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This App Set Out to Fight Pesticides. After VCs Stepped In, Now It Helps Sell Them
Plantix started with the mission of making farming more environmentally friendly. So how did it end up selling the very products it wanted to fight against?
And early on, the team tried to promote preventative measures in addition to remedies—measures such as cropping techniques, garlic tea, and wasps that eat common pests as alternatives to chemical pesticides, says Charlotte Schumann, a social anthropologist and Plantix cofounder who left the company in 2018 to pursue research. Silicon Valley–style venture capital places enormous emphasis on scale and a startup’s ability to grow rapidly, says Madeleine Fairbairn, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, who studies agriculture and food systems. One strategy, he says, is patient capital, where “investors realize that not all business plans go as expected, the market and the macroeconomic trends don’t always do what we think they’re going to do when we draw that curve on the piece of paper.” And startups are funded without the pressure to quickly turn a profit or die.
Or read this on Wired
