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Transcript

The Quest for the Perfect Avocado · What's Your Problem?

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin. My family is really into fruit. On my kitchen
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: counter right now is a bowl with apples, pears, bananas,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: and a mango, also an avocado technically a fruit. The
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: avocado and the pears are hard. They're not right yet,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: and I'm afraid that if I look away for like
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: five minutes, they're going to jump straight from hard to rotten.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: The bananas are turning brown but still totally edible. And
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the apples and the mango they are just right. But
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: somebody probably better eat that mango today. It's not gonna last. Now.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: There is a reason that I'm talking way too much
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: about my fruit bowl, and that is because it is
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: really hard to get fruit right. This is not just
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: a me problem. It is a massive problem for the
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: whole supply chain, all the way from the time the
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: fruit gets picked to the time winds up in a
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: bowl on my counter. It's a huge, multibillion dollar problem.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem, the
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: show where entrepreneurs and engineers explain how they're going to
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: change the world once they solve a few problems. My
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: guest today is Katherine Sizza. She is the founder and
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: CEO of Strella Biotech, and the problem Katherine is trying
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: to solve is this a huge share of the fruit
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: grown in America goes bad before it even gets to
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: the consumer. She learned this spect four years ago when
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: she was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, and
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: by the time she graduated in twenty nineteen, she had
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: both invented a device to detect when fruit is ripening
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: and started a company to bring that device to market. Today,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: her customers include some of the biggest apple and pair
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: packers in America. To start, can you just sort of
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: tell me, tell me how you came to start this company. Yeah.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: I read a paper that said, of all food is
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: wasted before it's consumed, which I thought was the most
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: ridiculous thing I've ever heard of in my entire life.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: And then that was quickly followed by guilt because I
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: was like, I don't even know where the food in
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: my grocery store comes from. So just after reading that paper,
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: walk to the grocery store and went up to the
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: produce manager and said, Hey, where did those peaches come from?
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: And what did they say? She said, I don't really know.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: You should probably talk to the growers and I was like, uh, okay,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: I'll go and do that. Realized peaches don't really grow
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania, but what does grow in Pennsylvania is apples.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: So went to the apple growers and you're in college
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: at this point, yep, I was in college. I guess,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: uh yeah, I started, you know, taking the train to Lancaster,
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Pennsylvania and stuff instead of going to class at some point,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: and do you what do you learn? Well? I learned
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: that an apple at a grocery store can be over
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: a year old by the time I eat it, like
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: a year since it's come off the tree. Yeah, yeah,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: how does that work? Apples are put into these rooms
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: that kind of are like outer space where they're deoxygenate
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: kept very very cold, and in those types of conditions,
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: the apples can actually survive for that long. And so
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: why does that become relevant for what you end up doing? Yeah?
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: So sometimes these rooms are kind of a black box
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: because they're deoxygenated. A person who stores them, which is
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: called a packer, they have dozens of these rooms. They're massive,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: they're filled with millions of pieces of fruit, and they're
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: kind of playing a little bit of a guessing game
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: of behind which door is the most ripe fruit. So
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: you'll have a room filled with five million apples. That's
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: a huge, huge room. And then sometimes they'll crack open
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: that door and all the apples apple sauce. And that's
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: like a million dollars for that operation in one really
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: bad day, and that happens. That happens just because they
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: don't know. They don't know that inside that sealed room
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: the apples are going bad. Yeah, so you learn all this,
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: what do you do? So? Uh, you know, my backgrounds
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: in molecular biology, and I was thinking, well, these are
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: biological organisms. Maybe we should kind of treat them as such.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Maybe we should listen to them, see what they're telling us,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: Like what does that actually mean? As you're learning about this,
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: like how do you listen to an apple? All the
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: fruit on a tree ripens at the same time, there's
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: some sort of evolutionary advantage to this happening. And the
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: way that produce do this is by communicating with each other.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: If you've heard the saying one bad apple spoils the bunch,
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: it's totally true, and it's because it's telling everybody else,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Hey I'm ripening, Hey I'm going bad, and the way
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: that they communicate with each other is through gas emissions. Okay,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: ethylene right in particular, this gas ethylene, that's right in particular,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: athlete ethylene is what just like carbon and hydrogen. It's
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: just like some boring gas. Yeah, it's uh yeah, I
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: guess it's kind of boring, but I don't know it's
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: a big deal, sad word. How would you characterize ethylene?
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: What's ethylene? Like? Symmetrical? Symmetrical? Very good? Okay, So basically
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: ethylene is a signal that a ripe apple puts out,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: and all of the other apples understand that signal to mean,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: oh I better get ripe now too. Yeah. And actually
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: it's a cross fruit communication as well. So I don't
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: know if your grandma ever put you know, a tomato
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: and a banana and a paper bag together to ripen
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: one of them faster. That's the way to do. Is
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: they communicate with each other using athlene and they ripe
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: and faster. Can you just list off the fruits that
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: communicate using ethylene? Yeah, so some of them are avocados,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: apples obviously, bananas, Kiwi's pears getting more exotic, per simmons, tomatoes, Yeah,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: a lot of tropical fruits. So you learn all this,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: you're reading papers about fruit communication. What do you do? So,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: thinking about fruits as a biological organism, let's listen to them,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Let's hear what they're saying through measuring ethylene gas, and
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: then figure out how ripe they are. I mean, when
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: you put it that way, it seems kind of obvious, right,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: It seems like weird that some college student who got
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: interested in it would do a thing that nobody had
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: done before. Had somebody done this before? Why wasn't this
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: already happening? If not? Yeah? Absolutely, Ethylene has been known
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: about since the seventies actually, and there are a ton
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: of awesome universities that have published a lot of studies
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: on it. It comes down to the technology. So apples
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: and produce aren't a really messy environment, if you will.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of pesticides, treatments, all sorts of things
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: in that environment, and so it's very hard for a
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: typical sensor to pick up just that tiny signal that
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: produce is emitting. So it's hard to measure it. It's
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: hard to actually do at some level. Yep. But you
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: set out to do it. You were like, well, maybe
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: I can figure it out. Yeah, well, I mean coming back,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: I only know molecular bio at the end of the day.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: So it was like, okay, you know what fruits have
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: been sensing and signaling athylene for millions of years. Why
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: don't we is that mechanism that they use? And so
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: at the end of the day, what we did was
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: essentially hack a fruit, if you will, and digitize its output,
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: and then we just convert that into a digital signal
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: that we can use to predict the ethylene concentration. So
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: the key idea that you had that maybe nobody had
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: had before was let's use the same protein that fruit
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: uses to perceive ethylene in our sensor to pick up ethylene.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Totally evolutionists smarter than we are. Like, is there a
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: moment there if you figuring it out? Was it easy?
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Was it hard? You know? I wish there were kind
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: of light bulb moments. I think a lot of the
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: times it's the lightbulb moment is taken over by some
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: big failure that you have to then co and solve.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: And then also when things work, you're like okay, and
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: you don't realize that. You go eat a burrito or
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: whatever and don't realize that this was a big moment. Yeah,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: were there any eating a burrito moments that you didn't
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: realize that the time, we're big moments, but that looking back,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: you're like, oh, that was actually a big moment. Yeah. Absolutely,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: it was. So the first year that we put sensors
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: in the real world just to see what happened. We
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: were getting really nice data and I had kind of
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: downloaded it and put it in Excel and looked at
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: it and saw like really nice ethylene curve. I was like,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: that looks great, and then I went to go eat
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: a burrito. And then a couple of weeks later, the
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: person whose room we had put the censor and said,
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: you know what, you saved me six hundred thousand dollars
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: this year. I would have totally opened that room way
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: late and had apple sauce apple. So it's like like
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: six hundred thousand dollars worth of apples would have gone bad,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: would have spoiled. Yeah, that's right. This is around the
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: time you started the company. You started the company before
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: your senior year of college, and then did you finish
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: school as you were building the company. I did finish school,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: namely because the school I went to had an entrepreneurial
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: prize that if I was still a senior I could
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: apply for and get money. So basically, you stayed in
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: school in order to fund your business. That's right. I
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: mean I was paying a lot of tuition. Got to
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: make them money back somehow, And did it work? Yeah?
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It did. By the time I graduated, we had received
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: over half a million dollars of just money through pitch
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: competitions and things like that. Well, if you got half
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: a million, I mean, I know tuition is expensive, but
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: I feel like you must have made a profit on
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: college if you got five hundred thousand. Yeah, I think so,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: I hope, So, I hope. So Okay, So this isn't
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: that long ago. This is like a few years ago,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Like where are you today? Tell me about the company today.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: So today we are fifteen folks, fifteen the smartest people
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: I've ever met. We work with seventy two percent of
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: all the Apple and Pair folks. And now we're expanding
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: into other parts of the market, whether that's different commodities
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: or different parts of the supply chain like retail and imports.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: And how does it work as a business, Like do
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: you sell them your devices? Or is it like a
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: subscription and like more or less how much do they pay?
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Frankly speaking, our customers are way too busy to worry
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: about something like ethylene, and they certainly don't have time
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: to interpret a sensor or a reading. So the most
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: important thing for us is the decision that we help
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: them make, which is which room to open first? So
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: our business model reflects that. So we just charge a
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: subscription service where you get access to Stralla monitoring per
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: room per year. Also in this industry, usually instead of
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: looking at a dashboard and making a decision, our customers
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: call us and say, hey, I'm about to open a
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: room full of galas, which one should I do? That
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: is old school. They call you like on your cell yeah,
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: and like more or less? How big is your business now?
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Just like order of magnitude? How much revenue do you have?
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Can I not say? Yeah? You can not say that? Like,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: what's another way of talking about it? Yeah? So we
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: charge five thousand dollars per room per year, and today
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: we've monitored over two billion pieces of fruit, more than
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: two billion pieces of fruit, mostly apples and papers. After
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: the break the next frontier avocados, I'm gonna be honest,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: I got a lot of skin in the avocado game.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: Steaks are very high from me on this one. That's
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: the end of the ads. Now we're going back to
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: the show. The place where you started is apples and
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: pears when they're in this kind of long term storage
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: in a sealed room, right, Like, that's the sort of
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: problem you have solved so far. What is the next
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: problem you're trying to solve? So the next problem is
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: the further you go down the chain, the less information
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: you have. So by the time you get to our retailer,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: they're not experts in apples or keyways or pairs. And
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: that's the most kind of saddest part of it, right,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: All this time, money, resources were spent to get this
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: piece of fruit to the shelf and then it goes
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: bad there. That's like the worst part. Almost made it.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: We went so far totally, And obviously that's a huge
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: business impact too, right, because the retailer is spending a
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: huge amount of money getting this stuff there and then
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: it's going bad right at the last minute. Yeah, So
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: how do you solve that? It's super hard. I mean
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of there's a lot of things we're
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: still working on like implementation. So for example, we've sat
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: with apples for six to eight months sometimes before they
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: got to the retailer, and so we can use that
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: same data that we collected using that sensor to inform
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: the retailer. But the question is, you know, is a
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: supplier cool with that? What if you know what's in it? Like,
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: how do we integrate into a retailer? Right, We're working
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: with huge, massive dinosaur systems that are sometimes not really
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: conducive to adding information. So you're saying the problem in
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: sort of moving your business to different parts of the
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: supply chain is not the technical problem, like not sensing
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: ethylene when it's not a sealed room or whatever. It's
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: just dealing with like the supplier's relationship with the retailer
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: and the retailer software. It's like the non technical piece
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: that's actually the problem. Oh, technical pieces problems too, Right.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: You know, we're going from environments that are literally called
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: controlled atmosphere. You know, that's the best place to put
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: a piece of technology, right because because the sealed room
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: is so controlled, like, it's really easy, relatively speaking, to
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: perceive a change in the level of ethylene. Right, It's
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: like the perfect place to do it, and then you're
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: out in the real world and there's weird things happening
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: and there's different kinds of fruits and they're opening the
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: box and they're closing the box and whatever, and like
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: does that mess up your sensing system? Yeah? Absolutely, I
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: mean we have to put a lot more math behind it.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: We have to have way bigger data sets that we
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: collect to make sure that we're actually making the right decision.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: And is that something you haven't quite cracked yet, the
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: sort of beyond the sealed room piece of it. So
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: we're working in Kiwi's right now, So we're cracking Kiwis
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: and then we're looking right now into bananas and avocados.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about avocados. I feel like avocados are perhaps
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: unique in the fruit world in the amount of frustration
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: they generate for consumers. So I think if you could
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: crack avocados, that would be that would be a huge
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: breakthrough for me. I spend a lot on avocados, and
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: often they're not good even if I get them under ripe.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Somehow I miss the magic moment when they are ripe,
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Like they go from hard to black on the inside,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: and I never even knew. So tell me where you
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: are on avocados, Like, what's happening with your business and avocados. Yeah,
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: So what we're doing in avocados is they have a
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: little bit of a different supply chain than apples. So
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: apples are picked basically ready from the tree. Avocados are
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: picked underripe from a tree, and then they're shipped into
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: the US, for example, and they're artificially ripened actually using
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: that ethylene gas. So you put a bunch of underripe
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: avocados into a room and then you dose them with ethylene.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: So similar to where the apples are stored, avocados are ripened.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: And so what we do is we put our technology
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: inside these ripening rooms and we're able to better control
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: that ripening process. So the fruit is dosed awakened with ethylene,
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: if you will, and then it starts producing athlene on
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: its own. And so we capture those signals and we're
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: able to tell, hey, this guy is ready to go.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: You know, it's time to send them down the chain.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: But this one isn't quite there yet. Maybe we do
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: another treatment. Maybe we expose it to a little bit
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: of heat or temperature to get that ripening process going
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: and that way create a more consistent product at the
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: end of the day. Is that like the dream or
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: is that what you can already do? No, that's the dream.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: That's what we're working on right now. Tell me why
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: it's hard. So avocados they ripen a lot faster. So
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: we're sitting with apples and pairs for a very long
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: time months, but avocados ripen in a matter of days.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: And so that's kind of a really big challenge that
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: we're working on addressing right now, is having a sensor
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: that reacts super quickly to those gas emissions and is
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: able to quickly predict out what's going on. And so
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: it's basically you have to make predictions with less data,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: which is hard for kind of obvious statistical reasons. Yeah,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: and also, our whole sensor technology is designed around like
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: a slow, long process and now we're going into a
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: quick opening process. Like what part of it do you
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: have to improve to solve avocados. One of the problems
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: is sensitivity, so upping our sensitivity and the algorithms as well.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: So in our storage rooms we collect once an hour,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: for example, and we have to absolutely increase the amount
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: of data that we're ingesting in order to be able
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: to make a prediction in such a short period of time.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: So in control the atmosphere, rooms is kind of sitting
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: there and be only measuring things. And that's cool when
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: you have months, but when you're dealing with a really
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: quick turn avocado, you have to kind of change that
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: process going from months to day's basically is it basically
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: exactly like you're almost there. I think the targets are
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: always moving, right, Like you get one thing done and
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: then a customer is like, well, let's make it do
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: this other thing. So it's moving goalposts, which I think
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: is always the hardest thing because sometimes you feel like
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: you've never gotten anywhere. I mean, let me ask you
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: a different way. Is most most of your business now
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: apples and pairs, like most of your revenue. Yep, most
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: of our revenues and apples and pairs, But our customer
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: segments are different. So we've got the packers who we
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: work with in storage rooms, We've got importers who's shipping
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: containers we monitor, and then we've got retailers so we
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: help them organize their inventory and always send the best
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: quality stuff to the shelf. Is there ever going to
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: be a day when you'll sell me your service. Basically,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: I'll buy some little mini brick and put it in
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: my bowl of avocados and get a text on my
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: cell phone when it's time to eat an avocado. That's
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: a great question. I think the future could look like
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: your fridge, for example, telling you that something's going bad
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: in there. But you know, the further you go down
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the chain, the cheaper. It's got to be more developed.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: The technology has to be which is why we started
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: upstream right, because if you're monitoring millions of pieces of fruit,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: you have the ability to have an R and D
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: budget included in your margin if you will right, you
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: have to be able to make something for like a
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: dollar that can perceive four avocados, which is way harder
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: than making something for what hundreds of dollars built to
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: perceive a million avocados exactly. So you think you'll get there?
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: I think so, yeah. I got time. A started earlier
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: in a minute the Lightning Round, including Catherine's tips for
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: solving hard problems and a discussion of underrated fruit. Okay,
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the Lightning Round. How do you feel about doing just
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: a bunch of quick fun questions? Sounds good. What's one
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: a hard problem? Take the risk, just do it small steps.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: Just figure out how to take that huge problem and
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: break it down into something that you can do today.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: It's really about just every single day. What is a
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: difficult problem you're working on today? Then? How do I
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: get a retailer to pay me? Okay, good one? How
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: do you get a retailer to pay you? You could
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: change them on my podcast? Do you want to say
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the name of the retailer that's not paying you? Oh? No, no, no, no,
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: no no no no, I can't. I'm not there yet.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Maybe like when I'm Elon Musk, I can like talk
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: shit about like big companies. So you started this company
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: when you were still in college, and you've grown it
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: and it's a real company now. One is one tip
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: you would give to other young women trying to start
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: companies or just trying to get people to listen to
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: their ideas. Oh that's a good question. So take whatever
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: attention you get and use it to pitch your product.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: You know sometimes Eddie, you know, whatever, attention you get
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: if you're sticking out in a room. Use it to
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: your advantage and get people to buy into your technology
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: and you're offering and understand how you're impacting their business
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: in a good way. What is the most underrated fruit? Mangoes?
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Mangoes are the best? Agree? Do they talk to each
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: other with ethylene? They do talk to each other with
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: ethylene and mangoes kind of like the hot girl on
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: the block right now, So expect more mangoes in the future.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Tell me more. It's the new it fruit. Yes, So
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: they're trying to actually ripen them similarly to avocados, and
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: so they're looking at it as a really big, you know,
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: commodity that's going to grow in the future. We love
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: mangoes in my house. What's the most overrated fruit? Banana?
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: There are way better varieties of bananas that we could
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: be eating. The one that we are used to is
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: definitely not the best one out there. Why aren't we
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: eating better bananas? Then that's a really good question. Why
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: are we still eating red delicious apples? We're just going
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: to ask you about red delicious apples? Why are we
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: still eating red delicious apples? They are so gross. When
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: I was a kid, that was like all you could get,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: and now we have this whole wonderful world of apples. Well,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: like what happened, Red Delicious apples are a supply chain product.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Those things can sit on your shelf for decades and
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: they can do the same thing in the supply chain.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: So Red Delicious is a good example of we have
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: a lot of problems in our supply chain, and so
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: we're going to solve that with a really hardy variety
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: that might not necessarily be the best to eat, but
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: something we can transport pie or crumble pie. What about
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: you if I'm cooking crumble because like, I don't want
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: to deal with making a crust if I'm eating piem
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: that makes sense. It's hard to make a crust. I'm
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: intimidated by making a crust. It's so hard to make
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: a crust. If everything goes well, what's a problem you'll
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: be trying to solve in five years saying e commerce?
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: How do we get a perfect avocado simply by ordering
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: it online? Uh? I mean, produce is a very personal thing,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: and you're kind of entrusting that to someone you've never met,
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: which is part of the reason why brick and mortar
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: store still exists, is for produce. Do you think you'll
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: ever leave Strella go work on some other problem? Yeah.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: I started Estrella as something that I thought I could
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: accomplish while still in college. There were other ideas that
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: I've had that just require more capital and experience and knowledge,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: and so I think, I think I want to be
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: a serial entrepreneur in the future. What do you want
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: to do next? Jerry's still out on that one. Katherine
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Sizzov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech. Today's
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: show was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: and engineered by Amanda k. Wong. You can reach us
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: at problem at Pushkin dot FM, or you can find
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: I'll be back next week with another episode of What's
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Your Problem.