Partnering with Young Changemakers at Farmlink to Address Hunger

 

At Mayfield, we have a long history of philanthropy, supporting community organizations around three pillars – education, hunger, and DEI. As the Thanksgiving season approaches, we are taking a moment to reflect on the many blessings we have received throughout the year. But we’re also mindful of the challenges that many families face, particularly during the holidays. That’s why we’re proud to announce our partnership with Farmlink, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting for a world where everyone has access to the food they need.

Earlier this month, the Farmlink and Mayfield teams came together for a special community event in celebration of the inaugural Farmlink FIELD Fellows program, a program we support, which is similar to the 25+ year Mayfield Fellows program at Stanford University. This is an 8-month, action-driven pipeline that educates, immerses, and enables changemakers to create an impact across different segments of the food system. Farmlink is catalyzing the next generation of ambitious students to create sustainable solutions within the food space and enact innovative change.

If we take a look at their beginnings, Farmlink was a response to COVID. Because the commercial food industry shut down, there was a massive amount of food waste piling up on farms. And yet, simultaneously, food banks were facing the longest lines they had ever seen.

Their first haul was 2000 lbs of onions from farmer Shay Myers. But today, they’re up to 300 truckloads of apples – hundreds of millions of lbs – in the largest food recovery effort of all time.

Consumer demand variability and canceled commercial contracts mean that again and again there are moments where this kind of wide-scale effort is needed in order to prevent substantial food waste and subsequent environmental damage (methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is a byproduct of food breakdown in landfills).

Furthermore, having been established by such a young and vibrant community of student entrepreneurs, the program is both innovative and dynamic. Every year in the US, 30%-40% of food (over 100 billion lbs.) is wasted, while 37 million Americans lack access to safe and sufficient food, and around the world over 828 million people are food insecure. It’s our goal as a venture fund to not just help finance the changemakers of tomorrow for profit, but to additionally enable those who will go on to solve complex and challenging dilemmas in hunger, education and DEI. If a single student’s idea can escalate and lead to the rescue of more than 150M lbs of food on an annual basis, then supporting dozens more can only lead to similar such impacts. Here is what our students worked on:

Food Bank Innovation
Margot Kirby / University District Food Bank

The Problem: Food bank donations are down. Individuals have less food to spare, and grocery stores have depleted stock due to lower consumer demand. However, more are going hungry than ever before, government food assistance has been significantly reduced since the pandemic, and food prices are higher than ever. So the need for non-profit food services is through the roof. The ratio of donated to purchased food at local non-profits must be restored in order to help vulnerable communities.

The Solution: Approaching grocery stores, local businesses and community groups to ask them:

  • Do you typically have surplus food that you end up having to discard?
  • Do you already work with a food bank to deal with these items?

Grocery stores typically already have a partner, but businesses are much less likely to already have a system in place and will often participate in charitable food drives. Furthermore, increasing community engagement can also spur donations from individuals. To get involved yourself: donate, volunteer, host a food drive, or ask your local businesses what they do with their day-olds.

Food Allergies Among Food Bank Recipients
Kennedy Wilcox / Brazos Valley Food Bank

The Problem: Many food banks don’t have programs in place to offer those with food allergies safe food to eat. In many cases, one jar of peanut butter can contaminate an entire box of donated food. Over 30M people a year (in the U.S.) have food allergies today, and that number is only increasing. Furthermore, food allergies are the most prevalent in vulnerable, minority populations.

The Solution: Implementing allergen-free food boxes at food banks. This will provide individuals with allergies access to safe food, while respecting diversity and responding to evolving needs.

Solving Food Insecurity
Ariel Cook / Harvest Against Hunger & West Seattle Food Bank

The Problem: Food insecurity is rapidly increasing across all communities. In Seattle, 10% of residents are food insecure today.

The Solution: Community engagement is always the best way to battle food insecurity. Monetary donations are not enough, you need strong local relationships to build strong local economies. Farms, food banks, and local businesses must work together to be part of the solution.

In 2020 the West Seattle Food Bank had 60% donated food and 40% purchased, today it’s 10% and 90% respectively. In order to correct these numbers, individually managed food drives and online fundraisers can help bring those numbers back to pre-COVID levels of donation.

Food Sovereignty and Community Empowerment
Alysia Jimenez / Farm to Pantry and San Diego Food Bank

The Problem: Hyper-localized solutions are important in order for communities to gain sovereignty over their own food supply.

The Solution: A local policy guide can be built to help non-profits and other partners through strategic community communication and the creation of functional directives for local partners.

Just Food and Actionable Food Resilience
Conor Flynn / Mid-Ohio Food Collective

The Problem: We need to adjust our practices as a society to meet basic human and community needs on account of structural issues with conventional food systems in the United States. There are issues with resiliency too – the way we handle food today will make it harder to manage in the future.

The Solution: There are three key principles for greater food equity:

  • Locality – Prioritizing hyper-local and hyper-regional food production and distribution
  • Seeking Synergies – Looking for and creating synergies between civic participation, circular resource practices, and meeting marginalized needs
  • Proactive Protection – Proactively protecting our progress, and ensuring its future resiliency

Building a Food Council
Aditi Kulkarni / Produce Packaging

The Problem: Ending food insecurity is a huge challenge, even on college campuses

The Solution: Bringing the campus food council model to schools across the country, by creating a kit that can be accessed by any student, professor, or resource center. It’s a step by step reference guide for others to help institute their own food councils, and can be used as part of broader teaching curriculums. The goal is to encourage students to implement their own campus food councils at their universities and empower students to become leaders in their communities.

Community-Driven Waste Solutions
Anna Bowden / Produce Good

The Problem: What if farmers markets didn’t just deliver fresh produce to communities, but also combatted food waste and hunger? Farmers markets are great hubs, but because of seasonal fluctuations and variable consumer demand, there’s a lot of food waste at these markets.

The Solution: Farmers market recoveries across local communities. Volunteers hand out bins to vendors that are collected and weighed, so that those donations can be recorded and therefore tax-deductible, benefitting local farmers. The produce will then be brought to food banks and other partners, feeding the community throughout the week.

Myco-Remediation
Owen Clark / Farm to Pantry

The Problem: Communities of low socioeconomics are disproportionately affected by pollution and food insecurity. When people are unable to access traditional pathways to food, they also often don’t have clean soil or land to grow their own food. Hazardous waste is most likely present in poorer areas

The Solution: Myco-remediation. Mushrooms are very efficient at reversing environmental damage. This is a natural and environmentally-friendly technique that employs certain species of fungi, like oyster mushrooms, to clean up contaminated environments. They have the ability to break down and absorb a wide variety of pollutants including heavy metals and petrochemicals from soil and water. They break these long-chained toxins into simple, less toxic forms. The goal is to make growing these mushrooms replicable at scale, by hosting workshops on how to perform myco-remediation in communities nationwide.

Sustainable Waste Management
Gillian Feinglass / Earth Matter

The Problem: Most waste today goes straight to the landfill, squandering precious resources and creating environmental harm. And while individuals create a wide variety of different kinds of waste, restaurants create mostly food waste.

New York City has created programs for individuals to try and divert their food waste, but there’s a glaring absence of similar programs at scale (restaurants, etc.). Food waste consumes 38% of the U.S. food supply today, the water usage of 50M American homes, and the energy of 83M passenger vehicles a year, at an economic cost of $408B ($112B from restaurants alone). This is an economic and ecological disaster, where restaurant food waste is a big piece of the puzzle.

Today, restaurants dispose of 85% of surplus food in landfills or incinerators, and razor-thin profit margins mean that wasted food is meaningful

The Solution: The average American hates interacting with garbage. It’s gross, smelly, and a nuisance, but it can become a valuable resource when sorted, treated and utilized. Anaerobic digestion turns food waste into nutrient-rich soil and renewable energy sources. A simple plan needs to be established for restaurants to take action:

  • Establish a three bin system in restaurants – Recycling, compost, and landfill
  • Educate restaurants on how to effectively compost
  • Designate a local organization to schedule pickups of compost bins
  • Establish infrastructure to connect them with the restaurants
  • Encourage restaurant participation with tax benefits

Waste diversion isn’t just good for the planet, it’s smart for businesses. $1 invested can save $7 over three years. Restaurants are incentivized to participate via education, a streamlined program, and tax incentives.

An Investor and a Practitioner’s Perspective on GenAI

We recently hosted a conversation with over a hundred CXOs from our network as part of our ongoing efforts to bridge the gap between the promise and reality of GenAI. IT leaders across all industries are already thinking about what their top of mind priorities will look like, including how they plan to educate and experiment, manage their blue sky planning, update data governance policies, and so much more.


Key Takeaways

  • A recent survey in McKinsey suggested that the technological advances we’re seeing in AI today are ten years too soon for a variety of different use cases. This includes rote tasks such as math or coding, but also cognitive activities that are further afield, like dialogue, video generation, and a higher order of understanding and interpreting natural language.
  • AI won’t necessarily replace humans, but humans utilizing AI may be substantially more productive than humans who aren’t. And because of the human aspect of all of this – the markets that AI will be replacing have to be considered differently. People tend to look at markets and say: “What is the TAM for accounting software?” But in the case of AI, they’ll have to say “What is the TAM for accountants?”
  • We’re seeing a bimodal distribution of funding. Some startups with just a couple million dollars can use gen AI to get to an MVP really quickly because they’re using open source tools or publicly available datasets. On the flipside, if you created your own model you have to raise a lot more, like a $20-$40M seed raise before you can even start selling anything. So the bifurcation is really between companies who are building models vs. those just taking things to market directly.
  • The same way that mobile devices in the past led to the consumerization of IT, generative AI is leading us in the direction of the consumerization of search. Unstructured content and documents can now be used to make customers and employees better informed and more intelligent.
  • CIOs will need to project where their specific IP is going to offer advantages and how that will play out across their industry. This is the first step in defining a game-changing LLM strategy. The second piece of that will of course be cleaning and prepping data for those private LLMs.
  • The abstraction of the stack results in selling to different personas – Back in 2014, the original AI stack was quickly abstracted away. You needed to be an AI expert and know algorithms and also hardware. But then, CUDA came along and you could write algorithms on top of that. And with PyTorch and TensorFlow there came another layer of abstraction. Then finally, with MLOps and SageMaker, eventually you could go directly to apps to write things. So you went from selling to the data scientist, to analysts and business users. And from a core engineering perspective it was interesting to see how different tools developed for different personas.
  • There has been an evolution from AI- Centrism to Data-Centrism – Many companies started out as AI-centric companies, but after applying models in practice, quickly realized that those models weren’t fitting their use cases properly (leading to many companies becoming more data-centric). This was a difficult pivot for them, but that transition did need to happen. Data-centrism is more about how to fit the right models to the data. What kind of model needs to be used? How is the data being collected?

Key CXO Considerations for CXOs:

Data governance

  • Where is your IP going? Where can it be used?
  • Make sure to review SaaS T&S
  • How are you accelerating data quality?

Guardrails

  • What are your employee use cases and platforms? What tools are being used in what ways?
  • How are you validating results? Make sure everyone is helping expose what problems and opportunities are worth solving for
  • How are you addressing safety and regulatory?

Communications

  • To your board and leadership: What is your clear and articulate AI strategy that’s updated on a quarterly basis?
  • To your customers and partners: What are you experimenting with as a company today? What’s your roadmap for tomorrow?
  • To Employees: Where are there learning opportunities they can take advantage of?

Stay tuned for upcoming conversations as we all navigate this exciting and changing landscape together.

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Navin Chaddha on Building CyberResilience in a Post-Hacked World

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Building Predictive Cyber-Risk Assessment in the Post-Hacked World

Cybersecurity remains a top concern for enterprises. Fears of hacking and data loss are constantly making news around the globe.  On the front pages of major media outlets, anxiety-stoking news made internet security a constant presence this past year. From Target, Department of State, Heartbleed, Sony, DNC, Disney, WannaCry, Yahoo!, the U.S. elections … the drumroll continues unabated. We are now in a world, where it’s a matter of when, not if, an enterprise is hacked. I call this the post-hacked world.  Hence building cyber-resilience has become a key priority for the C-suite.

Investors have poured over $13B into hundreds of cyber-security startups over the past five years, and yet, the pace of breaches keeps increasing. The cyber-security problem is clearly one of the hardest and most important problems facing us, but do we really need yet another security company?  

We got a thought-provoking answer to this question when we met with Gaurav Banga in the fall of 2015. Gaurav is a proven entrepreneur, technologist, and a security expert, having previously co-founded cyber-security company Bromium. Under his leadership, Bromium saw rapid adoption by a large number of Fortune 500 companies and key government agencies.  

A new approach

The modern enterprise has a massive and fast-growing attack surface. Every new technology, every new application or device that we deploy – IoT, BYOD/BYOA, cloud, –  comes with an incremental attack surface – i.e., new ways for the adversary to strike. We need to measure this attack surface with a predictive risk lens, in order to pick, and execute, the right security projects.

Organizations today don’t have a good idea of their security posture. Too many new threats emerge every day, making it very difficult for C-level executives to get a good handle on their digital risk. The enterprise security practice is very reactive, constantly dealing with a relentless stream of security events – corresponding to attacks that have already happened – and is unable to get ahead of attackers.

Deploying additional new products for better analyzing or reacting to the exhaust fumes of attackers is not going to help. Corporate leaders across the board are now looking for a way to change this game. Companies need a way to proactively understand their evolving attack surface, and how their digital defenses will hold up under attack. Being able to accurately measure predictive risk is critical to getting ahead of attackers!

During the last 18 months, Balbix has built a platform that does exactly this—delivering automated and comprehensive calculations of enterprise risk -using AI – drawn from continuous observations of the extended enterprise network, combined with a really cool visualization system – to allow enterprises to accurately measure and understand cyber-security risk.

Balbix emerged out of stealth today, announcing the general availability of the industry’s first predictive cyber-risk assessment platform. The Balbix platform can be used to predict top breach scenarios, prioritize security mitigations, and provide risk insights, to prevent security incidents before attacks happen.

We also know this is just the beginning—an accurate measurement of risk is just a precursor to the “risk aware” self-defending enterprise networks that Gaurav envisions.  As lead investors in Balbix, we are proud to announce our Series A investment and share our excitement in helping Gaurav and his team build the next big cyber-security company!