Harry Tannenbaum (Mill) - Setting the Goal at Delight

Speaker A: This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series brought to you by Stanford E Corner and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

Speaker B: My name is Emily Ma and I welcome you all back to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, co hosted by the Business association for Stanford Entrepreneurial Students and the management science and engineering department at Stanford. Today we are joined by a very special guest, Harry Tannenbaum, who is the co founder and president of Mill, a technology company combining hardware and AI to reduce waste and recover value from everyday materials. Starting with food. Mill's residential food recycler is now in tens of thousands of homes, including mine, creating the foundation for Mill Commercial, which pre processes and analyzes food waste streams on site, helping organizations reduce waste, gain operational efficiencies and unlock new value from what was once discarded. Prior to Mill, Harry led the centralized analytics group and e commerce business at Nest, which launched the first learning thermostat and became the leading brand for the connected home M. During his time at Nest, Harry helped to scale the business to more than 1 billion in annual revenue following Nest's acquisition by Google. He was a director in Google's hardware organization focused on e commerce and subscription offerings. He received his bachelor's in economics from UCLA and he's a surfer and was raised in San Francisco. So welcome home to San Francisco Bay Area and all the work that you do. And you and I are very passionate about food waste, but what is this thing about food waste that we want to talk about? So I'm going to hand the clicker to you because we're going to have you sort of walk us through why you're so passionate about this topic.

Speaker C: Well, I'm really happy to be here. Can you all hear me? Um, uh, it's an honor to be here. I was signing the, uh, wall of speakers and, um, I just want you to know that this isn't like a revenge fever dream for me. I didn't get into Stanford, so this

Speaker D: isn't like the moment where I'm like, take that admissions department.

Speaker C: Um, I mean, there's a little bit of that, uh, but it's just such a great feeling to be back on campus and to be brought into a

Speaker D: class and given an opportunity to talk

Speaker C: really broadly, um, about what I'm working on right now about the problem of food waste and hopefully answer some good

Speaker D: questions and impart a bit of advice.

Speaker C: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about this. Um, this is a crazy thing. So I kind of fell into the problem of food waste. Is it okay if I Stand.

Speaker B: Yeah, you can do whatever you want. It's an academic institution.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: So, um, these are bonkers numbers. 40% of all the food we grow on the planet goes to waste. It's like 1.5% of GDP. So out of every $100 on the planet, one and a half dollars of that on an annual basis is represented by food that is grown and not eaten. And it's the single largest type of

Speaker D: stuff in the landfill.

Speaker C: My entry to the waste problem, we can talk about a little bit more

Speaker D: later, was like, okay, I got to

Speaker C: go work on plastics because. Cause we're eating like a credit card

Speaker D: worth of plastics every week, and that has to be the biggest problem in waste.

Speaker C: But you crack the landfill open and it's fricking food in there. So, uh, this problem is a really interesting problem to unwind and unravel because it's not economically beneficial to waste food. It's not a rational act. Nobody's like, for food waste. There's no like, pro food waste group. But it's this huge drag on efficiency. Um, so that was a really interesting thing to start thinking about. The way we got rolling and we'll go back in time. Can we go back in time?

Speaker B: You can do, yes, please.

Speaker C: The way we got rolling on how we thought about solving the problem, um, was through a realization that 80% of food is water, 25% of the landfill is food. 20% of the landfill is water inside food.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker C: So any landfill bound garbage truck you see on the planet is 20% full

Speaker D: of water inside food. And that didn't seem particularly efficient.

Speaker C: Um, we have a background, our team, of making stuff, um, so harking back to the days of ipods and iPhones at Apple and then thermostats and smoke alarms and cameras at Nest. And I would say the secret about building things with kind of the Apple mindset is you're not necessarily inventing new technologies. You're getting really, really good at integrating existing technologies. And so what we built is a machine we call mill, um, food recycler. And basically, I know it kind of looks like what happens if you get a bunch of Apple people together and make a trash can. That there's more than that in here.

Speaker D: This thing has as much torque as a Harley Davidson.

Speaker C: Um, but what it does is overnight it eats food and it dries it out and it measures it along the way. And there have been some very, very cool things we've seen out of the sort of 20 million device days worth of data that have been born out of these being deployed in kitchens around the world, um, dehydration is really awesome as a process. Uh, when you take the water out of food, actually it's stays as food. And I just mentioned that a little bit because just in my journeys and musings of this problem, there's a really crazy thing that happens with food waste. Like, you're eating food, you all have done that, right? You have a plate and you're putting the food into your mouth.

Speaker D: It's delicious.

Speaker C: And you bring it to a sink and you put it in the sink, and in like a millisecond, it's turned into food waste. And you don't want to wash that

Speaker D: dish because it's gross.

Speaker C: That's a really weird behavioral loop that occurs that we believe is really closely tied to why so much food ends up in the landfill. Because people stop thinking about it as food. You start thinking about it as food waste. Anyway, more on that later. We dry it out, we turn it into this material we call food grounds that basically looks like coffee grounds and smells like spices, and it has values. Am I doing okay?

Speaker B: You're doing awesome.

Speaker C: Thanks, Emily. Am I doing okay? Okay, cool. The food grounds that come out of the average American household, which, by the way, the average American household throws away $3,000 worth of food a year on average, 19% protein burns at a higher BTU than wood pellets. You can use it as fertilizer. You can make compost out of it. You can even feed animals. This is a whole thing that's really interesting about transforming something that typically goes to waste because it's wet, heavy, putrescible. That is a good Scrabble word, folks. Uh, for anyone that plays, um, when you take the water out of food, it doesn't rot. The number one question I've gotten since starting the company is like, this is cool, Harry. Um, when are you going to make a big one? And we'll talk about this a little bit today and talk about our approach in go to market and, and how

Speaker D: we develop breakthrough technology.

Speaker C: Um, but the answer to that question is we're gonna make a big one

Speaker D: when we have the right partner.

Speaker C: Um, and we've recently announced who that partner is, and it's Whole Foods and Amazon. Uh, so starting in 2027, we're gonna deploy these larger scale mills across every single Whole Foods store. Amazon invested in the company. There's all sorts of interesting learnings around thinking about starting commercialization, building a brand in a household with a consumer product, and then scaling that up analogs to

Speaker D: nest as well as we started with

Speaker C: a direct to consumer business and then turned that into a business where we

Speaker D: sold through utility companies.

Speaker C: Um, it's a neato thing. Um, if there are questions if we go there, we can talk a lot about the theory of the circular economy. The cool thing about loops when you build them is they're more efficient. And this is kind of the loop we're building with Whole Foods and others. Food scraps from the back of a store go into a mill, dry stuff comes out, it's easier to transport. It's not a waste product. You can actually sell that back into farms, make eggs. And there's also a little loop on the inside around data and insights and something neato we're doing with our larger scale mills, which is kind of like a new kind of infrastructure we're building is we're putting cameras inside things. And you know, this is where the newest LLMs are really helpful because as we can identify everything that's being thrown away, then we can take action on it. And it's great to not have food end up in the landfill. It's great to turn it into chicken feed, but it's even better not to

Speaker D: fricking waste in the first place.

Speaker C: Okay, homestretch. The cool thing about this is it's like a win, win, win, win. The team we've assembled, everybody cares a lot about the environment and cares about the planet and cares about climate. And I would say if I were to describe the company we're building, it's a systems change company. But the only way you change systems is if you make new systems that

Speaker D: are better, faster and cheaper.

Speaker C: Like, please heed this advice. You can have an idea that makes all the sense for the planet, but the only way it's going to scale up massively is if it makes economic sense. These two things need to be true. So in building this product, in building this business, we're thinking about how do we make this a, uh, money machine

Speaker D: as well as a planet saving machine.

Speaker C: And if you can nail the environmental benefit and the economic benefit and do the right thing for employees and have chickens be the unlikely heroes of this whole story, that's an awesome combination. So, yeah, I don't want to give away more. I want to stop now with kind of the preamble. But, um, yeah, I'm very, very happy to be here. My name's Harry. I am a surfer. I played Scrabble competitively. Um, I'm excited to talk about whatever Emily wants to talk about and yeah. I'm excited for you all to dive into the dumpster with me.

Speaker B: So the secret here is Harry and I met in 2020 when you were just getting going.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: And I do want to share a little bit of a sort of insight. I remember you and Matt, uh, and I chatting and you talking about just smelliness and how getting rid of smelliness in our houses would be the thing. And I was so taken by that because it was the same. So sort of just stubbornness and passion about making a great user experience that came from your Nest days that were like also coming from the Apple days.

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker B: And getting that right was the game changer. So I kind of want to take one step back to prior from your Mill days about where that just like super focus on like the user experience came from and then maybe some other lessons that you've learned, uh, along the way in that part of your journey that has informed now what you do for Mill. And with Mill.

Speaker C: I mean, I think there are a lot of ways in, um, to building a business or thinking about starting a company or, um, you could start from a technology view. Okay, we have this technology. What can we do with the technology? You could start with a business case, um, you could start with a great story.

Speaker G: Um,

Speaker C: you could start with, um, thinking about some advantage you might have in

Speaker D: manufacturing or inside information, whatever it is.

Speaker C: All of those things swirl together.

Speaker D: But ultimately what matters the most is the story that you're telling the customer and the user.

Speaker C: And there's a really interesting exercise actually that um, we do at Mill that came from Nest, uh, and came from companies before that where before we do

Speaker D: stuff, we write a press release. I'm looking at Sarah, who's on our comms team, who pushes us to do this.

Speaker C: It's a really interesting exercise. I don't know if anybody here has

Speaker D: read a press release in detail, but

Speaker C: the thing about a press release is

Speaker D: it can't be very long, like a page, page and a half max.

Speaker C: And you can really only talk about a few things in the press release. And it's a really interesting exercise to try to figure out how you are going to communicate externally about what you're building. And if you can distill it into

Speaker D: something very, very simple that is memorable.

Speaker C: I think there's a mindset there where you sort of start thinking about what's

Speaker D: the story we're going to tell, what is this going to mean to people that are using our product.

Speaker C: And it's a really interesting and helpful North Star. Then of course, like Apple DNA. Google DNA. We can talk about the difference between Apple and Google. This is totally different, but like, you care a lot about the user.

Speaker D: M the customer is at the center of everything.

Speaker C: And it's an easy trap you can

Speaker D: fall into like, oh, the investor is at the center of everything, or the technology is at the center of everything. It can't be that.

Speaker C: So I think something that's deep in our DNA is really thinking about how we can make delightful experiences. And the word thermostat and delight didn't typically go together. And food waste and delight aren't words that are glommed together in the English language historically. But that's what we drive towards, which is, okay, how can we look at the world and look at things that are kind of unloved? And look, there were MP3 players before iPod, right. And look really, really closely and say, how can we make this feel magical? And then you get into like, okay, let's define magic or let's define delight. Okay, if it smells, that's not going to work. It can't make noise.

Speaker D: I'm talking about mill now.

Speaker C: Can't make any noise.

Speaker D: It has to be able to eat anything.

Speaker C: It can't smell. It should take forever to fricking fill up.

Speaker F: You know.

Speaker C: And you set those as goals. Mhm.

Speaker D: And that's kind of what you strive towards.

Speaker C: And where we ended up is something like we empty our mill, my wife and I, like once a month.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker C: And like you could put mango pits, avocado pits, two whole turkey carcasses. People email us like, oh my God, this saved my marriage. Like there's all this, there's all this good stuff that comes from setting these audacious goals and setting the goal at delight. Whereas if you start to set the goal at, okay, well here's what we think is feasible, you know, on this timeline, this budget, what exists, you're not necessarily going to move things forward. And ah, it's ah, that tapping into delight and frictionlessness that makes people one,

Speaker D: rave about your product.

Speaker C: But two, it's what changes behavior. And I think, um, a similar line between what we're doing at Mill and what we did at Nest is we're

Speaker D: making distributed infrastructure that changes behavior.

Speaker C: And um, I know I'm rambling on. Is this going okay still?

Speaker D: By the way, you're too shy.

Speaker A: Keep going.

Speaker C: So if you think about the energy

Speaker D: sector over the last 50 years, what

Speaker C: really happened in the energy sector as

Speaker D: we moved from centralized infrastructure to decentralized infrastructure.

Speaker C: It used to be that if you needed Power.

Speaker D: You built a power plant

Speaker C: over the last 50 years. Solar batteries, wind thermostats on the wall, all sorts of different technologies that allowed

Speaker D: the grid to decentralize.

Speaker C: And there's all sorts of goodness that comes from that. In the example of a thermostat on the wall, you can actually control energy

Speaker D: demand at the point of generation, at the point of consumption.

Speaker C: A crazy thing with thermostats that we saw is thermostat is responsible for 50%

Speaker D: of your energy bill or something like that. But only 20% of thermostats are programmed.

Speaker C: Not rational. But the thinking was, ok, can we make something really delightful, make something easy, maybe even have the right nudges? Like you email someone and say, hey, do you know your neighbor's wasting, like, 4% less electricity because they programmed their thermostat? People fricking run to their thermostat and program it after that. So there are opportunities to intercede in

Speaker D: ways that weren't previously possible with decentralized infrastructure.

Speaker C: And it's a ditto thing with mill, um, where you make this beautiful, delightful thing.

Speaker F: You.

Speaker C: You put it in someone's kitchen, you put it inside a grocery store, you

Speaker D: can change behavior, and that's actually the unlock that's required.

Speaker B: Can I tell you when it unlocked? For me in earnestness? It was actually in 2022, when I actually was able to smell and feel the food grounds. Right. You mentioned it was a little bit spicy. It actually smells good, and it was delightful to me. You didn't let me actually taste it because that's actually not good. But, like, um, it was phenomenal. Just the 180. Right. And I was in disbelief when I smelled the food grounds. So the MILL team created some magic there.

Speaker C: We have this test that's, like, called the stink bomb test, where we have small conference rooms at our office. Um, and we make this mixture of, like, squid, manchego cheese, um, anchovies, citrus, kimchi eggs, you know, to test the odor system of the device.

Speaker D: We sit working in small rooms where we're processing this kind of material.

Speaker C: And it's like, you smell that once

Speaker D: it's dried, and it actually smells kind of lovely.

Speaker B: I know.

Speaker C: And that's a trip to be able to use technology to take the ickiest thing and make it into something that's pleasant.

Speaker B: It's alchemy, truly alchemy. Okay, let's double down a little bit. I'm actually curious what has been hard along the way. Because like you did with Nest, you and Matt and the team you changed people's behavior. Right. And that wasn't like overnight.

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker B: You're actually working to change behavior here. And I know it's been a journey already for the past five years. So what has been hard, and I know there's a number of you here who wanna start climate tech companies, food and ag tech companies. Well, I'm curious if you had advice for folks, especially in fields like this, how to go about it.

Speaker C: I mean, I'll just speak for myself as like a person and an American. Like, I'm fundamentally lazy.

Speaker G: Yes.

Speaker C: And I'm like, pretty set in my ways and kind of stubborn. So like, you know, you throw around words like behavior change, we're going to change behavior. Like that's freaking hard. Because like the individual actors whose behavior you're trying to change, like, it takes a fair amount to get me to do something differently, like charging my AirPods like that. You know, I can't do it. I just can't figure out how to do it. So then I get another set and then if you have two, then they both, uh, ran out of batteries. So I think something that's very, very,

Speaker D: very hard on behavior change is you

Speaker C: need to really create a frictionless experience. I've talked about this, I've come back to it, but there's that. The second thing that's quite hard about what we're doing is we're truly making

Speaker D: a new kind of infrastructure.

Speaker C: Nest was very cool. We saved enough electricity to power the whole US electrical grid for many months with just little thermostats.

Speaker D: We made a connected thermostat.

Speaker C: Thermostats existed before the connected thermostat. Now at mill, we're making this like,

Speaker D: new kind of infrastructure.

Speaker C: Food recyclers don't really exist. There aren't really cameras on garbage cans in grocery stores.

Speaker D: There aren't pathways to get the dehydrated

Speaker C: material, which is a great chicken feed, back to chicken farms. There aren't regulatory frameworks that understand how these devices should be considered, what the

Speaker D: compliance metrics are, case studies of lots and lots of companies using them before. So you're truly starting at zero

Speaker C: and

Speaker D: you're entering a space that's actually really efficient.

Speaker C: Okay. The waste industry hasn't changed that much over the last hundred years, but it's really, really good at picking up material

Speaker D: at the curb and bringing it to a landfill.

Speaker C: So it's not like you're going against a market failure that hasn't been looked at by industries or that there aren't

Speaker D: systems and infrastructure around it.

Speaker C: So to go against that, you have a lot of work you have to do on education.

Speaker D: You have to nail execution. You can't stumble because there's not a lot of precedence behind it.

Speaker C: And you have to figure out how to make it cool. Otherwise you're not going to be able to get the best people in the

Speaker D: world to come work on it with you.

Speaker B: I think what's important to draw, uh, from what you said, is the interdisciplinary nature of the systems work that you're doing. This is a systems change. There's other food recyclers out there, but I think Mill's the only one that I'm aware of that's looking at not just the hardware, the product for the end user, but also the system in which the product that I'm so familiar with sits in. And you're pulling together all the pieces.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, there's, like, kind of a blessing, though, in coming at, uh, a problem like this, like, knowing nothing about

Speaker D: garbage or the waste industry, because, like,

Speaker C: there are a good amount of entrepreneurs

Speaker D: that start companies in industries that they've spent, like, 20, 30 years working in.

Speaker C: And there's something really freeing about looking at a problem, probably kind of dumbly from folks that are in the biz

Speaker D: or have been working on this, because

Speaker C: you sort of look at it with

Speaker D: eyes unclouded by what is going to be terrifyingly difficult.

Speaker C: It's like, okay, well, that makes sense. There's food over there, and the chicken could eat it. We should try to get it to the chickens. And maybe we got to dehydrate it on the way. And that's a good loop. And we should go do that. It's so hard when you get in there. But it's a blessing not to know how hard it is because it allows you to think really freely and openly in a first principle sense.

Speaker B: And you were willing to, as you said, dive into the dumpster, like I did.

Speaker C: Totally. You just start reading books. It's kind of fun, actually. Like, okay, there's like, 20 books on garbage. I'm going to read them. And then when we started the company, it was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was like, no

Speaker D: one could hide from us.

Speaker C: Like, no one could be like, I'm on vacation. It's like, no, you're at home. So you just start emailing professors and experts. And it's amazing how many people actually email you back. Uh, it's like, hey, I'm this entrepreneur. I've done this other stuff. I kind of want to talk to you about the thing you've spent your whole life working on. People are generally down to get on the phone with you. Just don't say like, I want to pick your brain. I think like, pick your brain. For some reason, it's just like not the right. I want you to help me.

Speaker D: I'd like your advice.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Picking a brain feels kind of violent.

Speaker B: No. Yeah, I don't answer those emails either. Um, okay, so I have two more questions and I want to open it up to the students because I think they have a lot of questions for you on Earth Day. Um, what are you excited about next? I mean, you gave a flavor of, um, what uh, you're doing with Whole Foods and Amazon and a few other big partners with the big version. Right. And um, what else is coming that is sort of fueling you and motivating you and your team?

Speaker C: So my favorite roles inside companies. And there's a really good piece written by First Round Capital called Give Away youy Legos. Um, and what the piece talks about, um, and what you'll all find if you have the opportunity to work in

Speaker D: a high growth company is you very, very quickly get the opportunity to build a LEGO tower. There's all sorts of things that are scaling up.

Speaker C: There's new opportunities to add structure metrics, automate things, figure out business lines, drive revenue, whatever the heck it is. You build the LEGO tower and you're

Speaker D: very proud of it.

Speaker C: And Molly Graham, who wrote the piece,

Speaker D: said you need to be fast to give that LEGO tower away

Speaker C: and go build another one.

Speaker D: And there's a mindset you can have

Speaker C: where it's like the second something's kind of been figured out, I'm going to go on and build onto the next thing. And that's a kind of work that's

Speaker D: been really addictive for me. It's not about org building or nation building inside a company. It's about figuring out what the bleeding edge of the new things we can figure out are, how we can boot things up and then kind of move on to the next thing thing.

Speaker C: And I don't, I mean, you probably

Speaker D: have some amazing stories about this at

Speaker C: Google, but you can't actually really scale with the company if you're still trying to hold on to the thing you were doing two years ago. You have to like sort of let

Speaker D: it slip through your hands a little bit.

Speaker C: So yeah, what's been really exciting for

Speaker D: me right now is building this commercial

Speaker C: business and I find myself like

Speaker E: in

Speaker C: the galleys of Cruise Ships and on chicken farms and talking to chefs and getting to just learn so much every day. But also as a founder, be the

Speaker D: integration point of this customer feedback. I think that's a really powerful thing

Speaker C: about building in this era of AI and being able to move really fast is I have the ability, we have

Speaker D: the ability to hear something from a customer, get that back to our product

Speaker C: and engineering teams, work that into a

Speaker D: prototype and turn that around in like 48 hours. And uh, that's not necessarily hardware, but that to me is so fulfilling and so exciting and being able to just approach every day like, can I end

Speaker C: the day a little bit more intelligent. I think that's what's been most exciting to me.

Speaker B: So beautiful. Well, so let's dive into the people side of things because clearly it's not just delighting your customers, but delighting your teammates and finding meaning in the work and delegating. And you co founded this company with Matt. And one of the questions that our students are asking is, am I going to be a singular founder on my own or am I going to do it with someone else? And then how am I going to grow this company and, and uh, instill it with a certain set of values. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you went about building Mill?

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker C: I think the first thing I'd say is the founder role is terribly lonely. And it seems like that wouldn't be the case because there are all these people around you and there are so many people that are tuned into you wanting to help move the mission forward, et cetera. But there's no one that's really holding the weight the way that you are,

Speaker D: of expectation, responsibility, promises made, all of the things that the team can't figure out or solve without help. And it's really, really nice to have another person in that seat with you.

Speaker C: My, I deeply love my co founder Matt. And um, he was one of the founders at Nest. And kind of, we didn't talk about this, but you know, I came into

Speaker D: Nest

Speaker C: after uh, school. Um, I was an investment banker and

Speaker D: I was like a really.

Speaker C: I wasn't a very good investment banker. I wasn't like corrupt, but I just like, it didn't just like didn't love it. And um, I got a job at Nest and was one of the first employees there at like 23.

Speaker D: I was like the first analyst at

Speaker C: the company, just figuring it out. And credit to Matt and Tony, the founders at Nest.

Speaker D: I just kept knocking stuff down and

Speaker C: they kept just giving me more responsibility, give Me more responsibility. Give me more responsibility. All of a sudden, like running the

Speaker D: e commerce business,

Speaker C: hiring all these people that are way smarter than I am and way more experienced than I am, but just keep doing stuff, keep learning. And after Nest was acquired by Google and after I left Google and we could talk about that too, um, the

Speaker D: pandemic hit and that's what really got me thinking about garbage cans, because I think we were just living in our own filth a little bit.

Speaker C: And uh, I called Matt with this little idea, really thinking he's this amazing engineer and uh, roboticist and leader in so many different ways, thinking like he would have one of his acolytes apostles, someone in his coterie of engineering radness,

Speaker D: someone he could pair me up with.

Speaker C: I remember he called me back like

Speaker D: two hours after we talked. I told him about this idea.

Speaker C: He was like, dude, I want to come do this with you.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker G: And.

Speaker C: It's a partnership, like any long term

Speaker D: partnership, it's akin to a marriage.

Speaker C: So with your co founder, you're gonna have amazing days, you're gonna have really

Speaker D: hard days, you're gonna get into perfect

Speaker C: rhythm working with each other and complete each other's sentences. And there will also be moments where

Speaker D: you're on each other's nerves in a crazy way.

Speaker C: But what underpins it, I think for

Speaker D: us and makes us really successful as

Speaker C: a pair is that we know that

Speaker D: by default there are miles of trust

Speaker C: in our relationship and ultimately everything we do, we care about the company, we

Speaker D: care about our users, we care about each other.

Speaker C: And that gives us room to really disagree when we have to disagree, debate when we have to debate, say hard

Speaker D: things when we have to say hard things.

Speaker C: I do think the choosing the co founder thing, uh, there are solar founders out there that do amazing things. There are companies with just one person

Speaker D: that do amazing things.

Speaker C: But in my experience, a team is really, really helpful and I think it's

Speaker D: an incredibly consequential decision.

Speaker C: I think you want to really think about someone who one, yeah, you gel

Speaker D: with and are down to spend a

Speaker C: ton of time with, but someone that

Speaker D: you have fun with too.

Speaker C: You may be stuck in an airport

Speaker D: in Guadalajara for a bunch of hours and that's a key consideration.

Speaker B: Well, since we're reflecting on really important lessons learned, uh, we're going to close out with the question we ask all our speakers, which is from the founder of this Thought Leaders series, Tina Seelig. She wrote a book called what I Wish I Knew when I was 20. So, Harry Tenenbaum, what Do you wish you knew when you were 20?

Speaker C: I think, um, I'm not like, into the whole energy of like, these are the best years of your life, because, you know, I think the hope is like, all the years of your life

Speaker D: are the best years of your life.

Speaker C: Like, I don't think that's the right way to think about it. But what I remember about being 20 and what actually kind of comes back

Speaker D: to me being on campus, putting it in that frame.

Speaker C: I remember there were times where I was like, man, I just wish I

Speaker D: was like, a little bit older, you

Speaker C: know, I wish I was like, a

Speaker D: little bit more progressed. I wish people would, like, take me a little bit seriously.

Speaker C: I wish I could get through some

Speaker D: of the stuff to get to that other stuff.

Speaker C: I also remember moments of immense freedom

Speaker D: and curiosity that were kind of unbridled

Speaker C: by commitments to others or weight. Even something as simple as choosing courses

Speaker D: for the next quarter. Like, there was just incredible openness.

Speaker C: And I think, um, if I could go back, I would say two things.

Speaker D: I would say don't rush it. You know, I would really lean into

Speaker C: the moments that are passing by in front of you and try to extend them as much as possible. As weird as it sounds, as I'm

Speaker D: saying this, I kind of have like

Speaker C: a moment of longing for like an

Speaker D: all nighter, preparing for an economics exam. Because, like, that was like such a finite thing. Sitting at the dining room table with my roommate, just like ripping through yellow pads.

Speaker C: And like, there was a little bit

Speaker D: where it was like we were pushing hard because we liked it.

Speaker C: So I would say, like, I'm not saying enjoy every moment, but I'm saying appreciate every moment. Try when possible, not to fast forward through them. And then I would say, like, lean

Speaker D: as hard as you possibly can into the things that are fun and feel energizing.

Speaker C: Because I really think, like, you end

Speaker D: up doing your best work when you're

Speaker C: working on things that are charging you up and you're on rails and the rails will bend and move as they sort of go. Um, and as much as you can,

Speaker D: surround yourself with people that are energizing to you and help you learn things,

Speaker C: help you have, you know, great experiences

Speaker D: and fun

Speaker C: without being burdened by, like,

Speaker D: what does this mean for the ultimate destination? I think these are, these are ingredients that, that lead to radness.

Speaker B: For me, what I heard was savoring every moment, even if it's hard, if it's joyful, if it's difficult. I think life has a lot to give us and we're you know, very full human beings if we can see the world through those lenses.

Speaker C: Totally. And I don't even know how old

Speaker D: I am now, but I still feel

Speaker C: like there's the possibility for things to

Speaker D: blossom out in a million different directions. But in the tree of potential outcomes

Speaker C: of your life at 20, there's so

Speaker D: much breadth that's possible.

Speaker C: I think you want to be careful

Speaker D: to scan the horizon and try different things and really be attuned to what your gut is telling you is, is exciting because I think there's a lot of wisdom in that feeling.

Speaker B: Okay, we have about 13 minutes for questions, so if you want to come up and ask Harry a question, please do.

Speaker G: So my question is around customer acquisition and how you approach that. Um, from what I've heard is like, meta ads are getting more and more expensive. So what is like your split there?

Speaker C: Okay. And everybody can hear the question, right?

Speaker E: Oh, no.

Speaker C: Okay, so, uh, let's get this mic ripping. But the question was around customer acquisition, how do we think about customer acquisition? How do you approach that? The word on the street is that

Speaker D: meta ads are getting more expensive. How do you think about mix there?

Speaker C: Um, cool. Did I do that? Okay?

Speaker H: Yes.

Speaker C: Okay. So, um, actually, we have a direct to consumer business. We started with the direct to consumer

Speaker D: business because that's a fast way to get to market.

Speaker C: And we did a similar thing with

Speaker D: Nest, where we started direct to consumer with Nest.

Speaker C: Um, but ultimately, the way we got

Speaker D: into tens of millions of households with Nest was through partnerships with utility companies. And I think you can get to a certain point D to C, running your own ads, acquiring people directly.

Speaker C: But ultimately, the way you get to

Speaker D: mega scale is figuring out the right distribution channels.

Speaker C: And the thing is, at Nest, and we tried this, if you walk into a utility company on day one with

Speaker D: your slide deck around a connected thermostat

Speaker C: you're going to build, they laugh you out of the fricking room. And even when you go back after you've sold a couple, they're like, go pound sand. And then at some point they're like, oh, my God, we need you. So I think the way we think about using our DTC business long term

Speaker D: is less about, okay, we're going to scale this to the moon. And it's more about how can this be a catalyst for other channels, whether that's retail incumbents that are running the grids, et cetera. On Meta specifically, it's a total changing tide. And I don't think you ever want to be dependent on a single Channel,

Speaker C: even if it's working well, you got

Speaker D: to force yourself to diversify on marketing channels. Try different things.

Speaker C: Don't get pot committed to one thing

Speaker D: because one day something weird can happen over there and then you're in a tough spot.

Speaker G: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Speaker F: Hi, Harry. Thank you so much. I'm, um, Daley. Is this on? Okay.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker F: There we go.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker F: I'm Bailey. I'm studying environmental communications and so I'm really interested in how similar to the kind of customer acquisition question of how you guys really communicate the urgency of food waste and food recovery issue, and how you get your customers to just care and what the best communication strategies you found so far.

Speaker C: I think, um, it's a great question.

Speaker D: Could people hear that? No, still not. Hold on.

Speaker B: You might want to hold it right up to your.

Speaker D: Okay, I can try to rephrase it.

Speaker B: Yes, hold it right up.

Speaker C: Okay. Bailey's question was, as we think about communication, um, especially as someone who's studying

Speaker D: environmental communications, how do we think about the hierarchy of messages that are going out? How do you get, uh, climate focused message to resonate with customers and drive urgency?

Speaker C: And this is important because, like, urgent action matters. When food ends up in the landfill, it makes methane 80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas over a 20 year period. We gotta figure out how to

Speaker D: solve this problem before we fry ourselves. Climate messaging is not a winner.

Speaker C: No, and I actually think environmental messaging

Speaker D: is generally not a winner either.

Speaker C: Like, even if you think about a brand like Patagonia, which I see some folks in here repping, and you know, like, people buy Patagonia equipment because it

Speaker D: is great equipment that happens to be made by a company that cares about the planet.

Speaker C: And I think there is a small

Speaker D: subset of consumers that will respond to, hey, buy this because it's better for the Earth. There is a much larger subset of consumers that will buy something because it is better, faster, cheaper.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Electric vehicles, great for the planet.

Speaker D: Teslas, not particularly sold as like the environmentally optimal thing.

Speaker C: First, even though they are kind of sold like, we got an iPad in there, or it's just a really good car. So I actually think my answer to

Speaker D: the question is

Speaker C: you can talk about

Speaker D: it and talk about in some subsets, you can talk about it with your

Speaker C: employees, you can think about it as

Speaker D: a reason for being as a business. But if we're trying to have maximal impact, we need maximal adoption. And in that way, the focus really needs to be on building something better.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker E: Hi, I'm Justin.

Speaker D: Hi, Justin.

Speaker H: Yes.

Speaker E: Um, seems like you've done a lot of exploration, especially in college. You've done economics, hosted some concerts at UCLA and been a corrupt investment baker, just ineffective. Yeah. Um, now you're honed in onto climate tech and I was wondering, once you are honed in onto something, how do you keep yourself open minded to maybe new fields or opportunities that you can get excited about and also once you do, um, how do you know at what point you should drop it and realize, oh, this is not energizing to me. Um, I think it'll be helpful for our explorations as Stanford students.

Speaker H: Great question.

Speaker D: That's a great question.

Speaker C: Um, there's a mathematician, I think he's

Speaker D: still there, Terrence Tao at ucla, um, who's like as smart as they come. Fields Medal winner at like 18 or something like that.

Speaker C: Um, uh, uh, Terry said that like um, eliminating wrong answers is often one

Speaker D: of the best ways to solve really, really hard problems.

Speaker C: So I actually think the exploration bit

Speaker D: is really important actually.

Speaker C: I don't regret my time investment banking at all. You know, I didn't do it for very long.

Speaker D: It was actually a very useful exercise to cross that off the list of something that I wanted to devote decades to. So I think um, you don't necessarily want to just be focused, focused, focused in as you said, because you can kind of get trapped at like a local max potentially.

Speaker G: Um,

Speaker D: focus and creativity are always intention inside startups. You have finite people, finite time, finite cash to burn before you're profitable. So you can't always be in idea, idea, idea, idea mode.

Speaker C: I think um, the key is, um,

Speaker D: I'm going to use a business framing for it and then maybe I'll come back on something.

Speaker C: At some point you have to decide

Speaker D: what the main thing is and that has to stay the main thing. That can't pivot a bunch of different times or else the team's going to

Speaker C: get whiplashed, you're going to be moving

Speaker D: in a bunch of different places.

Speaker C: Food waste is the thing.

Speaker D: We're doing it through pre processing infrastructure, we're doing it with these specs, that's what we're doing. That being said, every single day, every single week you can meet different people on the periphery. And um, like as an example,

Speaker C: we

Speaker D: didn't know on day one that we were going to make material that was going to go feed chickens. And that's now what's going to happen,

Speaker C: you know, at the scale of feeding many millions of birds.

Speaker D: And that idea came from like a conversation over dinner with someone.

Speaker C: So I think there are like meaningful

Speaker D: shifts that can occur in a business that can come from happenstance or come from surrounding yourself with the right people

Speaker C: in terms of like, do I want

Speaker D: to be a concert producer or do

Speaker C: I want to be a banker? Do I want to be someone making, um, you know, a garbage can that

Speaker D: eats food waste and turns into chicken feed? I don't think there's a good algorithm for that.

Speaker C: You know, I think you really have

Speaker D: to trust your gut, you know, And I'll go back to what I said before, where I think if you're questioning the pull and attachment to something,

Speaker G: you

Speaker C: know, you don't feel rooted there.

Speaker D: I think there's probably some truth in that, you know, And I think where I found I've done my best work is when I feel really invested and attached to the problem, to the people, to the mission, et cetera.

Speaker C: I actually didn't always think that I was like, oh, you know, maybe I'm not like mission driven. Maybe I just like hard problems. Maybe I want to be okay working at a blueberry farm, figuring out how

Speaker D: we can stack the blueberries better.

Speaker C: And there were times in my career

Speaker D: where I realized, no, I've actually lost that pull. I guess my little nugget of advice is when you find it, you're going to feel it. And if you can feel local maxes of it, keep chasing that.

Speaker E: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you. Okay, last question.

Speaker C: I guess you find the local max,

Speaker D: keep chasing the global max.

Speaker H: Thank you so much. I uh, am the lucky F2, so that's why I'm here.

Speaker C: Okay, got it. Okay, so you are not here by

Speaker H: choice, but I do have some questions.

Speaker C: Okay. System works.

Speaker H: So one of my question is because I had a background in civil environmental engineering, especially in sustainable design. So my question is from a perspective of uh, consumer research, design perspective and sustainability, especially climate change. What's your idea about how AI is changing this entire relationship with the customers, with the research and how would that be impact to, uh, the future goes? Mhm.

Speaker G: Great.

Speaker D: Um, question.

Speaker C: AI is very cool. There are jobs that AI is very

Speaker D: well suited to do and I think an interesting lens, obviously there's productivity gains in every part of the company that

Speaker C: can be aided by it.

Speaker D: There's ways we can learn about customers, there's ways we can process information.

Speaker C: But I think with AI, from an

Speaker D: entrepreneurial standpoint, it's helpful to think about what are the tasks that this technology is really well suited to be a force multiplier for and for us, one of those that jumped out was computer vision.

Speaker C: And I'll get back to the customer

Speaker D: research side in a second.

Speaker C: But to go back to Nest, we

Speaker D: made doorbells and cameras for the homes. We had products called Nest Cams. Uh, for the doorbell camera, we had

Speaker C: a feature that we were making back in 201213 called package detection. This was in the days when we

Speaker D: called it machine learning.

Speaker C: Um, in those days, to have a

Speaker D: feature like package detection on a connected

Speaker C: camera, you would need to have eight engineers work on tuning an algorithm for eight months and spend real money labeling data. This is a box, this is a cat. This is a box, this is a shadow. It used to be that to tell a robot to go sit in that

Speaker D: chair, you'd have to teach it what a chair was.

Speaker C: Now in the world of LLMs and

Speaker D: where AI is now, the models just know stuff.

Speaker C: And so I think from a technologist

Speaker D: standpoint, you want to kind of sit back a little bit and say, okay, I'm working on this problem versus just throwing AI at the whole problem. What are the right parts of the problem to throw AI at?

Speaker C: Is this jiving with you?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker D: And for us it's like, okay, the way food waste is talked about globally is like how many tons did a grocery store produce? Not like how many apples.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker D: Or how many watermelon rinds. Or actually is it an inch of

Speaker C: flesh on the rind or a quarter

Speaker D: inch of flesh on the rind?

Speaker C: And these are like new ways where

Speaker D: proprietary data or information can be generated by infrastructure that wouldn't have been frickin possible before AI.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker D: So I think that's like my technologist take, I think from like, ah, hey,

Speaker C: I'm just starting out, I want to

Speaker D: learn a lot about consumers.

Speaker C: I think there's really cool stuff you can do with AI.

Speaker D: Basically generating users for your website to ab test things versus actually having to wait for a test to break. One way or another, there's ways to get massive amounts of information in front of you.

Speaker C: I do think though, you have to

Speaker D: be careful, one of the syncopantic nature of AI, which is just going to encourage you down your path, and secondly,

Speaker C: that you're checking in with real people,

Speaker D: real businesses, real action there. I mean, uh, I'm a devout

Speaker C: user

Speaker D: of AI every single day.

Speaker C: But it is also the case that if you ask Opus 4.7, should I walk or drive to the car wash? It's like you should walk there. It's 50 meters away and it's like. So I think there are points where

Speaker D: you have to make sure you're harnessing really carefully and prompting really carefully so you don't get led astray.

Speaker C: I don't know. Emily knows a lot about this, too.

Speaker B: Uh, well, today's not about me.

Speaker A: It's about you.

Speaker B: And we're at time, so I'm going to thank Harry, if we can give him a huge round of applause. Harry, you are such a gift. Mill is such a gift. Thank you for being here on Earth Day and celebrating climate tech and solving food waste for the world. We'll see you next week. Tracy Chow is the founder and CEO of Block Party, and we're going to talk a little bit about a media company. All right, see you next week.

Speaker A: The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series is an original production of Stanford E Corner and the Stanford Technology Ventures program. To learn more, please Visit us at STVP Stanford. Edu eCorner.