The Story of SESO: Building the Operating System for Agricultural Labor

Sometimes the biggest business opportunities come from unexpected dinner conversations. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Michael Guirguis shared how a Thanksgiving discussion with his cousin’s husband led to the creation of SESO, now the third-largest H-2A visa platform in agriculture.

Michael’s path to agricultural technology wasn’t obvious. After studying labor economics and interning at the White House’s National Economic Council, he joined McKinsey focusing on job creation initiatives. But his perspective on creating impact shifted after joining his cousin’s education startup. “I realized that if you really want to do job creation at scale, it’s much more interesting to do that in the private sector, leveraging technology than trying to climb the government ladder,” Michael explains.

The genesis of SESO came when his cousin Marsha, a farmer in California’s Central Valley, asked for help evaluating a potential farm expansion. While analyzing her financials, Michael discovered a critical constraint: labor shortage was limiting her growth. This led him down a familiar Silicon Valley path – trying to solve the problem with automation.

“Before I did what we started doing today, we looked at robotics and automation and strawberry picking robotics,” Michael recalls. But farmers quickly shot down this approach: “Nobody needs another stupid robot. There’s a ton of these guys out there. They’re way ahead of you.”

The real breakthrough came during Thanksgiving dinner when Marsha’s husband, who’s from Oaxaca, mentioned “a visa we treat like gold, but nobody knows how to get it.” This casual conversation revealed the H-2A visa program – one of the few uncapped visa categories in the U.S. that was growing rapidly but remained difficult to access.

Instead of building another agtech solution, SESO would focus on streamlining the complex process of bringing in and managing legal foreign labor. This decision ran counter to prevailing venture capital wisdom. “Most venture capitalists think that vertical farming and automation are just going to replace humans in ag in the near future. And that’s far from the truth, or at least anytime soon,” Michael notes.

The company’s growth has been remarkable. Starting as the 45th largest H-2A agent, they climbed to 7th place in their second year and now rank third overall. They serve 22 of the 100 largest agricultural employers, while maintaining support for small family farms bringing in just one or two workers.

This rapid scaling came from maintaining strict focus on labor management while others chased various agtech opportunities. “There’s a lot of really shiny objects. AG has so much opportunity for improvement…but we really tried to stay maniacally focused on the labor problem,” Michael emphasizes.

Looking ahead, Michael sees SESO evolving into the operating system for agricultural workforce management. “Three years from now? We want to be the operating system for farms where you hire and manage your workforce, both workers on this visa and domestic. You handle your timekeeping, your payroll, your insurance, your HR.”

But the vision extends beyond agriculture. “We see a lot of these same problems in other industries, in landscaping and forestry, fisheries, truck drivers, construction,” Michael explains. “They all have labor shortages. They all have kind of pain points related to not only bringing in labor on visas, but then also being compliant in how you do payroll and manage the different regulations of a domestic and international workforce working next to each other.”

From a Thanksgiving dinner conversation to becoming the operating system for blue-collar workforce management – SESO’s story demonstrates how solving one specific problem extremely well can unlock opportunities far beyond the initial market.