Investor and entrepreneur Dave Friedberg (@friedberg), the CEO of The Production Board and co-host/“Bestie” on The All-In Podcast, joined Julia La Roche on today’s episode for a wide-ranging conversation.

Friedberg was born in South Africa and moved to Los Angeles with his family at age 6. Friedberg studied astrophysics and UC Berkley. He joined Google months before its initial public offering working in corporate development. At the end of 2006, Friedberg left Google to start The Climate Corporation, a software company focused on agriculture. Monsanto acquired the Climate Corporation in 2013 for around $1 billion. 

In the episode, Friedberg shares his struggles raising venture capital for The Climate Corporation and later rapidly iterating and evolving the business model and product. According to Friedberg, three predictors for a startup’s success — grit, bias to action, and narrative — are all traits he looks for in making investments today.

Friedberg started The Production Board, a holding company that creates and invests in agriculture, food, human health, life sciences, and biomanufacturing businesses. A core tenet of The Production Board focuses on decentralizing industrial processes to reinvent how we make and consume things as a species, from clothing, materials, plastics, food, and more.

Friedberg sees a tremendous opportunity to deploy technologies such as biomanufacturing, automation, 3-D printing, or additive manufacturing to modularize and decentralize production, which benefits the planet and serves human needs. One example is Cana, a molecular beverage printer that allows consumers to turn water into soda, juice, coffee, and tea at home using a flavor cartridge without all the CO2 emissions that span the existing supply chains.

Elsewhere, Friedberg shared his views on how we can achieve free, abundant energy. He predicts terrestrial nucleosynthesis could drive the greatest source of value and wealth creation in the 22nd century, and he extrapolates what this might mean for civilization. 

0:00 Intro

0:30 Origin story

2:18 Friedberg’s interest in science

3:56 Lessons in entrepreneurship

7:15 Predictors of startup success

8:15 Building ‘grit’ in business

10:05 Importance of narrative

12:35 Strong storytellers more likely to succeed

14:14 Everything is learnable

18:42 Macro view of reimagining earth

25:45 Why anti-consumerism is dumb

29:30 Cana, the molecular beverage printer

32:15 Decentralization in media expanding to physical goods

33:45 Creators’ products will win against traditional products

39:58 Starbucks the first personalized consumer products company

42:30 Abundant free energy

53:45 From laborers to knowledge workers to narrators

1:00:34 Thoughts on UBI

1:04:55 Why is there fear around new technology?

1:06:03 Implications of solving the protein folding problem