Lumo CEO, Devon Wright, Featured on the Hardware to Save a Planet Podcast
The Hardware to Save a Planet podcast explores the technical innovations that are giving us hope in the fight against climate change. Each episode focuses on a specific climate challenge and explores an emerging physical technology solution, with the person bringing it into reality.
Last month, Lumo's CEO, Devon Wright, had the pleasure of speaking with host Dylan Garrett, Head of Climate Tech Business at Synapse.
In the episode, Devon and Dylan discuss why we need to mitigate the water crisis, and how Lumo's smart irrigation solution is helping growers conserve groundwater while improving crop quality and reducing labor costs.
Have a listen to the podcast here
Apple: https://apple.co/401B3aJ
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3HsWOsL
Read the full transcription below
Moderator:
Hardware to save a planet explores the technical innovations that are giving us hope in the fight against climate change. Each episode focuses on a specific climate challenge and explores an emerging physical technology solution with the person bringing it into reality. I'm your host, Dylan Garrett.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Hello and welcome to Hardware to Save a Planet. I'm excited to talk with Devon Wright today, CEO o and co-founder of Lumo about what he and his team are doing to help the agriculture industry use water more sustainably. This is a big deal because many parts of the world are experiencing a water crisis that is only getting worse with climate change. A couple quick stats, just to put that into perspective. United Nations have predicted that by 2030 our water consumption will exceed sustainable supplies by 40%. That's just in seven years. 70% of water used globally is for agriculture. So that kind of tells us where we need to be focused. That also means the water crisis could easily turn into a food crisis if we can't figure out a way to produce food with less water. Of course, we also need to stop climate change itself, which is exacerbating this problem.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
But what Devon is doing with Lumo is giving us tools to be more resilient to the changes that are already happening. Now, what I've learned about Devon so far is that unlike a lot of our guests, he doesn't necessarily have a super deep technical background or history working in climate, but he is a successful entrepreneur with diverse skills and interests, including at least farming and music. Devon, I found your album on Spotify Dunno, and was <laugh>. Well, maybe we'll play a couple clips in the after the edit, but I was grooving to it this morning. It was awesome. He has a lot of passion for solving problems he sees in the world, which is how Lumo came about. He's also an advisor to other startups and a father of two young children, so he must have a crazy amount of energy <laugh>. Devon, thanks a lot for taking the time out of all of that to join us on the show today. Really appreciate it.
Devon Wright:
Oh, thank you so much for having me Dylan. This is an awesome podcast. So I appreciate you making time. So
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Maybe to start, I know you sold your previous startup to Yelp in 2017. I'd actually, I'd love to hear what led up to that and then how we get from there to this new company focused on AgTech.
Devon Wright:
Sure, yeah. Well you mentioned the music career thing. That was short, reasonably short-lived, but it was the inspiration for the first business. Okay. We had, that's kind of how I've always found problems to work on and built businesses around, I guess is just looking at problems that I have and then diving into them and seeing if I can fix them. Cuz I'm definitely not one to sit on a problem and wait for someone else to fix it. So 2012 we had a band, me and my partners, and we were playing live shows and we were feeling really frustrated that we couldn't really connect with our live fans. You know, it felt kind of weird cuz at the time smartphones were coming out and like Twitter and all these things were coming out and Facebook was well on its way and online it felt like you could connect with everyone so easily and yet you'd go to play a live show and you'd have a hundred or 200 people in front of you that are fans of your music and you were unable to really ever make a meaningful relationship.
Devon Wright:
You know, the mu the show would end and they would just go out the door and you'd be like, oh you know you're, you're a business too. You're trying to build relationships and you're trying to market your stuff. And it just always felt like such a missing, a missed opportunity. So we started to ask the question of like, well how do we connect with these people in a room? How can we actually start to connect with people face-to-face, not just on social networks? How can we actually really like use our mobile phones to connect with the people all around us in businesses that we're in every day? That led to us figuring out that, well the wifi network was totally unutilized, you know, and yet there was all these mobile phones in there trying to connect to wifi. What if we just hacked the routers in the buildings that we were playing music and made it so that in order to sign onto the wifi, a splash page would come up and you'd like put in your email or your phone number to get on the wifi and then that would be like a lead gen splash page almost.
Devon Wright:
We hacked a little router and we would take it to all the shows we would play, it was working. We would go down the stage and tell everyone, hey, if you want to stay in touch with us, just sign on to the wifi with your email, your phone number and we'll reach out. So he started to build this lead list and it started to work to promote our shows and our music. One of the venues that we had a relationship with stopped us one day and watched what we were doing. They're like, what is this thing? When we explained it to him, he said, this is crazy. We have the very same problem. I don't think you should sell this to B bands. You guys have no money but you could sell it to the venues because we're all trying to connect with our fans as well and our customers as well.
Devon Wright:
We hate that we have to pay all these online apps money to advertise to our own customers. What if we could use your tool to turn our wifi traffic into real rich leads and and engagement? So I took his advice. I also took a little money from him. It was a guy named Naga. Yeah, he was my first inve second investor and then he helped me build the business and then fast forward to 2017 and we ended up selling it to Yelp. We'd closed something like 3,500 locations or 4,000 locations or something and had a good run going. And Yelp was a great partner for us to see the vision of connecting people to great local businesses and help us kind of scale it up. So felt like a good opportunity and we took it and that's how we got, at least that's how I got to California. But I'll pause there before I can talk about what
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Anything from there <laugh>? No, that's awesome. How's the band doing
Devon Wright:
<Laugh>? We no longer make music, but my old band partner's an investor in my, in this new business Lumo. So still buds still going along. I'm still laughing at our tunes every so often.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Okay, <laugh>, nice. And have you always been entrepreneurial or, or was this kind of your first foray into starting something like that?
Devon Wright:
Yeah, always, always. I was always the kid doing weird things at school and trying to sell it to the other kids or trading snacks at lunch so you know, if I can get better snacks than <laugh>, I started with and I was always after something and I love to tinker and I think that's kind of followed me around. So
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Cool. So selling that and that company was turnstile sold that to Yelp in 2017 that brought you to California to Bay Area, right? Yeah. And yeah, so what happened after that to get you, get you to Lumo?
Devon Wright:
Yeah, well so I forgot to mention I'm Canadian, I'm from just outside of Toronto so we have, I grew up there, started the first company there. I only moved to California when I was 30 so I had no idea water was limited to anyone. I, Canada has so much fresh water, it's like <laugh>, it's terrible to say but you know when you're a kid you just, your hoses are on, your sprinklers are rutted, you just, you don't even think about it. There's all these Leo lakes and stuff, you just never think about it. And so it was particularly shocking to me to move to a place where there was drought, catastrophic drought and where I, I actually moved out of the Bay area within the first couple years and I moved into rural California, a little town called Occidental. It's kind of on the outskirts of wine country and we're all groundwater.
Devon Wright:
My house is groundwater, my whole community's groundwater and we're a little agriculture community and the whole agriculture community uses groundwater. So it was really in my face how severe things get when groundwaters overused or when the rivers and such start getting limited. My community really felt it. I personally felt it, I have a little orchard on my property that I planted and was irrigating and so that was my first goal was if I'm gonna have this orchard let me try to find some tools that might help me be a better steward of the groundwater that I have. And so I looked about in the market and I was just like whoa, there's not a lot and the things that are here, it seemed reasonably limited and so I started to tinker with like, well could I build something that was better? I called it the nest of irrigation at the time. You know, I have a nest in my house and I've got a decently automated smart home situation. And I just started to realize like huh, you know like it's funny that we have all these tools for IOT and and smart home for our homes and yet when it comes to the most important precious resource we have, it seemed like we were a bit behind. So yeah, I just figured hell, I'll dive in and see what's out there and that's how at least I discovered the problem.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Did you find other companies or people that were trying to solve the problem and just not executing well Or why do you think you weren't able to find something that did the right thing?
Devon Wright:
Well I think a couple things. So I tried some of the incumbents and I think they just, they were very expensive and very complex for setting up. They're a controller for the most part. The incumbents, they sell you a thing called a controller which you're supposed to like plug your valves into and maybe a flow meter and maybe solar panel and maybe a soil sensor and there's a lot of wiring that needs to go on and like my orchard's few hundred feet from my house, I'm not gonna trench a bunch of wire into my vineyard and then try to trench wires between all my valves. They're all distributed through the field. So it's kind of like that model just seemed really dated, like something that you might use for your home irrigation or something like in your garden. But once you try to apply that same controller model at at scale in a farmer field, it just kind of broke down.
Devon Wright:
It wasn't very easy to use or really cost effective. And then also like there just wasn't really good, I don't think a lot of the incumbents had very good cloud management capabilities or mobile capabilities. So there was a lot to be, like I said, you have a nest and you get used to this like plug it on your wall, press one button, it's paired to your phone, all of a sudden you're connected now you can see it from everywhere. The mobile app's beautiful, you know this whole user experience was just so modern. It felt like some of the incumbents, like naturally those incumbents do right? They make a lot of money selling lots of other stuff. They're not necessarily like hyper-focused on how do I make this legacy problem of irrigation control kind of how do I obsess about it until it's perfect? They're not doing that.
Devon Wright:
So nothing against 'em either. They're amazing companies. Toro one of my favorite companies, they own tro like they have really healthy business in a lot of other areas. I don't, you know, they're maybe not necessarily focused on that. That was one part. And then the other part was I kind of mentioned like there are some really good residential companies I think that are doing irrigation residential that were quite inspiring. Like I'll call out orbit, I think they do really great work. They've just been acquired by Husk Bardo I think is how you say the name big European company. But they had some really cool stuff I think at the residential level that was a little inspirational. But again like that residential's a little easier to set up iot cuz you've got dedicated power all around the house, you've got wifi all around the house. The distances we're talking about communicating between valves might be a few hundred feet at most maybe and usually less than 25, you know, to get a signal from your garage to your garden. I mean maybe it's a handful of steps.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
It almost sounds like you started out just looking for something to help your kind of home home orchard setup but ended up realizing there's an opportunity for a company here. Is that, is that right? Or were you looking to start a company in the
Devon Wright:
Space? No, that's totally right. Yeah, I I for the first year of tinkering on it and it was really just a passion project of my own and I didn't quite know that it would ever turn into a company. I had a little hunch maybe this is but to be honest I actually at first thought I don't want to be able to valve, you know, <laugh> how many people are gonna buy this thing. I didn't realize, I don't think I'd even really fully appreciated the zeitgeist and this that was changing around like you know, this water thing is getting bad and we really need to fix it. And from it was partly when I met all the farmers and started to realize whoa they feel underserved so that's clearly a tam that that's large and could be useful. But I also started to learn and research more about just policy in general and like where from the very highest levels of government and how are they reacting to the current water environment.
Devon Wright:
And there's a lot of attention with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act for example. A lot of policy that's really putting change the the tides of change in the air for farmers and for the ag community and for the water users in the state to really start being more thoughtful about how we're tracking water use and how we're becoming more efficient and and calculated about applying water, detecting leaks and other potential issues becoming more efficient with irrigation so that we're not so hungry for power and emissions. I just started to realize like holy, this isn't just like a bottoms up, it was getting exciting meeting all the farmers but then like tops down you're think geez, I mean there's a potential here for a big wave of change around the law and around policy and around the incentives that that growers have to really like reinvest in in their systems. I think that's when I got really fired up and said okay, that's what you want. I think when you wanna start a business you want to know that there's as many big forces outside of you that can come as a wave and push you along because that can, that makes your life a lot easier if they show up and I was starting to see those things so that was really exciting and yeah ma motivated us to really go into it.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
So it'd be helpful for me to maybe just understand the problem the farmers are having. So I'm picturing a vineyard or an orchard with a bunch of irrigation lines watering all their plants and we're talking about what your product is addressing. Is this problem of, is it mostly about unidentified leaks or can you help illustrate that? Yeah,
Devon Wright:
It's a few things. So the first most important like word I'll I'll call out is accountability valve accountability network, irrigation system accountability. And what I mean by that is the valves that are out there today, the pieces of of an irrigate system that are out there today. So the flow meter or which gives you information on how much water you're using and the rate at which you're using it. The valve which allows you to turn on and off the water, the pressure sensor which allows you to sense the health of the pump and and the network for potential leaks and so on. All of these tend to be very distributed and very like dumb analog to some extent. They're very simple devices and so like I said, there are some controller solutions that try to like allow you to buy a bunch of those components and connect them all but they're, as you can already tell, that that becomes very challenging to do when you have to buy all the components separately.
Devon Wright:
So none of the vendors are accountable to one another. You have to wire them all separately, you have to calibrate them all and then you file this upfront and there's no real ongoing support in my opinion for a lot of those businesses. So what do you do? You kind of stuck with a bunch of remote valves and and other things that are out in the field and you basically have to make sure that they work so there's no accountability from any of those pieces of the system to give you confidence that they're working well. And so then what happens is as a farmer is you have two problems. One is you manually have to turn on and off your valves for the most part. So you walk around the field or drive around your fields turning on and off valves to get water running and then you gotta like watch your wash and go back out eight hours later and turn it off when the water's supposed to be done.
Devon Wright:
Or even if you wanna automate that process and you put a little controller on a valve and you can control it from the cloud and you say turn it on and turn it off eight hours later you have this accountability problem cuz you're afraid, what if I open the valve and I'm not there to see it? And it just so happens that a go first chewed through the first line in my crop of my drip line and now without cuz no one's there turning the valve on, no one knows. And I just gush a hundred thousand gallons of water over 10 hours into my field, which happens all the time. I mean this is like if you ask any farmer and you show 'em a picture of a gopher and a picture of a drip line, they'll just laugh right away. I'm like, yes, happens all the time.
Devon Wright:
It's like standard, right? Like the birds pack them, the coyotes go get them like it's just, it's water in 110 degree weather. They're gonna find it, they're gonna chew it, tractors run it over. Like things happen all the time. I mean this was the biggest insight when I was working as an irrigator cuz when I first thought about like what the problem irrigators have, I thought well it's probably automation if we can just automate everything we're going, you know, help them eliminate labor and there's an obvious roi. But I very quickly realized like no, no this isn't just an automation game. These people could automate valves if that's all they wanted, but they're very worried about doing that and not having visibility into how those valves and how the network is performing. Cuz if there's any problem they need to turn that water off and fix it.
Devon Wright:
We're talking about huge volumes of water flowing through these fields. So they've gotta be accountability. So that's kind of where Lumo said, look, what we have to do is reinvent the valve. There is no getting away from this. It makes the job much harder. But what we have to do is like imagine a a device that lives in the field that can not only be automated remotely, but before even that can provide real-time visibility into the health of the network. What is the pressure going on in that valve and in the system downstream from the valve? Is it appropriate for what you would expect or do you see high or low pressure which would mean leaks or clogs? What's the flow rate going through that valve? Is it what you'd expect with 2000 vines down field from the valve each with one gallon emitter that has a particular theoretical flow rate you'd expect?
Devon Wright:
And if it's very high, well you might have a broken line and you should turn the valve off and you should send someone to go see it. And so we realized like if you really want to make farming efficient, irrigation efficient for these specialty crops using the drip irrigation systems, you're gonna have to reimagine the valve. And we have to build one that has internet connectivity, that has the appropriate sensors and that has a computer and a brain built into it so that there's some sense of AI that you can build to tech leaks better and better and to start learning when to irrigate more to be the most efficient with power and so on. That's what Lumo does really we are, we're the smart valve that has grown to be something more than just a valve. You know, it incorporates a lot of really critical components of the irrigation system and brings it to the cloud so that a farmer can manage all that remotely and and feel really confident that they're doing it in a way that's accountable and sustainable.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
And how much water can be saved by addressing all those problems? Is it a big
Devon Wright:
Chunk? I think so, yeah. I'd say it's easiest is just what if you could irrigate at night instead of the day, which you could do if you have automated runs with BLE detection so that you can turn off the run if no one's awake to go fix it. Just doing that would save 15% of water through of apple transpiration, right? It's 15% more efficient to irrigate at night than than the day. So that's a real simple quick win. And what if you, you know, instead of estimating how much water is out there, how much water comes out of a valve when you run it for seven hours, what if you could just program exactly how much water you wanna come out of the valve? If you ask a farmer that they're gonna say, yeah that'd be great because I almost always intentionally over irrigate because you never know if you're just timing your valves you say okay, there's a thousand trees down the line, each one has a one gallon an hour emitter, I want six gallons on each tree, I should run it for six hours.
Devon Wright:
But what if the lines aren't perfect? What if there's a problem or if it takes a while for the lines to fill, I'll run it for seven or eight hours and then hell, I'll be better to, you know, a little over irrigate than under irrigate. So they all are over irrigating probably 10, 15% in intentionally. And they would tell you if I could irrigate precise amounts of volume that I would do it, that would save me a lot, that would save me water, it would save me pump time. I would love to do that. So that's another way you could save another 10, 15%. And then finally obvious one is leak detection. There's catastrophic leaks happens on farms all the time working as an irrigator. I think second thing that blew my mind the most was how frequently you were seeing leaks or brakes or even sometimes catastrophic problems like tractor had run over a main line that no one noticed and you just wake up the next day and a automated valve was running for six hours and you look and the tanks are empty and it's like, holy crap that was 50,000 or a hundred thousand gallons in a field.
Devon Wright:
Whoa, not only is that bad for the crop, like there goes a bunch of water and if your groundwater pump is only feeding that tank 10,000 gallons a day, it could take, it could take a long time to recharge and and run another irrigation. I mean there's, this is catastrophic potential loss. So it's hard for me to estimate what that is. But if there's been better research done in the residential and the industrial space or the U, let's call the water utility space, I've read papers that estimate to as much as 30 to 40% of LA's water is lost to leaks and utility pipes. And so could you maybe say that maybe about how much water could be lost in a very similar system of an irrigation network maybe. I don't know if it's exactly that, but it's not zero and it, it's material when a problem happens, right? Because we're talking about big volume. So just those three alone, I think you really can imagine some big double digit savings.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
It'd be helpful for me and I'm a little embarrassed to say this, but like I don't really understand the water problem. So I remember from like kindergarten, there's a certain amount of water on the globe and there's never, no water is ever added or removed from earth, right? So is it just that our demand for water is increasing as population increases and we're eating more food and that kind of thing? Or is there something happening with climate change that's changing the distribution of water that's exacerbating this problem? Can you, I don't know, do you have a perspective on that or can you help me understand that a little better?
Devon Wright:
Yeah, for sure. I will not start by saying I, I know the water, I understand the water thing either. It's an incredibly complex okay ecosystem and there's different ways of understanding water use. And so by no means having me answer this question, do you, I want you to think I'd suggest I'm the expert on all of it, but there is the increasing demand, right? So that's obviously a big part of it. But then there's this other component of timing. So what climate is affecting is when waters are pulled into the sky, when they falls precipitation and then what that means for how they get stored. So for example, you know in California we may have similar amounts of water year to year, but if 15 million acre feet of it gets stored in snow in the Sierras and slowly melts through the summer when we need water withdrawals for growing, that's a pretty cool natural irrigation system that works really well to help balance supply and demand.
Devon Wright:
It gives you this consistent flow of water throughout the season that gets pulled through. Not only the ground goes into groundwater that we can use for later years or gets pulled through water rights that people have for surface water rights into the big irrigation systems or from rivers. But if all of that precipitation gets shifted and cuz we have a say a warmer winter or what have you, it doesn't get stored as snow, it actually just melts as runoff right out of the gate or it just doesn't even freeze and it just falls on the mountain and rushes through the rivers. First off you have flood events and then all of that water just makes its way to the ocean on month one of the year. So 15 million acre feet doesn't end up in the Sierras anymore, ends up in the ocean and now it's got all alienation and you can't pull it and you can't use it for growing.
Devon Wright:
And so your groundwaters deplete because the farmers start to pull on groundwater more to try to make up for the lower flows from the Sierra. The state might cut off their water rights, the junior water rights fellows will get nothing and senior water rights might get something but all of a sudden people start to panic about water availability and then they start to pull on the ground and it's just exasperates the problem, right? Fresno for example shrinks when you pull too much water from it and that permanently reduces how much water you can store on the ground. So water is a good canary in the coal mine I'd say unlike what's happening when climate changes and like you said, I mean there are ways to increase supply, there are ways, you know, desalination technologies, one pulling water from the atmosphere is another, but they tend to be very power hungry and they're still pretty early and they also can't produce anywhere near the volumes of 15 million acre feet that you could get from an appropriate snowfall that's timed appropriately or maybe more traditionally in the Sierras. So efficiency around how we use the limited water resources we have and I'll say the more variable water resources that we have, it makes it really
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Important. I find this a lot in my conversations with people in the climate space. It's like the best thing to do is reduce consumption, reduce the demand in the first place. It's like recycling the whole, the classic like reduce, recycle in that priority order, right? It's a lot better to just reduce what we're producing in the first place than get better at recycling. It sounds like the same is true here and you're focused on reducing, which makes a lot of sense. You wrote an article about how solving the water problem specifically can help leaders support us kind of rally support around addressing climate change is kind of similar to what you just said said like that it's this very visible immediate problem and I thought that was really interesting. Can you explain that a little bit more?
Devon Wright:
Water gives us a chance to show people that we can make a positive impact in their community that they can see, touch and feel. And by doing so you can energize them to get really excited about sustainability in other areas that are harder to touch and feel and harder to control completely. Because you can always point back to like, I know it might be hard with carbon, I know it might still seem along out but look, we're, our efforts together are removing plastics from the beach. You can see it on your local beach, they're removing groundwater pumping at a really high clip and you can see your wells and rivers refilling. You can look at your flow meter and feel that you're actually using less power and water and you're saving more money and you're feeling really great about sustainability. So let's keep rallying, let's keep the winds going, let's apply that energy to things that are more difficult to wrap our hands around. So I think that was my point is like we need to have a bit more of like a strategy around how we can motivate for the long haul people around sustainability and show wins so that we can channel that into other bigger potential issues like things like carbon management,
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Right? Yeah, that makes sense. It's local, it's right in front of you, it's tangible, the results are near term, whereas sometimes climate change, carbon removal is so abstract and invisible, it's hard to kind of rally behind it. I wanna make sure I understand just at least at a high level sort of your business model. So you have these smart connected valves. Is your plan to sell hardware to farmers or a service or data or what does that look like? Yeah, it'd
Devon Wright:
Be both. Yeah I think both. It's a hardware and a software at the moment. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, we sell the hardware cuz I mean it costs us money to make the thing we want the farmer to own it if, if they want, we'd like them to feel like they have an ownership. If they don't wanna work with us in the future, they can kick us out and you can use that thing on manual mode and it'll turn on and off and you can just use it like a valve. But we really want to earn their trust and earn their business by providing an amazing software that connects to that valve and then gives you that realtime diagnostic, that real-time control so that you can do the precision irrigation, you can do the leak detection and you can do all that automation and feel really good about what that valve and that hardware has to offer. So we sell the hardware upfront and then we sell an annual recurring fee that gives you a seat to control or as many seats as you want to control your valve. So fee for the hardware and then an annual recurring fee for the valve. And each valve has its own recurring fee and obviously we reduce the fee per valve as you scale.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, what's the, I don't know how far along you are in kind of the commercial launch, but what's the reception been like? Are people excited about this? Are they nervous about new technology? How is that? Do you see that as a barrier? Oh
Devon Wright:
I think they're excited. Yeah. Yeah we feel we are early but we've kind of got demand for, we're only making 250 of these next year cuz as you know in hardware, yeah you want to get it right. You don't want to have mistakes and ship 10,000 units and find a mistake or a bug and then it's hardware, it lives in the world, you're gonna drive around and pick 'em all up in a truck. Like it can be pretty catastrophic. So, and it's money you've spent up front. So we're trying to move slow partly to, to make sure we're being thoughtful about how we go to market and build the best possible product but also so that we could say super close to the customers as they use it. And your first, this will be our second season. We did a few pilots this previous growing season but this'll be our first season with about 15 growers, some of the biggest in California really using our product.
Devon Wright:
And so what a blessing to be able to, if you can stay close to them and watch, I mean these are some of the best vineyards in the world that are producing some of the highest dollars per ton of any agricultural product on the planet. These people 20 years of experience in viticulture and and water and irrigation management, these people know what they're doing. So we actually want to intentionally stay small and handpick those kinds of growers so that I can literally sit in the fields with them and watch like how do you use this valve? Okay, use the software, what are you looking for? What are you doing differently? What's missing so that we can just nail it? And this season is kind of the put the icing on the cake of what I think is already a really good solution. So that one, if the growers that are using it love it, they can scale it to their many thousands of other acres.
Devon Wright:
But two, the feedback we get from them can rapidly be built into the products so that we know we have a world class device on our hands which should really pay off for scale in following years. So all that to say is the demand. We've limited the supply intentionally. I think we could have sold more units but the demand has been great enough that we've been able to get some really good growers signed up. And I think I just put out a piece of PR on or on LinkedIn about the, some of the early signups we got, we got Crimson came in there, were there and I c double, I W C A silver member. So they're gonna be piloting with us at Pine Ridge Napa Valley, we got Sprout Wood, which is just one of the most sustainable brands I've ever seen. You check their website if you get a chance, I mean they, they've been leading the charge for on sustainability and ag for 30 or 40 years.
Devon Wright:
Price Behem like some of these folks. I mean our limit was like we want them to not only be really high quality but show a very public commitment to sustainability so that we know they put their money where their mouth is institutionally so that we can learn from that and build that in the product And that's been awesome. So yeah, we think we won't have a problem filling up the 250 valve demand and then like I said, we're gonna turn off the sales hat for a little bit and just focus on learning, learning, learning, iterating, iterating, iterating and and making it great. Before we go, V2 and
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Some of your early customers it sounds like are really have a sustainability kind of mission but as I understand it there's a, even if a farmer doesn't care about climate change or the water problem, is there just sort of a financial and operational reason to adopt this too?
Devon Wright:
It's totally like actually our objective with pricing and ROI calculation was that it has to be able to pay for itself based off just labor savings and energy savings alone. Like bottom line you need to know that in year one if Lumo does what it says it's gonna do, you're saving enough labor and enough energy that you're feeling good about this and then the gravy is, well think of all this great sustainability and the water that you're saving and yeah the data you're collecting and the reporting that you're getting to do and and automate all that there as gravy. So that was intentional because as you said, like I think every farmers have been blowing my mind about how much they care about sustainability and it shouldn't blow your mind. I mean these are people who work with the earth so they for the most part really care about the sustainability of their soil and of their ecosystem and of their community and of their way of life. So it hasn't been hard to get them to like get fired up about the sustainability benefit and and frankly to like get us excited about it but they have financial realities and they can't just say, yeah saving water's going to make everyone else happy so I'm gonna spend all this money and do it. It's gonna have to make the operation more efficient. So we knew that we had to make that ROI reality in our product or else we'd have a pretty tough time going to market in my opinion.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
And I know you're very familiar with kind of software development and building companies and things. What has been something you've learned about hardware development in this process that you didn't expect?
Devon Wright:
Well I wouldn't say I learned this cuz it sounds really obvious but I totally underestimated it. And that's that you cannot like software you ship quickly because you can just like, oh whoops, theses wrong line of code, change it. And it goes back to how you wanted it, not with hardware. You have to be committed, very committed to doing it the right way the first time my partner Henry Heini is the guy who taught us this, he kicks our <laugh> because me and my partner John, there were three of us, me, John and we're both software guys and then Henry who's hardware, hardware, hardware, like old school hardware too, like he was golden frigging like metal pipes. He was in inventing metal pipes like 40 years ago guys amazing <laugh>, he just rips us apart every time John and I are just like oh you know we'll just buy that chip, it's cheap and it'll just get us started and we'll B order a hundred of those and we'll just get it going and once it's good we'll just do it again.
Devon Wright:
He always just like that conversation ends really soon and then he forces us back to the drawing board around like no, what is the end state? Like who do you want to be three years from now, four years from now, five years from now? Because what the choices you make today are gonna start to handcuff you and put you on tr rails toward an outcome. And it needs to be, you need to be clear about who you want to be and you need to invest more upfront in being right and being high quality because if you do that every time you're gonna reduce your risk down the line and you're gonna get to your bigger vision faster.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Where in the hardware are you innovating and where are you kind of as opposed to using things that are sort of off the shelf? Is there a part that's particularly challenging about what you're doing from a hardware perspective?
Devon Wright:
I'd say like one of the big ones is just telecommunication or how do you get all these valves to be online all the time? So there's like a meshing problem at scale and we're talking big scales like they're not uncommon for valves to be three four in a three acre or four acre block, another 700 or 800 feet away from another valve. So what sorts of telemetry can you use to communicate between valves at that kind of a distance? Can you mesh them? How do you get them to sleep? Sleep and wake up at cycles that are power hung efficient enough that you're able to keep the batteries alive on these things that often need eight and nine hour run cycles while still being responsive enough that if there is a problem or there is a choice being made by the farmer, they can be awake and and hear the choice and and solve themselves.
Devon Wright:
So there's a lot of that stuff. It's not that that's particularly unique but when you're talking about it's all solar powered, there is no hardwiring, it's all huge distances up to a thousand feet at a time without any really solid connectivity. There's a lot of innovation that has to happen at that level just to make sure this thing's reliable. That's one area I guess you'd call that like the firmware and hardware area. The other would be in the, what I call the wet wear, right? So that's the valve itself, the actual valve and flow meter and pressure sensor and things that are built into the pipe, things that get wet. And that's a fun area to to innovate on actually there's little things we've been doing around how the device gets set up or how you could remove the electronics components very simply to make an exchange very easy should you ever need to service the device.
Devon Wright:
There's things around how we are innovating around how you would control the flow meter or the flow adjuster on the top right. There's like some really cool UX innovations where again Henry's just such a beauty where he's seen this a million times, he's like you will take for granted the littlest thing but like if you make the installer's job a little bit easier, that can be the make or break between this thing getting in the fields and this thing being abandoned. Or if you make a tamperproof in a way that they've never seen before and get rid of a tiny headache that like bothers every one of them. You could actually differe your yourself on something as simple as your tamper proofness. So don't obsess too much about the things that are just sexy like the telemetry and the meshing cuz everyone has to solve those problems and sometimes it blinders you from looking at some of the wetwear stuff and get really creative around just the user experience in the feel and the way that the valve handles. So again, he's been really helpful there and there's been some fun innovations there that I'm, I'm excited to get out into the into the market. That's
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Awesome. Thinking about the future a little bit, where do you see kind of what's the end game or or sort of steady state vision for Lumo? I don't know if it's five or 10 years out.
Devon Wright:
Yeah, well I'm actually hoping it's a ways out because the big picture is that I see, or I wouldn't call it a steady state, I hope we never get to a steady state but I wanna get a lot of valves out there and become a standard for irrigation valves and flow meters because I really believe in the value of the data that might have been. Like I said, I think that might have been where I finally realized like whoa this is a big opportunity if we get this right. We're not only gonna be a big business that sells cuz we've sold a lot of valves and a large subscription base. We could be a big business because we might be sitting on a very unique data asset around where water is being used in the agricultural setting, which is the largest setting for water usage in the world.
Devon Wright:
So what I'm saying there is like what if all of our data, what if we become ubiquitous and where every farmer could use us to trade water rights amongst themselves because our valve would be validating how much water has been used precisely on a particular crop which is information needed for water rights reporting and use in diversion reporting. What if we could create that record in real time and compare it to the water a farmer has and say, Hey Mr. Farmer, you're on pace to only use 70% of your water rights this year, you're gonna have a 30% excess. And our other user, Mrs. Farmer down the lane, she's like pacing to go over, she's using a lot of water and would love to buy your excesses from you pair them and make an exchange making a transaction. I think there's value in that sort of of thinking is like how could we not only build the smart infrastructure to empower the farmers to be better at in water efficiency at the local level, but what if that smart infrastructure could start to become connected, empowering communities to start becoming more efficient with how they're allocating water at the macro level.
Devon Wright:
That to me is like a very exciting problem unsolved today and it's holding back a lot of people from participating in the water trading world and water pricing world and building better water markets to me is a no-brainer for building more efficient allocations of where we put that water and how we use it. And so yeah, I think smart infrastructure has a huge role to plan that and I want to be the one of the biggest players in it so we kind of can't get there very fast by the nature of needing to scale but also by the fact that it's gonna require policy change and that just means <laugh> many cycles of trying to figure out how to help influence the policy and legislative conversation to evolve the water law and the water world to maybe encourage more of that thinking. But I think it's going in that direction. I think policymakers I've spoken to seem very eager to continue to innovate on water policy and they know it needs to happen and I'd love to be a company that could play a part in that.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Yeah, well and it sounds like given the way you described kind of the current status quo of equipment and data availability and stuff, they're probably limited in their ability to get there by what kind of data they have available. So
Devon Wright:
Oh yeah. I've heard estimates from people in the very high levels of making these decisions that up to 85% of all agricultural withdrawals are estimates. Estimates from satellite imagery estimates, from pump data, electricity usage, things that are totally not accurate enough to be useful for what I'm talking about in terms of market creation and really understanding who's got surplus and who's being good with conservation and so on. So, and I think they're all hungry for it. I think that data could itself be valuable let alone applications of the data.
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Like you said, for such a valuable resource, <laugh>, that's where we're at today. A few closing questions. How optimistic or pessimistic are you about the future of our planet and why?
Devon Wright:
I like to be really optimistic. We actually almost wrote a blog post about this. We haven't put it out yet, so I have some ideas on it, but I tend to be really optimistic. The reason is there's many reasons in fact that's why we didn't put the post out. There's too many reasons to be optimistic <laugh>, like for water for example. Like we have done almost nothing really in any material way, at least in the west, to really like think of sustainable water policy because our intention was to not have a sustainable water policy. Our intention was literally to have almost no real framework so that everyone had an incentive to move here and use up all the water and grow the crops to attract more population to grow the cities and grow the industries. And so it's worked, right? We have like the most wealth one, we'd sit in one of the wealthiest regions of the entire planet in just 140 years.
Devon Wright:
It worked to do its job. Is it still gonna work going forward? Is that sustainable? Not at all. But the nice thing is, is we didn't create a bunch of policies that turned us into something unsustainable. It was a lack of policies and humans are so good at when they finally say like, we got a problem, let's get together and figure it out. It's messy and dirty and it sometimes looks like a war, but it tends to come out the other side quite, in my opinion. We've been good at finding solutions when we put our minds to it. And so just looking at water for example, you feel optimistic and you can kind of look at that with things like carbon and emissions. Like we had a policy of just like drill it, burn it, grow, and it worked. I mean it made the people of the globe, the wealthiest I've ever been, maybe arguably the most peaceful they have ever been.
Devon Wright:
There's all sorts of problems still, but we're making progress. We're you know, evolving and billions of people are being lifted out of poverty and, but it's hitting a limit now where I think people are starting to go, whoa, if we keep up on that trajectory, it's too much. We have to make change. So what are the new policies, the new innovations that we can make that can get us out of that? And a great one, like a great fusion for example, is such a great outcome where you look at that and you go, huh, like if fusion becomes widely adopted 50 years from now and like that replaces all these fossil fuels, the story we tell ourselves about the energy journey we went on isn't gonna be like, oh no, we're all dead, we're gonna die. I can't believe we had carbon. We're gonna go, that was a messy, disgusting but necessary energy choice to get to where we are now.
Devon Wright:
Or we have more clean energy and a really wonderful source of clean energy. And that will probably introduce new problems and we'll have to think about. But I just, I see this, I kind of look at things and I think we're making, you're making progress, but it's hard sometimes to look at the dirty beaches or the polluted cities and not think like, wow, it's the end of the world. Like what have we done? It's, I just believe that we've got upside. What's one other company or individual addressing climate change that you're inspired by? Tony Fidel. It was, it was the guy I, I chose and there's a lot of people out there doing great work, but he, I think he just done so much to kind of get us started and move us along with Nest and now to kind of turn his attention to the fund that he's built, collective.
Devon Wright:
And yeah, he was a lot of energy and resources to just like accelerate the community, particularly with this hardware skill, right? Because I really believe that like we cannot do this without really getting a new appreciation for hardware. We're not gonna solve the big climate issues just writing code in the cloud. We're gonna need to reimagine infrastructure, we're gonna need to reimagine user experiences in the real world. And having a fellow who's that accomplished with that level of kind of expertise and commitment to quality that has brought us all these amazing devices, including Nest, which has itself been a, a driver of sustainability. Like he's a winner and I'm glad he is there and I try to look up to him and stay close to what he is writing cuz we need more of that. So it's, hopefully it rubs off of
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Me. Awesome. Can you share some advice for someone not working in climate tech today who wants to do something to help?
Devon Wright:
Yeah, definitely don't let your imposter syndrome get you. Cuz I had it like, why the hell am I starting Lumo? Who the hell am I, I don't know any, I'm not even a farmer, I'm not, never, I come from a water rich place. Like I said, I left my sprinklers on like, who the hell am I, you know, but look like, well, who are you to not do anything about it? Like you live in a community, you yourself consume, living in, assuming that you live in any reasonably developed lifestyle, like you are consuming a lot of the resources that are creating the challenges that we live with. Do your best to put your effort into it. If you're legitimately care about it and you have passion for it, bring that passion to the first and second and 10th and a millionth conversation that you have.
Devon Wright:
And it's gonna, people are gonna see it and they're gonna say, all right, who's this idiot who doesn't know anything about climate but is saying that they give and wants to try? I'll talk to them for 20 minutes. And then you're gonna learn a little bit and you're gonna get one more introduction and it's gonna cascade and like keep being humble and keep bringing up that passion and just go out and start talking to people. And sooner than later, like after the hundredth conversation, you're gonna be like, whoa, 20 of those people actually wanna support me either by making other introductions or maybe making investments or maybe giving you a job or whatever it is. You'll be so surprised that the goodwill of people, because people in the climate community, like maybe the one thing they all have in common is like they just care about this planet and wanna make a, an an effort.
Devon Wright:
And if you say that that's how you think they, you just fit in right away and they're gonna do their best to get you a stepping stone. So yeah, put away the composure syndrome. Don't listen to anyone who says, oh, you don't know enough about it. You don't have a fit. Get outta here. Cuz I don't think that's how this community goes. If you're legitimately in this community, then you hear people loud and clear who express real concern and, and commitment and you try to help and they will. So, hmm. Just do it. Keep doing it every day and before you know it, within a year you'll, you'll be where you want to
Dylan Garrett (Host):
Be. Awesome. Well you've set a really good example of that. Devon, thank you so much for the time amongst all the, all the things you have going on. I really appreciate it. It's been really fun talking to you and I'm really excited to see what you and Lumo do.
Devon Wright:
That's great. Well thank you so much
Moderator:
Hard way to save a planet is brought to you by Synapse. To find out more about us and how we develop hardware solutions for the world's most ambitious companies, head to synapse.com and then make sure to search for hardware to save a planet in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts or anywhere you like to listen, make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Synapse, thanks for listening.