Jenny Du

In a way, it's not about me or us and our beautiful ideas.

It is about the why we want to do it and who else is it for, and knowing that there will be benefits to many other people if we can find a way to get it right.

I love how your career has been on like disrupting the status quo, kind of breaking the structures down.

You did it at Kickstarter and now with your new artist corporation structure, like let's just like take it back almost.

Why has it been important to

shake the institutions and it's like normal ways of working.

Well, I feel like that, I mean, they say like, let's say in school and you're really expected to conform to this pretty set framework of what like a good student looks like.

And then unfortunately schools just sort of like be a robot, repeat these things back to me.

And then it's, I think there's sort of a belief that the ones that are a little bit not the right, that don't fit.

or stand out or even almost like struggle in that environment will be, you know, almost like nurtured in the right way.

The folks who will make the greatest change at some point later on, it's just more that in this time and place that wasn't the right time and place.

Yeah.

So it started with hearing a fact for the first time that a third of the food that we produce worldwide is lost or wasted before it ever has a chance to be eaten.

That was an FAO report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in 2012.

And our founder, James Rogers, heard that and was just sort of like,

wait, what?

And sometimes you hear something that you can't unhear.

And I think especially quite close to us because where we're located in Santa Barbara, California, we're surrounded by

these fruits and vegetable fields, especially if you're driving between where we are and you head up into Northern California.

And it's pretty crazy suddenly to have it in front of you to see this food that we're growing.