49 - Whit Allen

I'll be honest with you, it isn't so much. What we're noticing is the types of customers that we're really adding a lot of value to. A lot of times the control system can be very simple. It can be very much, you know, an on-off. The Bluetooth controls do come in handy where maybe you have a leap that you need to make in a farm and running wires to connect might be difficult and having a wireless connectivity would be useful in that case.

There have also been some applications where we do need to have different levels of dimming to create the right uniformity and intensity in a farm.

I mean, I'm thinking back to a project we did at LinkedIn at their European headquarters in Dublin. There were a lot of constraints on that project. I mean European headquarters in Dublin. There were a lot of constraints on that project. I mean it had to be in this very specific corner of their campus but they wanted it very visible so people would walk by it and see them growing their own food that they ate in their amazing cafeteria for lunch every day. But there were so many constraints of where the farm could be that we didn't have a lot of room to design a full 100% intensity light plan. So we had to vary intensity for a bunch of different lights at a bunch of different levels, and so the bluetooth controls came in very handy for that, to be able to send the right signals, you know, at the right times of the day, to manage that lighting within a work environment which is very different, often a dedicated farm.

0:26:16 - Harry Duran

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then I saw that you had custom applications for cannabis implementations and also something that you had designated there as germicidal disinfection as well.

0:26:27 - Whit Allen

Yeah, yeah yeah, no good question. I appreciate you bringing that up. On cannabis, we don't play a lot in cannabis. It's a very popular space with a lot of different lighting companies and a lot of them are designed more for kind of home grower and, again, like I said, we're not focused on the consumer market. So we get brought in on cannabis typically in a commercial grow where there's like a unique challenge Again do they need to have a variability of spectrum recipe at different times of day and having all that types of level of control in developing UVC. So ultraviolet C-band based germicidal systems that were going into like dressing rooms of department stores and different applications for that and so we got a lot of experience working with UVC LEDs and so now we've been seeing a lot of requests coming in for agricultural applications for basically for disinfection and for treating different pathogens that are showing up in farms that we can treat instead of with chemicals we can treat with LED treatments.

0:27:53 - Harry Duran

Interesting. So I think when folks in the space think about LEDs, they think about all the innovation that's happened, and it's something that's been around for decades I guess at this point right In terms of an industry. So where are you seeing, from your vantage point, some of the innovation happening in the LED space?

0:28:11 - Whit Allen

So there's definitely a lot of companies doing some great things around spectral tuning and looking at what type of spectrum do you want for different plants and at different times of the day and at different parts of the maturity cycle of the plant.

A lot of those are being done with university partnerships and all of that data will be super useful for the industry, the whole industry. All boats are going to rise from that research because we're all going to learn a lot more and be able to fine tune all the LED products. But right now, the most immediate thing that we see is just getting the basics correct of the right levels of light intensity, and so one of the things that you could experience, for example, in a vertical structure or really any type of farm. But if you don't have the right intensity of light, you can run into a couple of challenges. If you've got too low of an intensity, you can get shade avoidance response, so you start getting leggy plants, which really impacts the quality of the product. In fact might even make it not sellable. And then, if you get too much intensity, you can run into problems tip burn or bolting, especially if you're trying to sell the leafy greens, you're not wanting them to flower.

And so really, the immediate applicability today of the spectral tuning is I see a little bit less. I see a little bit more focus and need around the intensities and getting those correct and the uniformity across the plants and the farm. But for sure, as we go on throughout the next couple of years, I think the spectrum tuning is going to start to show us where we need to focus our efforts, because not all of these experiments are going to bear fruit, so to speak, right Are going to give us good results, but the learning is super important on how can we further optimize the production coming out of farms.

0:30:09 - Harry Duran

Obviously, the elephant in the room is energy usage and expenditure, right, and so when you're having conversations with clients and prospects, how often does that come up, and is that something you've talked about as well with the folks you're working with?

0:30:21 - Whit Allen

Yeah, it comes up quite a bit. I would definitely say it comes up always with customers in Europe. I can't talk to a customer in Europe without talking about energy efficiency and it comes up quite a bit, for example in the US. But you're kind of going to exactly one of the reasons why I mentioned that really today's applicability is really focused on getting the intensity levels right and then getting the photons directed where you're going to get an ROI on that electricity and not wasting them in places where you're not going to get an ROI Because those have, whereas I think the spectral tuning that we talked about, that's going to come along in the next couple of years. We're going to get 5% benefit and 10% benefit here and there, getting the intensities right and not wasting photons where you don't need them. I've personally been involved in projects where we changed the energy efficiency number by 52%. So to me, the intensity and the photon uniformity is still the bigger lever right now to get right, especially with our global concerns about energy and energy prices.

0:31:34 - Harry Duran

Is there anything folks that are thinking about getting a new farm off the ground they can think about in terms of planning? When it comes to like the LED, there's so many obviously different variables location and what you're going to grow and marketing all this sort of stuff but obviously your hardware setup is going to be a big part of that and LED plays a big role there, and I imagine there's some guidance in terms of how the farm is structured, how it's gonna be built out and where things like shelving are gonna be. And I wonder how much input you guys have in those conversations.

0:32:02 - Whit Allen

It's interesting. You ask that because I can't tell you how many times I mean it's probably once a week where we get brought involved into a project and we actually make recommendations to relay out the farm based on lighting and we show like, well, if we can do it your way, but if we were to reorganize the farm this way, we would get this much better performance out of the lighting strategy. So my advice is always to bring us in as early as possible in the planning process. There have been many times where farms ready to get off the ground and it's like, all right, well, let's go look for some lights. I mean, our ability to add value is decreased the later we're brought into the project is decreased the later we're brought into the project.

0:32:51 - Harry Duran

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and it's something I think more and more folks are considering, because everything sort of has this synergistic effect. Right, everything's playing well together. I'm sure there's considerations with farms that are using AI and robotics as well.

0:33:03 - Whit Allen

For sure. Yeah, robotics is an exciting one too. We're collaborating with a company here in Boulder up the road Rooted Robotics, and it's exciting to see what they're able to do. It's pretty impressive.

0:33:16 - Harry Duran

What does the industry look like in Colorado? Obviously, because of the climate there, there's opportunities for people that are interested, because of the harsh winters there, in terms of looking at what they can grow during those off seasons. Looking at what they can grow during those off seasons.

0:33:28 - Whit Allen

I'm impressed at what we have in Colorado. I would say we have companies in every single part of the vertical farming space. I mean, we've got us with lighting, we've got Harvest Today with grow walls. There's what? Farmbox Foods with containers, saris Greenhouses, wadsworth controls oh, I'm rooted robotics and I'm sure I'm missing some others. My friends will kill me, but just right off the top of my head there's so many great companies right here in Colorado that are, I mean, leaders in their specific niche.

0:34:03 - Harry Duran

Is there sort of a community building there? Do you guys get together or just kind of powwow, brainstorm a little bit, or is any of that happening? You?

0:34:09 - Whit Allen

know this happened really well at Indoor EggCon in Vegas last week.

0:34:13 - Harry Duran

Yeah, yeah.

0:34:14 - Whit Allen

We had at least three of us with booths next to each other, and there was a four with the booth right around the corner. So, yeah, we are starting to collaborate more and in fact it was even great. One group took their truck and trailer and were able to take several different trade show booths together. It was quite efficient for us.

0:34:35 - Harry Duran

And you were there at Indoor Econ. Yeah yeah, we didn't get to connect. I was there. Do you think that you have so much time to get to see everybody? But it's so many more booths this time it was probably double the size of last year and I was, I remember, just making the rounds and I had a lot of people on my list and the two days go by so fast and it's interesting they the windows of time for the pavilion were a little weird. They cut them off like at 2 PM on the second day, which I I'm sure they're getting feedback about it, but I think to a vendor they would have liked to have spent more time on the floor. But how did it go for you? It was a great show, but on the floor, but how did it go for you?

0:35:07 - Whit Allen

It was a great show but I'm with you, it was so short Like I couldn't believe we had just set up and then we were just taken down and it was like where did that time go? And I'm with you, there were several people that we were planning to connect and just we all just ran out of time. Now, those hours that we did connect with people, they were full and they were great. It was great to connect with a lot of people in industry I know and meet a lot of new people. So that's one of my favorite shows for sure.

0:35:34 - Harry Duran

Are you planning any others the rest of this year?

0:35:37 - Whit Allen

We've got three more this year.

0:35:38 - Harry Duran

Okay.

0:35:38 - Whit Allen

Because we'll do four in total. So, in May we're doing one in Brazil.

0:35:43 - Harry Duran

Oh, wow.

0:35:43 - Whit Allen

Vertical farming show there. We'll do Green Tech in Amsterdam in June and then we'll do Agrimay in Dubai in October.

0:35:52 - Harry Duran

Oh yeah, I did Agrimay a couple of years ago. That's getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, yeah, it is it is have you been there before?

0:35:58 - Whit Allen

We did last year. That was our first one last year.

0:36:05 - Harry Duran

That area is just fascinating when you think about everything that's happening there and the different challenges they have and 95% of their 95 or 98 of their food gets imported and the different use cases. You know, we had some folks on who are doing fodder indoors for camels and just like the different challenges that people have, right. And then they've got stables with like thousands of camels and I spoke to the founder of Renaissance Ag and that's specifically what they're focused on. So you just make your way to the different booths and you have the sheiks coming around and asking questions and it's a pretty unique experience and Dubai itself I was in Dubai itself was just a wild place to be if you've never been there before.

0:36:38 - Whit Allen

That is a fascinating city, for sure, for sure.

0:36:41 - Harry Duran

Yeah, and so what's your take on where we are in terms of the industry, and do you find yourself having conversations around, like possible collaborations, or connecting with your peers?

0:36:53 - Whit Allen

Definitely we are very much a collaborative company. We don't have this concept that we have to live in our own little world and we do our thing and we can't do anything better. We can't learn from anybody else. Very open to collaboration, I see that happening more and more. I mean, like I mentioned before, indoor AgCon was a great example of several of us coming together. There was a company doing Growall, a robot kind of an AI-based monitoring system, and there's so many other aspects where it's interesting to see when you put one plus one, sometimes you get a little bit more than two right, you can maybe get three or four, and the other way.

I would answer your question about what do I see in terms of the industry and also with collaborations. What's really fascinating to me are the companies that we're starting to work with and the level of impact that they're focused on, the type of impact that they're focused on and the wide variety of applications of vertical farming getting invested in these really big farms. But really our day-to-day is working with these medium and smaller sized farms that are there at high school, they're at a nonprofit, they're with a religious organization, they're at a winery, they're at a restaurant. There are just so many different aspects to this industry that, to me, are exciting because it's so cool to see, through their efforts, this unique impact that vertical farming, the vertical farming industry, can have on such a local basis. Every day is exciting, it really is.

0:38:47 - Harry Duran

And is this your first time in the CEO role? It is, yeah. This your first time in the CEO role. It is yeah. So how's that been Like? How have you grown since starting the company? It's quite an experience.

0:39:04 - Whit Allen

I do tell people a lot like well, I've got the CEO title on my card, but what really my role in the company and what I enjoy doing most is being out in the field with customers and with partners and seeing what obstacles there are to people's success in this industry and where we can add value and help people overcome these challenges.

And building partnerships, building collaborations that's what excites me quite a bit. So I think the thing that has come up for me as the CEO, as a leader, has been making sure we define roles and responsibilities around those things that make each individual come alive. That's what I want on my team. I want people who have come alive and are ready to share that aliveness with the work. And what I found is sometimes we have to tweak job descriptions. We needed to tweak mine, even though with the CEO role, there's some things I don't enjoy doing and we need to tweak and find either create new roles or find other people to make sure we've got good alignment on what we're good at and also what we're good at and we enjoy doing right.

0:40:18 - Harry Duran

What's a tough question you've had to ask yourself recently.

0:40:22 - Whit Allen

I would say the toughest question recently is around do we raise more funding or do we keep growing organically? And so it's a conversation that I have with my board of directors, but it falls into my lap to implement this, and so that's a hard question for any startup to think about those next rounds of funding and if you want to do them or not, and the pros and cons.

0:40:53 - Harry Duran

I've been thinking a lot about this idea of first principles, and I'm a fan of this show called the podcast. So it's a shame parish the knowledge project. That's what it's called. But it's interesting. When you think about a question like that, I'm curious about your decision-making process, like how do you go about the process of thinking about a question like that and what comes into play, like what are the different factors that you're thinking about?

0:41:19 - Whit Allen

This may sound a little woo-woo, but I think there's a huge part of intuition that comes into play, and intuition's a that's a weird word to use in business. People in business like spreadsheets, they like numbers and they need analysis. But at the end of the day, you've got to interpret the data, you've got to interpret what that spreadsheet's telling you, and we can iterate spreadsheets until we're blue in the face and don't take any action. And so there's a point where you gotta make a decision. You gotta take advantage of all the other aspects of your brain power. And again, the intuition that there are other sensors collecting data that might not be so obvious that you could put on a spreadsheet, but are important things to consider. So my process involves getting data. I do definitely like to make data-driven decisions, but the other part of the process is I don't kill myself trying to get 100% correct or 100% accurate. There's a point, whatever it is, 75% is going to be good enough to go forward and make some type of decision. So yeah.

I try to definitely avoid paralysis by analysis.

0:42:40 - Harry Duran

Analysis, paralysis.

Yeah, that's helpful.

I think what came to mind as you were saying that, and obviously how we started the conversation, is this idea of reading the room right. As a DJ, you think about that like working with energy and feeling like you're going with your gut at some point. You're like and what feels right for you and I'm probably someone who's I consider myself very spiritual, so definitely play in that realm a lot and there is something to be said for, you know, having that intuition, that gut feel, which helps you make cross that final threshold when making those decisions. So I appreciate you sharing that as we wrap up, I've been leaving some room at the end of these conversations for any closing thoughts you have for this, your peers in the industry, a lot of folks in this space or the leaders in this space that listen to this show, and so you know, just, I like to foster that conversation and get people talking. And so you know, is there anything that comes to mind in terms of thinking about where we are or any message you have for your colleagues in the space?

0:43:34 - Whit Allen

I definitely like the point you initiated earlier around collaboration. I think that would be the thought to leave, for the audience is very open to collaboration and I see the benefit for our industry of not being in the silos of hiding information, but kind of the sharing, know and brainstorm new, better things for the industry, instead of all everyone just kind of working in their own silos, their own closed doors, without having that opportunity to brainstorm. And what was it? The think and grow rich, the theory of the mastermind.

0:44:23 - Harry Duran

Yeah, of course. Yeah, napoleon Hill, yeah.

0:44:25 - Whit Allen

Napoleon Hill. When more than one gets together, there's this extra mastermind that's created, and I'm a big believer in that. Having participated in mastermind groups before, I'm a big fan of what can be created when multiple people come together to look at challenges and problems to solve.

0:44:46 - Harry Duran

Yeah, I think it's always a valid point to make and it's something that we can just continue to talk about with each of these conversations, because one of my takeaways from the conference and every time that I go, that there's some of the benefits sometimes is the hallway conversations or the lunch you have with someone, or just someone, that is. It makes an introduction that you didn't see, but because the two people were in the same room, you're able to have that conversation and I think there's something to be said for everyone to be continuing to speak. It is an all hands on deck moment and I think I've had past guests mentioned this before that every company has the ability to succeed in this space and what everyone's doing is needed at this time because of the challenges we're facing as well.

Yeah Well, I appreciate you taking the time to come on and I was looking forward to our conversation because of our obviously because of our shared interests, but also because it's interesting to see you know the different perspectives that people bring, especially coming from different backgrounds. And it's funny how you had this inspiration for SpectraGrow at that conference and realizing there was a need in this industry and even being able to come in with a different perspective, a 3D perspective if you will, which I think is helpful and useful. So spectrogrowcom for folks to learn more. Anywhere else you want to have folks reach out if they want to connect.

0:45:56 - Whit Allen

We use LinkedIn quite a bit, as well as Instagram. Those would probably be the best places.

0:46:02 - Harry Duran

Okay, and we'll make sure all those links are in the show notes as well, so people can look out for you as well.

0:46:11 - Whit Allen

So,