Friedberg argues CRISPR Cas9's market arrival ten years ago was more consequential than Climate Corp's billion-dollar acquisition.
“And since then, hundreds of other gene editing tools have come to market, many of which are open sourced or royalty free”
“At that time, probably the largest we were known to be the largest users of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud because we were ingesting so much data to build these models that related all the variables of farming and the weather to predict outcome.”
Friedberg says Climate Corp's average data use increased 40x every year for seven consecutive years.
“In the seven years we ran Climate Corp, by the way, we did a study that our average data use per year increased by 40x every year for seven years.”
Friedberg says Climate Corp was the largest known user of Amazon's cloud and filed FOIA requests for farming data.
“In fact, we did federal Freedom of Information Act requests for the federal government in The U. S. To get hard drives and hard drives of data.”
Friedberg says Climate Corp was launching paid services when Monsanto acquisition talks began, requiring hefty negotiations to satisfy prior investors.
“So I was like, well, in order to pull that off, we really have to do good for our last round's investors and kinda had a hefty negotiation to get the deal done.”
Friedberg recalls buying 17 megabytes of weather data on CD-ROM for $10,000 in 2006 when founding Climate Corp.
“when I started Climate Corp 2006, the first thing I did when I got a seed check to start the company is I went out and bought weather data, and I bought it from a company called RMS that sold weather data. The sales guy was a guy named Jeff Hamlin.”
Friedberg states Climate Corp's average annual data use increased 40x every year for seven consecutive years.
“In the seven years we ran Climate Corp, by the way, we did a study that our average data use per year increased by 40x every year for seven years.”
Friedberg paid $10,000 for 17 megabytes of weather data in 2006, illustrating how data costs have plummeted.
“So you could put it a spreadsheet. It cost me $10,000 to buy that CD ROM. It was 17 megabytes of data.”
Friedberg recounts buying a CD-ROM with 30 years of weather data for 200 stations when founding Climate Corp.
“I'll give him a shout out because he still works at Climate Corp to this day I hired him after so he sold me a CD ROM of weather data.”
Friedberg recalls buying weather data on CD-ROM for $10,000 when starting Climate Corp in 2006.
“The sales guy was a guy named Jeff Hamlin. I'll give him a shout out because he still works at Climate Corp to this day.”
Friedberg's investors told him not to build software for agriculture, advice he ignored to create Climate's success.
“I was really convinced that building software for agriculture could work and should be the future, and we should do that.”
Monsanto paid $1.1 billion to acquire Climate Corp, a deal Friedberg says defined the ag tech sector.
“No. I think if you ask people that work in and around the industry, a lot of people call the acquisition of Climate by Monsanto because they paid $1,100,000,000.”