The following interview is a conversation we had with Mark DeSantis, CEO of Bloomfield, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $8.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Agriculture Robotics

Mark DeSantis
Thank you. Appreciate being on your program. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what’s being built over there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Mark DeSantis
Yeah, sure. I guess you could say I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. I’m on my fourth startup, and it’s my third AI startup. I’m also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering. So I not only live this stuff, I teach it as well. Amazing. 

Brett
And would ten year old Mark be surprised that you’re CEO of an AG tech startup today? 

Mark DeSantis
Yeah, I’d say even 20 year old Mark would have been surprised. I never imagined that I would be into farming, and it’s not a subject that had a lot of interest for me when I was younger. And throughout my life, I always thought of it as, frankly, a little boring until I actually looked at it. And then I discovered this is one of the most interesting worlds to be in. And if I think young people are out there, I want to make a recommendation. You want to get into the future of technology and get into agriculture because that’s where it is and there’s a reason for that. And it’s the fact that the world’s population is growing 40% in the next 30 years. We’re going to add more people to the world than we have in the last 10,000 years, and they all need to be fed and there’s fewer resources to do it. 

Mark DeSantis
So if you want to talk about a challenge, that’s a challenge. So it’s an exciting world to be in, and I’m happy to be a part of it. Privilege really nice. 

Brett
That’s super interesting. I’d love to talk a little bit about your background with AI. So what year was that first AI startup? 

Mark DeSantis
So my first AI company was coming on mobile fusion and it was 2007. So this is when AI really didn’t work, but it sort of kind of worked. Not really. Maybe sometimes. So we developed technology through Carnegie Mellon in the Robotics Institute. What we developed was a small ball, really a little bit bigger than a softball, and it was packed with sensors. And we had a friend who was in Iraq, and sadly, he was killed. And he was going into a building. And in that room that he was going into, there was somebody in there. And he lost his life. Had he known that there was somebody essentially around the corner where behind the door, it might have saved his life. And so we developed a device. It was a ball that was packed with sensors, and you would toss it into what the military called a denied area, any place that was either too dangerous to put a human or you couldn’t fit somebody in there. 

Mark DeSantis
And this ball packed with sensors would use machine learning, and it would roughly identify what it saw. So it would roll around and then sweep the room for it. Depends on what sensor cluster was on. The device could sort of mix and match sensor clusters. So we would put audio and video, infrared. We even had a seismic sensor you could sniff. And all those things would sort of soak up what was around it in a radius of about 15, 20ft. And then the operator would be looking at a device that would tell them, bad guy behind the couch, or that’s a T 90 tank, or whatever it might be. And we developed this for the military, for different branches of it, was to test it in the Marine Corps, US Navy, even an intel agency. And it sort of worked. Brett kind of, but not enough for people’s lives to depend on what the machine was saying. 

Mark DeSantis
But it taught me the potential of AI. And at that time, machine learning 2006, 2007, still kind of exotic. And I happened to be fortunate in that I had some of the best machine learning engineers in the world because were connected to Carnegie Mellon. But that first exposure really convinced me that, hey, this technology is going to be game changing. My next company was a company called Quantera that used machine learning to predict price changes in power markets. And essentially, it’s the largest commodity market in the world, the US. Power market. And so this would require three programs to explain how power markets work. Bret so I’m going to give you the really short version because it’s complicated, but effectively, power is bought and sold every day, every minute of every day, continuously across the United States. And those power prices are there’s, what’s called the real time price, and the one day forward price. 

Mark DeSantis
And that balances the supply and demand of electricity in an economical way? Well, what if you had machine learning and you could predict with some probability what the day ahead and real time prices might be at a given time? And this is particularly important for some suppliers, like in our case, wind farms, who are struggling with what they call participating in the market. So I have a wind farm. I’m going to sell my electricity today what should I sell it for versus for most wind farms, they sell it for the whole years, fixed price. They don’t have to worry about what the price today is. Many of them were having to now participate in the market because their power purchase agreements were coming to an end. And now they had to know what the price is with some reliability, what it’s going to be tomorrow. 

Mark DeSantis
And so we predicted that for them. And so we did reasonably well in General Electric when they had a venture fund invested in our company, substantial amount of money because they were producing generators. One quarter of all of the generation in the world is probably on a GEnerator. So that was my second experience. So using machine learning to do price prediction in power markets, that was exciting. And the next one really was the company that I was describing with respect to road surfaces. And a it was a company called Robotics. It was acquired by Michelin. And we would use deep learning spun out of Carnegie Mellon to assess road surfaces. So we grew the company to a couple hundred cities around the world. Every cities have public works departments. You have to manage the road. And if you think of mostly streets are asphalt, some concrete, and people who are roadway engineers, people who work in the public works departments of cities, towns, states, drive around, look at the road service and look for patterns. 

Mark DeSantis
About three or four dozen patterns that show up in mostly asphalt. They go by names of lateral cracks and even alligator cracks. They look like the back of an alligator. You’ve probably seen that on your streets at home. And all of those things, all of those surface features tell roadway engineers what treatments they need to do to the road to preserve the road. So you don’t have potholes. Our AI would use video from a cell phone camera in a windshield. It would take that video in the cloud, isolate the road surface, and then look for those and identify those features and then generate a map for the city. And so the city would know to the meter what the condition of the road surface is, the rating of that particular part of the surface. And it was in digital form. They could click through the mayor of Savannah, Georgia, could click through any part of the entire 700 miles, center line, mile road network of Savannah. 

Mark DeSantis
And they could see the rating per foot. They could even click and see a pothole a particular part of the city. So they would know exactly the condition of the roads. All captured with a cell phone passively in a street sweeper. Wow. So pretty cool. And then that sort of led me to this company that I’m with now, Bloomfield, where if you think of the analogy analogously, what we did for road surfaces, imagine you did that for specialty crops. So when I was a little kid, my grandfather had about a one acre garden in his backyard. My Italian immigrant grandfather would walk around and he was always putzing around playing with the fruits and vegetables, seeing the condition of the tomatoes, and he was always doing something to the plants to try to get the most from his one acre farm. Well, that routine is repeated for the world’s. 

Mark DeSantis
$1.4 trillion worth of apples, peaches, tomatoes and fruits, vegetables, other specialty crops. It’s similar treatment is done for the world’s row crops, wheat, rice, and corn. But in our world, fruits and vegetables, the one we inhabit, it’s pretty important routine. So if I’m a let’s just take a viticulturalist or take your average vineyard, there’s somebody who’s highly trained, a viticulturalist or viney culturalist. They are walking among the grapes, among the vines. They’re looking at different things. They’re looking at right about now, they’re looking at something called stand count, bud break. These are the very beginnings of what will ultimately be leaves, grapes, what have you. They’re counting. They’re looking at a specific vine and they’re counting them. They’re sizing them, they’re looking their color. A month from now, they’ll be looking at something that’s a little bit more leafy again. Later they’ll be looking at actual berries, the early version of those berries, and then ultimately grapes. 

Mark DeSantis
Then those grapes will be harvested continuously inspecting those crops. And that routine, as I say, happens for not just grapes, but oranges, bananas, tomatoes, cannabis, you name it. Well, what if you could take AI and imaging, just as we did for my previous company, and apply that AI and imaging and tell the grower exactly the condition of each and every plant? And you would do it not only telling the condition of the plant, you would geolocate every plant. And the difference would be not just that you’re doing what that viney cultural and bitter culturalist can do, but you’re doing it at scale. So some of our customers, we have about 1516 vineyards now in three continents, as well as blueberry grows. Not only a typical bitter culturalist can inspect about 150 vines in a day, it’s about a 10th of an acre. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of these bitter culturalists as well. 

Mark DeSantis
So it’s not only a limited selection of plants you can inspect there’s a limited number of people can do it. What if I could take a camera, put it on an ATV or a tractor? And while that tractor ATV is doing something else, it’s imaging not 150 vines in a day, a 10th of an acre, but it’s imaging 20,000 vines in a day. And doing it passively and getting even more detail about the plant and geolocating every plant and doing it repeatedly through the year. Now I got something. Well, that’s what we do. We do that for growers around the world. We put cameras on vehicles, whatever the customer has, those cameras are built by us. But the more importantly, the AI that sits in the cloud, that analyzes it was built by us, and it images all of those plants, and then it tells the grower the condition of those plants. 

Mark DeSantis
Everything from leaf density to grape count, sizing, color, whatever you are looking for, we’re seeing and digitalizing it at the plant level. For those who are in AG, know this. But some interesting things about AG, particularly for AI folks. Anybody who’s a regular reader of Wired magazine probably this year saw the issue that had no less than John Deere, a 160 year old tractor company, on the COVID of Wired saying this is one of the leading AI companies in the world. And why is that? Well, the CEO of John Deere was quoted recently he’s a guy named John May as saying, that the world. And he’s aware of a very important factoid that, as I said earlier, about the world population increasing by 40%, adding billions, several billion people to the world’s population the next 30 years. You got to feed those folks, and you don’t have any more arable land. 

Mark DeSantis
You’re actually going to have less fertilizer and water available just to make it even more difficult. And John May, the CEO of John Deere, said, up to now, most farmers have managed their farms to the acre. Now they’re going to manage to the plant. That means that every plant which has its own unique genetic profile and as a consequence, its own capability to produce food and energy and calories will now be managed separately. And that unique capability will be identified and exploited. Imagine if we all had tutors, how much we would have done in school. Certainly that would have helped me teach in classrooms, because it’s scalable. In the same vein, farmers grow and they farm to the acre. What if I could know the condition of every vine tree or bush, and I could uniquely identify its capability and uniquely treat it to maximize its potential? 

Mark DeSantis
Well, you can do that now. And that’s one of the things we bring and do. 

Brett
You see that farmers are open to new and emerging technology like this? Are they quick to adopt? 

Mark DeSantis
It’s funny, the time in our history, somewhere upwards of 40% of the population of the United States was engaged in agriculture. It’s less than 1.2% and shrinking. So we’re producing this food with a very small population of folks where the average age of people in farming is close to 60. It’s pushing mid 50s. So farming is a challenge right now, given the limited resource base to draw from. So farmers know the challenge they’re facing, and they are more than ready to embrace technology. Now, farmers are a lot like the folks that we worked with in the military. You give me a tool, and I take it into a dirty, dusty, difficult environment. It better work, because if it doesn’t work, I’m never going to try it again. So whatever you bring to a farmer, it has to work. But that farmer will embrace technology if it gives them an advantage, if it gives them a labor savings, it makes them more efficient, and above all, if it makes them more effective as a farmer. 

Mark DeSantis
In other words, increase that yield, quality and size and consistency, they will embrace it completely. It doesn’t matter how exotic it is. 

Brett
Wow, that’s fascinating. And I’m ignorantly thinking this because I’m not from this industry and I haven’t spent a lot of time in this industry. But from my outside view, I would just picture a farmer not being quick to embrace new technology. You just kind of picture Farmer John and his overalls not liking technology, which is a very unfair stereotype. But that’s what I think a lot of people would think. So that’s fascinating that they’re quick to embrace. And I like that parallel with the military of if they embrace it better work because it’s high stakes, right? They can’t bring these tools and then have them not work. It just doesn’t not an option. You bet. 

Mark DeSantis
And let me tell you, I’ll give you my world of kind of viticulture and winemaking. I imagine we have customers up and down the West Coast and we actually have an office in St. Helena right in this middle of Napa. And we have a team of folks in California, and we also have a team in Dijon, France, where we have customers across France. And I always imagined that in know, particularly in Northern California, you would go to a vineyard and it’d know you’ve got Silicon Valley right down the street and you’re sure that’s fully kitted out with all this technology. And then I imagine going to know it’s old world. I half expected to see people stepping on grapes. Old world artisanal, kind of farming. It’s the opposite. The farming that I’ve seen in California is to a large extent for smaller vintners. It’s very artisanal, it’s very old world. 

Mark DeSantis
And I mean that in a positive sense. I mean, they embraced a lot of the techniques that get those results that allow you to have that $2,000 bottle of wine. Interestingly, in France, it’s science and technology. They embrace completely science and technology in ways that really are extraordinary. And I think to some extent it’s because of sheer scale of the industry. In Europe, little known fact, half of the world’s wine comes from Spain, France and Italy. A fraction of that comes from California. So when that’s your industry, you’re going to be spending money, you’re going to be wanting the best technology you can get your hands on. And that was probably one of the more interesting things. 

Brett
And for the customers, then, what’s actually being sent to them? Is it a camera system that they can mount onto the vehicles or what’s the physical thing that’s being sent? Yeah. 

Mark DeSantis
And for those interested, it’s just Bloomfield AI and you can see some video of our camera tech working. And you essentially camera about the size of a small toaster. It has two lenses, so we’re duplicating human vision so we can see depth. And that camera also has its own light source. And so when you image it’s just riding on any kind of vehicle. One of our investors is actually Kubota, one of the largest tractor manufacturers in the world. We have a little kit that comes in a pelican case. We send that pelican case as the camera, the little gear to attach it to whatever kind of vehicle you have. You hit the on button, go within 40 minutes, you’re collecting data. You don’t have to drive in any special way. Each lens is capturing about 1530 frames a second, and then it’s flashing. You could do this at 03:00, a.m. 

Mark DeSantis
High noon, and it’s imaging everything. It’s geolocating everything. And then that data goes up to the cloud. And that’s where deep learning, or neural net deep learning then takes all of those images, combines them. It’s a little more complicated. It’s not so much a single image that it’s using. It’s using multiple images combined. And it’s then at the pixel level looking for patterns that are indicative or predictive of features that a particular bitter culturalist would look for. So, for example, simply put, we can tell a grower that there’s mold on that grape, on that cluster, on that vine. So when you have what I call the atomic level knowledge of a farm, if you equate kind of a plant with an atom, we have subatomic knowledge. We actually know features of the plant geolocated. And then where this gets really interesting, Brett, is for those who are interested in this topic, I would encourage you to look up something called plant digitalization. 

Mark DeSantis
Okay. And this is a concept that, most recently, a company called Mineral, which is one of the recently created alphabet companies, does something similar to what we do. Their approach, our approach, John Deere’s approach others, is to take a plant and turn it into a digital artifact at the pixel level and then repeatedly inspect that plant for as long as it’s alive. So a typical vine might exist for 20 years. You’re going to create that vine, and you’re going to turn it into a digital artifact. You’re going to repeatedly inspect it so that you’re going to see its evolution not just through a season, but for as long as it’s live. Wow. And you’re going to look at everything on that plant. And that is how that plant will be managed through that digital artifact. It’s how it will receive irrigation. It’s how it will receive treatments like delefing. 

Mark DeSantis
It’s how it will receive know when to harvest. It’s how the yield prediction will be generated. It’s how the contract between the grower and the buyer will be determined. It’s how the insurance will be determined for that farmer. And I’ll take it one step further and this will blow your mind. So one of our customers works with a very prominent grocery store chain people have heard of, and that grocery store chain said to one of our customers, look, you’ve been selling us these products now and saying they’re organic for a long time, and we’re not sure that’s true. So we want you to prove it. And also we want to be able to give our customers visibility into their crops, into the things they buy, unprecedented visibility. So the way this will work is you and I, Brett, will be able to buy a bag of apples, and there’ll be a QR code. 

Mark DeSantis
And we’ll mouse over know, we’ll put our phone over that QR code, and that will tell us which tree those apples came from. And everything about that tree, for as long as that tree has been alive. All the treatments that have been applied to that tree where these apples came from, not the orchard. Not the type of tree, but literally the tree that these apples came from. And everything about the history of that tree. That will be true of every fruit and vegetable you buy at some point in the not too distant future. Now you’ll pay a premium for that. Well, we now can do that because we’re imaging that plant. We know its location, we know its productivity, and the grower also knows what’s been done to it. That is just one feature of the idea of plant digitalization. 

Brett
Well, that’s a relief to hear. I have a girlfriend, or I should say fiance, who loves to buy organic. So everything in our household is organic. And I always wonder who’s fact checking this and who’s verifying that this is real and that we’re not just paying twice as much for the same exact thing. So that sounds like that’s the ultimate level of transparency then, right? 

Mark DeSantis
That’s what I would call extreme transparency. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.iopodcast. Now, back today’s episode, and I’d love to ask a little bit about the reports that come from the actual camera. So what does that look like then? If you’re the farmer and running this, what type of report are you getting? And then how do you ensure that’s actionable and they’re not just overwhelmed? Like, what if you run this and it comes back and it says, okay, there’s, I don’t know, a million grapes that need to be fixed or taken out? 

Brett
What does that look like, yeah. 

Mark DeSantis
So essentially, they have a dashboard, and the dashboard is live. So I’ll give you an example. We are now collecting data. The growers, typically the growers will do that. They will strap that camera. And a number of our growers have multiple cameras. And so they might send this. Anybody who would go to my LinkedIn profile would see a recently posted video of one of our customers, gloria Ferreir, a vineyard in Sonoma, and it would show a sprayer spraying the vines. But that sprayer also had a camera. So while it’s doing other work, it’s imaging all those plants. Within 8 hours of imaging, the grower will go to a portal, a website, where their entire farm down to the plant has been imaged, and they can start at any level of abstraction. For example, Brett, they could say, okay, for this ranch, this part of the farm, maybe it’s ten acres, I see a heat map. 

Mark DeSantis
That heat map can show me any number of things. Shoot counts, shoot density at this time, stand count at a later time. It might look at leaf density or grape count, grape color, disease, infestation to the plant. But I want to know more. And I’ve seen a particular area of those ten acres where I want to drill down. I click down, and I’m actually looking at a particular row, and this row is particularly productive. Our data is showing that this row is out producing any other row in the entire vineyard. But, you know, I’m even more curious as to what that looks like. So I decide to click down all the way to one of the vines that’s in that row that’s out producing all the other rows. Now, there are different reasons I might want to have that level of detail, and that’s where you get into the sort of what I call the recipe that particular farmer has as to how they grow their grapes. 

Mark DeSantis
But the point is, I now do this on a continuous basis. So that same row, that same ten acres, that entire vineyard, is going to be scanned again at a later time, perhaps as soon as two or three weeks from now. And that farmer will now have data that down to the plant, and they can see the changes in the plant at any level of abstraction. Now, maybe they don’t want to look. Maybe they just want to generate recommendations. Well, in that case, they may say, show me all of those vines with leaf density above our maximum threshold. Leaf density is such that there’s too many leaves, so that’s reducing the amount of sunlight, sun exposure. So what happens is the grower will actually go through the vineyard and remove some of the leaves. There’s a variety of treatments like that where they’re manually going in and doing things to the vines beyond just irrigation and pesticide and what have you. 

Mark DeSantis
And so all of those require inspection. Well, they may just say, show me all the vines where the leaf density is above the threshold. It shows them all the vines and then they know where to deploy the labor. They know specifically where to go to treat specifically which vines. The list of ways that the specificity and detail that information is used by the grower is a long list. But essentially what it does is it gives the grower more control. If I know to the plant what’s going on, I know what I need to do exactly and precisely to each vine to get the maximum performance. Performance being the quality of the yield, the size of the yield, and importantly the consistency of the yield. Consistency is an important part of farming. Now previously it was just, hey, I’m going to sell everything I grow and there it is. 

Mark DeSantis
But that’s not how the world works now. The world works in the way that we want our apples of a certain size, of a certain color. We like our peppers to be of a certain size, a certain color, certain firmness, certain density. And if they’re not inside that spec, whole Foods can’t sell them. So we want to make sure that all of our crops are not only of a certain quality yield, certain size, a certain consistency. And that requires continuous inspection. And that inspection then generates treatments to ensure that happens. If I know the condition of every plant on a continuous basis, every single detail of that plant, I know how to deploy my limited labor, my limited resources during the year to ensure that quality, size and consistency. Essentially you’re taking a farm and you’re turning it into a food factory. You’re making it perform. 

Mark DeSantis
You’re bringing in a sense engineering principles to that farm to get the most results from those crops. 

Brett
And what’s your journey like to learn a new industry? Because as you’re saying there at the start, this isn’t where you come from. You didn’t live on a farm and spend 30 years farming and then start this. So what does that process look like? And how do you become such an expert? Because as you’re talking through, you’re hurting my brain as I’m trying to understand and learn this new industry. So what’s your process for learning industry when you move into it? 

Mark DeSantis
That’s a good question. That’s a great question because I think that’s where a lot of entrepreneurs, I think people that are drawn to entrepreneurship Brett, are just naturally curious people. I think they’re people who classically know a good bit about a good many things. There are people that perhaps maybe get bored easily and they’re always curious about the next thing. And I think when you go into a new industry, there are some entrepreneurs that just love the notion that they’re going to learn something new. And I would say to any entrepreneur out there that you not only have to know the problem you’re trying to solve, you. Have to love that problem. And I think that would be my biggest recommendation. Any entrepreneurs listening, you not only have to know the problem, as Steve Blanket Stanford who teaches the discovery, he says look, you got to wisely, thoughtfully says you really have to know the problem. 

Mark DeSantis
You have to have a PhD in the problem and you can get away with a bachelor’s degree in the solution. But you also have to love the problem. You have to really find that to be a really interesting thing, a really interesting puzzle, and all of the things connected to that problem and that’s really start thinking about the industry, where the industry is going, what’s the context for this problem? And when you are curious about that and you’re drawn to that, you’re more likely to succeed, in my humble opinion. For me, I probably orient myself towards problems that are, as a friend of mine, a venture capitalist, said, the big and boring problems, the problems like road maintenance, power markets and agriculture. And I think what is most compelling for me is being able to take sophisticated, very powerful, even a little bit exotic technology and apply them to big, boring, mundane problems. 

Mark DeSantis
And to me that’s fascinating. My first part of my career, I worked for the federal government in different capacities. And that public service kind of notion that drove me then sort of motivates me now. But as an entrepreneur, that I feel like I can do good by going at these big, kind of boring problems that need solutions and try to bring Some fancy kit to solve. 

Brett
Know, speaking for myself, and I’m sure the same for the audience listening in. I think they’re probably a little bit jealous of you because your market discovery and research probably involved going to Napa, going to France, getting to hang out at these vineyards and just research, just talking to customers, potential customers, trying to like that was probably a fun experience. 

Mark DeSantis
Yeah, I have a funny story real quick. I found myself in Bordeaux, we have customers in Bordeaux and I met one of our growers and they grow a very fancy vineyard and I had a chance to the end of the tour again a they of course they opened a bottle of wine and I’m sitting there, you know, it’s incredible. Well, I had to get on an airplane. I had to fly to Napa and meet another customer. And sure enough, it’s dusk, it’s in Napa, they’re opening a bottle of their Famous. And I’m thinking to know, when I think of all the startup effort that I put in from opening an office in a first floor of an know, building your own furniture, I thought I’ve come a long way now, my journey of entrepreneurship. And I think to myself, well, somebody’s. 

Brett
Got to do it. 

Mark DeSantis
Somebody’s got to go to Napa, somebody’s got to go to Fortune. 

Brett
So I love that’s so funny. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this book, but I read it a couple of months ago. It’s called the Outsiders. And I heard Bill Ackman talking about it. And I like Bill Ackman, so anything he says to read, I read. And that kind of reminds me of you. It seems like you’ve been an outsider in all of these different companies and all of these different industries, and I’m guessing that’s by design. So do you like being the outsider? Do you feel that you come in with an advantage and that fresh perspective? 

Mark DeSantis
Yeah, I guess maybe it’s not so much an advantage, but I think it is a case of not coming with sort of biases. Now, I will say this. There are days when I wish I wasn’t an outsider because there’s so many basic things I just don’t know and could never know in three or four years being in an industry. But I will say that for those who are again considering entrepreneurship, that you shouldn’t be intimidated by a lack of experience in a given industry because you’re not so much trying to understand an industry as you’re trying to understand a problem within an industry. And being very specific in your knowledge about the problem is going to help you overcome that lack of direct experience in a given industry. It’s funny, I’ve been in the military, space, power markets, infrastructure and now agriculture, and I always hear this. 

Mark DeSantis
People say, well, you know, Mark, we’re different. This market’s different. And they’re right, it is. But it’s not different in every way. It’s different in some ways. And if you know the problems you’re trying to solve, you actually find similarities between problems you maybe solved previously and the one you’re looking at now. It’s just a different industry. And I think that one of the other things I would say is respect the industry and respect people who know it. That’s one of the problems I’ve seen with some companies that I’m either advising or on the board of or invested in is they sometimes don’t have an appreciation for that industry experience. So I don’t want to sound like I’m saying don’t listen to the people who have been doing it, but I am saying don’t be intimidated by it either. 

Brett
That makes a lot of sense and that’s super helpful. Another question I want to ask you about, and I think this is something you and I were discussing in the pre interview, and you touched on it a little bit there at the start, but could you just make the case for entrepreneurs to get out there and go build things that interact with the physical world? I think a lot of stuff happening today. It’s all online and the world we live in, everything’s online. But I personally find it especially exciting when I talk with CEOs and entrepreneurs who are building real things that we can touch and see. So could you just make the case for any founders listening in. How do we get them to build in the physical world? Yeah, I would say I would have. 

Mark DeSantis
Them look at one of the world’s most valuable companies and that would be Apple. And if you look at what they produce, they make things that are used and touched by people who live in the real physical world. They use hardware. They violate all of the tenets of what is a good VC investment. Number one, they’re in the physical world. That’s a messy world. Most investors get nervous about that. They make hardware. Of course, no VCs like investing in hardware companies. They make multiple products that are seemingly somewhat related. Again, no one likes that. But they also have 600 billion in the bank. So I would say to people what Apple as a company has done is very hard and very difficult and they have decades of experience. So I don’t want to be dismissive here and say that anybody who’s thinking thoughtfully about starting a business, but I would say that being in the physical world and trying to solve the challenges associated with the real world or the physical world, not the virtual world or the cyber world, has its merits. 

Mark DeSantis
And if you can solve those problems, you can create tremendous wealth and you can be wildly successful. They are very hard problems because the real world, the physical world is in many ways a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more confusing, a little bit more challenging than some of the virtual worlds or cyber worlds that a lot of startups focus on. And it’s a less constrained problem, the physical world. And as a consequence, people get they shy away from it because, well, that’s too hard. And I would say to them, if you really understand the problem and you understand the capabilities of modern technology, like deep learning, for example, you realize it’s hard, but it’s not know. Autonomous Vehicles is going through a bit of a slump now because there was a big boom, and a lot of my friends were in the space here in Pittsburgh, and now it’s sort of lost a little bit of its luster. 

Mark DeSantis
But if anybody thinks that autonomous vehicles aren’t coming, they’re mistaken. They’re coming, and they’re coming with a vengeance. So the technology will work. Believe me. When it does, it’s going to explode, it’s going to take off. And so I would say to people, yes, these are challenging problems when you’re trying to solve problems in the physical world with technology. But if you’re persistent, you can have a tremendous impact. 

Brett
I love that. And last couple of questions here before we wrap. Mark, what excites you most about the work you get to do every day here with Bloomfield? 

Mark DeSantis
Well, I’ll tell you what’s most exciting is our team and getting really the feeling of creating a circumstance or the conditions where people can do things they didn’t think they could otherwise do that they get opportunity to take. Responsibility and solve problems they never imagined they might ever see or see for another ten years in their career if they went a more traditional route. So giving young people the chance to give expression to their talents and ambitions. And for our team, they’re really jazzed about the idea they’re trying to help feed the world as well. So give them that mission and give them the freedom and to make mistakes, make them feel that mistakes are part of learning and they can work miracles. So that’s the most satisfying thing, no doubt. 

Brett
And final question here, let’s zoom out. Three to five years from today, what does the future of Bloomfield look? 

Mark DeSantis
You know, it’s our intention and it’s our belief that everything that’s on a farm that’s moving will probably be soaking up data passively, and then that data in turn will then be crunched and inform the farmer as to what they need to do to improve that yield, quality, consistency and sized. So what we imagine is our technology will ultimately be embedded in all those moving vehicles on farms, passively collecting data, crunching that data in real time as the vehicle is moving, and then informing actions of that vehicle and the implements on that vehicle, as well as the long term plans of that farm. So that’s our dream. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. That’s super exciting. Mark, we are over on time and I know you’re on the East Coast, so I don’t want to keep you any longer here. So we’re going to have to wrap here. I’d love to bring you on again and dive deeper into other topics. So we’ll have to save that for part two and maybe a part three before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Mark DeSantis
They can go to Bloomfield AI, or they can go to Bloomfield, which is our LinkedIn profile. And you can see us and how we do. We’re also on Instagram as well. And again. It’s Bloomfieldai. AI. So follow us on all those and you’ll see an exciting journey. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and talk about what you’re building over there. This has been a super fun conversation. Like I said, it hurt my brain a little bit at times trying to understand this technology and really just understand farming. So it’s been a lot of fun. I learned a lot and I’m sure our listeners did as well. So thanks so much for making the time. I really appreciate it. 

Mark DeSantis
Appreciate it. Brett, privilege being on your program. Thank you. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.