Today’s episode is with Irving Fain, founder and CEO of Bowery Farming. Bowery is a modern farming company that grows produce indoors, free from pollutants and using significantly less water and space. Just this week, the company announced a $300 million Series C round, the largest private fundraise to date for an indoor farming company.

Bowery’s mission to democratize access to fresh, locally grown food. It’s no doubt an extremely complex problem, so it might surprise you that its founder, Irving, didn’t have any background in agriculture before starting Bowery. He was previously the CEO and founder of CrowdTwist, a loyalty and analytics solution that was eventually acquired by Oracle, and helped build iHeartRadio. 

But looking back on the early days of Bowery, Irving believes his naivety was in fact an asset. Coming in with no preconceived notions about how to solve the problem, he committed to approaching agriculture with a wide aperture and going unreasonably deep. In today’s conversation, he walks us through his multi-pronged approach to developing the idea for what would become Bowery, which includes paying just as much attention to the doubters as to the folks who believed in the vision.   

Next we switch gears and talk about assembling Bowery’s small-but-mighty team of five, which Irving kept deliberately small and sought out folks that didn’t have vast agriculture experience and could approach problems from first principles. Whether you’re a founder yourself or have long-term career goals to make the leap, today’s episode is packed with equal parts inspiration and tactical takeaways. 

You can follow Irving on Twitter at @ifain

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson 

To learn more about Bowery Farming and its most recent fundraise, https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/25/indoor-farming-company-bowery-raises-300m/amp/