I've worked in agriculture my entire life, and seven weeks is a pretty good turnaround for fixing these types of problems. the next batch of issues they're likely to encounter is handling product with variations in moisture content that further bungs the system. Then it will be incorporating new feedstock from other crops.

Agriculture is the intersection of industrial mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over time as situations are encountered that exceed previously theorized boundaries/ranges.

I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can be planned for in advance.

Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather than a traditional industrial company and there's a recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather than places like the Midwest or even central valley. Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already lives in the bay.

Why you wouldn’t do ag tech in Chicago is beyond me.

Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

There are less drastic options than Kansas that would work fine. Chicago has an international airport. Indianapolis as well (though it’s not listed in Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is). St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports besides those I’m less familiar with, but if you’re planning to process corn waste what you need is rail access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of the midwest and still maybe be able to find Bulgogi for lunch. The Quad Cities, Peoria, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Omaha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_International_Air... ?

That’s not a list of international airports, though. I’m unclear what page I was looking at now, but it only had about a dozen on it and IND was not one of them.

Disconnected data is just information, not knowledge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_airpor... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_the_United... both list KIND

The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.

John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour, IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from starting an agtech company where the resources are if they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.

>> You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

To be honest, to me it sounds like a dream job.

Oh for heaven’s sake. You can find a whole bunch of talented mech e’s and ag e’s all over the corn belt that already live there and like it. John Deere in Waterloo is just one name of many. My nephew works at Ag Leader (he’s an EE). There is a lot of ag engineering talent in the midwest, it is silly to try to recruit it here in Sili Valley.

This is like the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street light because the light is better than whete he dropped them.

“Did he just tell me to go fuck myself?”

“I believe he did, Bob.”