Embracing the Future of Food: The Rise of Sustainable Indoor Urban Farming with Square Roots CEO Tobias Peggs

00:15 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Hello and welcome to Between Two COO's, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice and, at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, michael Kinnick, and occasionally I like to bring on a COO to bring their perspective and also learn about their industry. But in mind, our guest today is Tobias Peggs, co-founder and CEO of Square Roots, a leading indoor urban farm tech company, on a mission to bring scalable, healthy food to urban areas all year round. Before starting Square Roots with his co-founder, kimmel Musk yes, that Musk Tobias was the CEO of Aviary, which was acquired by Adobe, and before taking that, he was the CEO at One Riot, which was acquired by Walmart Labs. 

00:57
He also advises tech companies like Verbalizeit, acquired by Smartling, sendhub, acquired by Cameo Global. Ubelie, acquired by Sphereo. Visual Revenue, acquired by Outbrain Kansas, acquired by AOL. you get the idea. And, as a fun fact, way, way back towards the start of my career, i worked with or reported to Tobias. I can't remember after I played in an 80s punk cover band with Kimmel. Seriously, that's no joke. So, tobias, thanks for being here, welcome. 

01:29 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
I forgot about the 80s punk cover band. It's great to talk to you again, man. 

01:32 - Michael Koenig (Host)
How are you doing? I'm doing well, i'm doing well, so let's dive in. Set the stage for us. Why start a farming company? 

01:41 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Climate change in two words, i think when we eat the food that we eat today sometimes pays you to have a think about where that food has come from. And for us on the east coast here, the answer in the summer months is likely the west coast. A lot of the food has grown in California and Arizona and then it's dipped across the country And, given climate change, droughts, floods, what that kind of reeks in terms of kind of chaos, you know, migrant labor, can they come in? new pathogens? what happens there, bottom line, is the way we produce the food today is kind of getting increasingly risky, increasingly expensive, increasing the volatile. I would say. 

02:36
10 years from now, chances are we might not be able to do it, and so we need to have new ways of producing food right. And so that led us then to set up a different type of farming company where we could farm basically anywhere near where the customer is right. We can pop up a farm near a city, grow delicious food inside controlled environments, so it's kind of immune to climate change, and then get that food out to the end consumer literally within hours of harvesting it, rather than transporting it from one side of the planet to the other. So there's kind of a lot to unpack in that, but that is why we set up a farming company. which is where are we going to get our food from 10 years from now If climate change keeps doing its thing right? we need other solutions. 

03:30 - Michael Koenig (Host)
There's a lot to dive in there. I'd like to unpack the operation, and then I do want to get back to the environmental impact. I'm assuming that there are the land permits. You all use shipping containers which you upcycle and outfit it for these indoor hydroponic farms, and then you actually grow the food, which has a host of challenges. Then you have to harvest it, you have to package it, you have to get it out the door and sell it to grocers And you have a tech operation on top of that for precision agriculture. That's a hell of a lot more complicated than building a tech business. How have you gone about tackling that? 

04:16 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, I kind of laugh. I kind of laugh. You and I both buy roots in tech businesses, right, and we talk about full stack businesses there, and then I look at what Square Roots does and how fat do you want your stack to be? And you need to be an expert at every single step along the way. So you've described it completely correct. 

04:39
We have, firstly, a hardware and software engineering team that is kind of inventing new versions of the technology, which is all around. How can we guarantee consistent quality yields that can be grown with minimum impact to the planet? right, so with at least energy possible, no pesticides, recirculating water systems so we're good with water and at the same time, reducing our cost of goods so that we can grow our food to be price competitive with commodity crops that are growing outdoors in the field. So just from an engineering perspective, that is a very, very complex thing. And once you've done the engineering, great, you have a design for a farm, so we have to build the farm right. We have a construction team. Now. We have a farm. Now we have to grow stuff right, so we have a farm team. Right, we literally hire farmers, train farmers, put them in the farm. Now we have to train these farmers to use our technology. So these technologies are kind of half sort of horticultural, you know, plant science, and half data science. Right, you know, they're checking the square roots act that we've built, which will guide them through their day-to-day activities in the farms and their logging observations that they see about the plants, the quality, or, you know, taking photos of what it looks like, which all gets sent up into the cloud for our analytics engine to, you know, spot insights and help improve things, right. 

06:14
And then, to your point, you've grown the food, we pack it on site, we distribute it to restaurants and grocery retail stores. So actually it's twice as complex as you think. And then we've got to make sure people like the product at the end of the day. So, yeah, it is complex in the way that we do it. Honestly, we sort of look at it like a layer cake and we have sort of an operational head for each layer, right. And actually the way I've also described it, it is sort of sequential as well, right? So once kind of one layer is done, they can hand off to the next layer, right, once engineering is done with the next version of the farm tech platform, they can hand it off to the construction team to build right. Once the construction team has built, they can hand it off to the farm team to come in and start to use right. Now we're sort of you know, short of cycles, right, but now the farm team have grown food and they're harvesting food, they can hand it off to the distribution team to distribute, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way up the stack. 

07:15
So a lot of what we think about from operations is that handoff right, you know, because at the end of the day, you've got to get very high quality food that meets all of the regulatory food safety requirements on a supermarket shelf And that all relies on every step down that chain right. And the quality of the food is really going to be based on the weakest link in that chain right. So you want to make sure that that link, that handoff, is as strong as possible. So you know it's a pretty pretty complicated business. But listen, the good news is the end result is delicious food. So whenever it starts to feel too stressful, you just go walk around the farm and eat some beautiful, you know, salad that we've just harvested, and life feels a lot better. 

08:05 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's, that's stress eating. 

08:08 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
But it's healthy way. Stress eating salads, that's stress eating salad. 

08:14 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Well, let's, let's back up, because I want to a lot of our listeners. I venture to say the majority don't really understand what goes into getting that food that they're buying in the supermarket. If we just go back to one thing, which is growing the crops in traditional farming, that's outdoor, there's all sorts of environmental aspects that you need to control and modify from the nutrients that are in the soil, from the amount of precipitation that you're getting, from the season. When do you plant, when do you harvest? Do you have cover crops you know, or crops that are going to return nutrients to the soil? Are you rotating? 

08:57
All of these things go into our food and it's often completely unnoticed or just people don't know. Why would they? So when you're talking about growing food, you have to account for all of these different factors You just talked about. I mean, that's, that's a business in and of itself. You just talked about having expertise and refined operations throughout the entire stack. But where do you start? I mean, how did you get the knowledge to? let's just start with grow food in a effective way. 

09:35 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, we took kind of a software in my background is software and we took a software approach to it which is like what does an MVP look like? You know, let's not worry about monetizing straight off the back. It's just like okay, let's put the scrappiest indoor farm we can possibly put together in a literally in an empty parking lot in Brooklyn And let's just say bring grow food. Because the you know, if I rewind all the way back to the beginning of square roots, where we had this sort of long term vision which was okay, we can feed every single consumer on the planet with locally grown food. That's the long term kind of it. Right, completely eliminate lengthy supply chains, get fresh food to the consumer, eliminate waste from that supply chain. Right, because today 40% of the food that's growing in fewer farms is wasted. Right, there are so many steps between the farm and the consumer that the food just gets rotten or gets bruised or, frankly, doesn't look pretty enough by the time it turns up at the retail store and they reject it. This is like enormous waste and efficiency in the current system. So we think, okay, if we can grow local food but do that at a international scale, then that's the win, right? So let's start somewhere, right? 

10:55
So we kind of stood up a farm, pretty scrappily, in the middle of New York City And we just learned how to grow food. And the sort of first hurdle for us was like if we can grow food inside a metal box in a parking lot in Brooklyn, does it pass the chef's kind of test? right, if we put it in front of a chef, do they think it's delicious food? Because at the end of the day, for all of our vision and all of our clever technology and all the rest of it, if we can't grow food that tastes delicious, nobody is going to care, right? So that was number one. 

11:31
It says, okay, now we've cracked the code and we can grow food. Okay, now how do we make that food at least kind of cost, competitive with sort of other ways of growing, field growing, and that's just kind of iteration on the technology and the process. And once you've got that you can say, okay, how do we commercialize this? You know what, to this point, is then a science project, right? How do we now commercialize this? Right? How do we do this at scale? How do we get this to market? that then gets you into the world of a consumer brand And you know we can talk about that forever. But to answer your original question, where you really took that kind of software approach right, that MVP is like let's stand it up and see, and I think that mentality is kind of really helped essentially. 

12:16 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I love how you said the MVP of all right. Well, let's see if we can stand up a farm in the middle of New York City. That sentence, right there, is so absurd. I love it. Now you have a COO, and what I'm interested in here is how have you divided up the areas of responsibility? I mean, you just described a very complex operation, a lot of logistics. Where does your role start and end, and then where does Amanda pick up? 

12:52 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, it's a great question. So, amanda Lufkin, as I see a low and really we're kind of joined at the hip, i would say I think that this is the way we do it, right. I don't think it's necessarily the way. I don't think there's, like you know, sort of a playbook here that naturally sort of lends itself to everybody else. So we just had a really good discussion about things that we could act and things that we enjoyed and things that we know we had an obligation to do and figure out how to divide and conquer a little bit right. When we worked together, i was in a business development role, right. I like getting out there and talking to customers and making magic happen and convincing big partners how one-on-one people three and all that stuff, right. So I tend to do a lot more of that. Amanda comes from a finance background And so where I look at the P&L and my eyes kind of glaze over, you know that's like nighttime reading for her. She loves it, right, and so I think you know we've begun to figure out okay, well, listen, if I can spend more of the time sort of helping with the enabling technology, helping with sales and business development, as well as courses. You know CEO stuff, you know strategy, communication, investor relations, all that stuff. You know as I read, but in terms of day-to-day right, if I can sort of, you know, help more in the sales and the enabling technology stuff. 

14:19
And then Amanda is really looking at each of our farms and maybe it'd help if I kind of explained that a little bit. And basically, you know what's the P&L on the farm, right? So you know all the other key metrics of the farms, right? So when we stand up a farm, we have one, for example, in Grand Rapids, right, which is not too far away from you in Michigan, and so we have a farm there that is growing. You know, hundreds of thousands of pains of food a year, millions of retail packages a year, and what Amanda is looking at there on sort of a weekly basis is how much food are we growing and how close is that to the theoretical max? right, because inside these farms they're so closely controlled, right? I can tell you that you know we plant seed on day one and I know exactly the yield that should be coming out on day 28, right? So how close are we to that theoretical max? 

15:13
Do? have we then converted that to sales. Are we selling everything that we're growing? If not, what are we going to do about that gap? You know, is it sales problem? Is it an operations problem, a logistics problem? And then we also look at farmer happiness, right, how much do people love what they're doing? right, because a farming job is hard work. Right, and you've got to have a certain sort of love for the plants to, you know, want to keep showing up every day and make this happen, right. So you know, at the sort of 100,000 feet we look at those things. And then obviously, you know she'll get into the nitty-gritty detail of every lion item that makes up the P&L. But those are kind of the top three metrics that we look at. 

15:59 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Give us a primer on what a square roots farm actually looks like. 

16:04 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Sure. So a number of people have said to me it's how they imagine we will grow food on Mars. So we can stop there. So what does it look like? So the farm is kind of got two core elements what we call the grow zone And the head house. So the grow zone, as the name implies, is where we grow the food, right, and these grow zones for us, we fabricate them out of and used So upcycled shipping containers. And inside these grow zones we have what's known as a closed loop hydroponic growing system And other words there. But basically we're growing food without soil, also without sunlight, right? So we've got these plants kind of suspended, if you like, fed with water and nutrient mix directly to the roots that give the plant exactly what it needs 24, seven. And then the plants they don't just need the nutrients, they also need energy from a light source, which we then provide through LEDs that are sort of giving the plant exactly the spectrum of light that it requires. Also, then, inside these grow zones, we're basically sort of manipulating the climate to make sure that it's always optimum for whatever plant is growing, right? So let me give you an example. 

17:35
Let's say we're growing basil inside one of these grow zones? Right, the best basil in the world is going to come from the Genoa region in northwest Italy, right? And so what we have done is study the climate in the Genoa region in northwest Italy at peak basil growing season, right? How hot does it get in the day, how cold does it get at night? What's the CO2 level, what's the relative humidity, all of those factors, and we basically program our grow zones so that the climate is exactly that, but it's exactly that 365 days a year, right. So we're always able to grow this kind of peak season basil in there. So that that's the grow zones, right. 

18:16
So you're growing the food there. But then you know, as we were saying earlier, there's a lot more to the business, right. Once you've grown the food, you then need to harvest it and pack it. So we have what we call a headhouse that's attached to these grow zones And there you have all of the shared infrastructure that's required to run a commercial scale food safe and people safe business, right. Automated harvesting machines and packing machines. And you know a cool room to store the product before the truck comes to pick it up. And you know when you're sort of standing in the middle and watching the farmers kind of running around this like space age facility growing the food. I mean it's very, you know, beletic, if that's a word, literally like you're watching swan Lake right, and everybody's moving in this beautiful orchestration. And you know, egg pops, a beautiful salad, it's pretty amazing really. 

19:10 - Michael Koenig (Host)
It's incredible. Let's talk about the transportation. You have a partnership with Gordon Food Services. Tell us about that, yeah. 

19:19 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
So Gordon Food Services are a company that transports food, which is very, very, very challenging. You have transported the right temperature. If you transport it too hot, it's going to spoil them, wasting. You know, logistically it's very, very complex to get food from a source, a farm or a distribution center out to the endpoints, right, which could be thousands of restaurants or thousands of grocery retail stores. Gordon Food Services tend to focus on restaurants, but the partnership that we have there is great. Actually, this company is 125 years old. They're still family owned. You've got 20,000 plus employees, right, but it's just, you know, an incredible story. They know how to get food to customers. They have a lot of experience doing this stuff, right. 

20:13
But when we first started talking with the CEO, rich Willowsky, probably four or five years ago, he too was thinking oh, climate change, right, that's not slowing down, and where we source our food today, i don't know if I'm going to be able to do that in 10, 20 years, right, and so I need to start wrapping my head around indoor controlled climate farming. You know, might not be ready for prime time today, but like it needs to be in the next decade or two, and so I'm going to kind of have a seat at the table here and figure it out, right. So that was sort of the genesis of the relationship. How it works today is that we build our farms literally on Gordon Food Services distribution centers. So we grow the food, we pack the food, that goes immediately into the Gordon Food Services distribution center And then immediately on a truck out to their you know, tens of thousands of restaurant customers. So it eliminates you know days, maybe weeks, from the supply chain, right, and it means the Gordon Food Service customer can get really fresh product, that is, you know, literally kind of farm fresh, and have that all year round, which is pretty amazing, right. 

21:26
So we have farms with Gordon Food Service name of Michigan, wisconsin, ohio, and then, as we talk today I don't know when this podcast will be released, but next Tuesday we have the ribbon cutting ceremony for a new farm in Kentucky, which will be on June 6th. So, yeah, we have a lovely relationship with them. It's, you know, they like the sort of innovation and new technology that we bring, but we also understand that they bring 125 years of experience and how to get food to customers, right, and so it's a very sort of mutually respectful relationship for both doing things that is not in the others. Dna necessarily, and yeah, it's a wonderful thing. 

22:13 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's incredible, And congratulations on the upcoming ribbon cutting. That's very exciting. So that will be. is it your fifth or sixth farm? 

22:22 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, fifth. Yeah, we have two in Michigan and one in the other locations. 

22:26 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's fantastic. You're taking on massive and powerful companies in the agro business like Dole Foods and Chiquita Del Monte Driscoll's. Are you ready to poke the dragon? Because they're going to have to, at some point, pivot as well because, like you said, being able to farm conventional methods and what you called field farming, that is going to be threatened. 

22:52 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, i think it's less about poking the dragon, i think it's more about we're very grateful that we got the relationship with Gordon Food series, because that is allowing us to prove this sort of future of farming, but prove that at a commercial scale today. And so we're sort of signposting a pathway for all of these other companies And I'm not going to say who, but, like two of the companies that you mentioned in that list have been on our farms in the last kind of month, you know, wrapping their head, or I'm going to go ahead and say, hey, does this work and could this apply to us? Now, you know, what is interesting is that where indoor farming technology is today, it's kind of economically viable for crops like salads, right, leafy greens, herbs, crops that really don't have a lot of biomass, because as we're growing these crops, basically what's happening inside the farm, without getting lost in the science, is the plant is taking energy from a light source and converting that into biomass. So things like lettuces and herbs and leafy greens not too much biomass doesn't need that much energy, right Which means we can get that product to market at a very competitive price because our energy bill isn't so high, right. 

24:11
The minute you start to think about pineapples or bananas. right, these things are the capabilities there. right, but maybe not the economics today. right, because you need so much energy to create all that biomass that you know I could grow bananas for you, but I have to charge you $50 a banana to get my money back. right, it doesn't make sense today. But that's the beauty about being this technology company is that you can, you know, every day, use technology to keep bending those cost curves and make those sort of like heavier fruits and vegetables, if you like, sort of more and more feasible, right? So the way I kind of think about Michael is imagine walking into, you know, whole Foods or Maya or any supermarket you know, pick your one and sort of look at every fruit and vegetable and line them up from the lightest to the heaviest, and that is essentially our product roadmap for the next 50 years. That's kind of the way to think about it. 

25:12 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I love it. I was going to ask about when I can get some square roots root vegetables. 

25:17 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
We can get them today. I'm not. We can grow them for you if you can afford them. 

25:25 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I don't think so. So let's get back to climate change, which you opened with, and let's talk about the environmental impact. I want to put some numbers here so that we can kind of start to wrap our heads around this. Of the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases that are emitted globally each year, agriculture contributes about 19% Of that. About 14% and you may have different figures 14% is from livestock farming. So the remaining 5% or 2.5 billion tons of greenhouse gases comes directly from farming produce, and those figures don't include the indirect impacts like deforestation and soil degradation and food transportation, as you think about that, and the catalyst for starting this company. And you've spoken about energy. how do you think about refining that impact And do you have an idea of what is the carbon footprint for a square roots farm? 

26:30 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah. So when we started the business, intuitively it felt like we would have less impact on the planet. You eliminate transport, you eliminate food waste. There's like pretty much zero waste in our system, whereas, like I've said, with the sort of industry and agriculture system, there's 40% food waste And that waste just ends up in landfill and then emits methane, which is kind of like one of the worst greenhouse gases. So, intuitively, it's like, if you grow everything locally and have no waste, that's got to be a better way. And then a couple of years ago, we sort of decided that, okay, it's not enough to wave our hands around and say, okay, intuitively, this feels like a better system, we've got to start measuring this stuff. So we actually worked with a company called Watershed who measured the CO2 emissions for our entire footprint, everything that we do, and it turned out actually that almost half of our emissions came from the construction of new farming facilities, the steel that is used in the walls of the shipping container, the concrete pad that we use for foundations, and so one of the first things that we did was look at the design of our farms and engineer the design to reduce the CO2. So the new farm that we opened in Kentucky has got carbon capturing concrete foundation pad, for example. So now it's a positive rather than negative, so I can talk about a laundry list of things. 

28:14
That was kind of the biggest bucket for us. The second bucket was energy. Right, no, these. If I'm a field farmer, my source of energy comes from the sun. If I am an indoor farmer, my source of energy comes from LED lights, and so somewhere I need the energy for that. And so what we've done with Gordon Food Service is we've sort of had a really great agreement with them where they're actually deploying solar farms with battery storage back up on every facility where we're building a square roots farm, and so our farms then come off the grid and are powered by on-site removal. So that's not in place today, but the first of those projects starts later this year, which is great. So that kind of deals with that problem. 

29:03
And the third one for us was distribution. Actually, right, so although we eliminate millions of miles, millions of food miles, and we still have distribution, and so that is all about moving your distribution fleet to EVs. It's kind of like a systematic program there. So basically what we kind of did was say, okay, intuitively, this feels better. However, let's measure it and see, actually, where the biggest corporates are right now. Then we know what to focus on. So now let's focus on it And, by sort of systematically ticking things off the list, reducing the CO2 for sort of every step along the way, and we think we're at the point where, sort of 2030, you have a carbon neutral company, right, sort of carbon neutral way of producing this local food across multiple locations in the world, which is pretty exciting actually. That's phenomenal. 

29:59 - Michael Koenig (Host)
By 2030, that's amazing, congratulations. You're not there yet, but it's a giant, giant leap forward. Let's get back to your partnership with Amanda. What should our COOs and ops listeners know about how to best work with their CEO? 

30:17 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Great, question Probably the wrong person to ask it to. I mean, sometimes I feel very sorry. No, i mean, all joking aside, i think one of the things that Amanda and I do pretty regularly is co-author what we call the Square Roots playbook, and the playbook forces us to answer six or seven questions, starting with you know what is our mission, you know how are we trying to make the world a better place? Let's make sure we can all articulate that And, broadly speaking, that should never change for the lifetime of a company, right? Then the second question then is okay, what are our values? right, as we're trying to tackle that mission, what does it feel like to be at Square Roots? How do we show up for each other? How do we tackle problems? How do we get it done? How do we sort of watch the culture, basically? 

31:20
And then we move into areas, like you know what's important right now? Right, you know what are the OKRs? We tend to sort of have sort of rolling six month OKRs, right, just like you know what's kind of like the next base that we're all trying to get to, and then how does that translate to department goals and then ultimately a budget, right? And so we can sort of, you know, every six months or so, sit down and sort of re-author that book. You know some of it never changes, some of it is going to change, you know, every six months. But what it means then is that you know that's not just an exercise that I do with Amanda. I would like the whole executive team will come together and do that And OK, we're now on the same page. Right, boom Off we go again. You know let's run fast, but we all understand sort of where the business is heading next right. 

32:15 - Michael Koenig (Host)
I love that And I love that, even though you've set the mission and the values and they aren't hopefully changing too often, you still revisit it right, Because everything else is in service of that And it's kind of it's a good reminder. Oh, if we're going to focus on something and it's not in service of achieving that mission right, Then why are we doing it? So I love that, Yeah. 

32:41 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, you know, and you can come up with all sorts of business justifications, like for why you might want to take this shortcut or do it that way or whatever. But you know, the downstream effect of that is that people who've joined your company for the mission will then look at what you're doing and go, well, that's not what I signed up for, right? And then you have all sorts of you know problems there, right? So yeah, i think it really kind of pays you to make you know to very deliberately, very sort of explicitly rearticulate that mission. You hope nothing changes, no word changes. But like, it definitely pays you to get grounded in there. 

33:18 - Michael Koenig (Host)
you know, every six months or so, And it keeps you from issuing a square root crypto coin, so that's always good too, yeah. 

33:27 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
I actually think in one of our term sheets one of the reins were explicitly banned from doing that anyway, So no danger there Making it into term sheets. God knows why or how that was in there. That's incredible. I was just like okay, i don't think. I need to worry about that line, that ain't in my plan. That's amazing. 

33:47 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Well, listen, it's time for my last in favor question. We've all had those moments in a leadership position where something crazy has come up and we've just thought that is insane. Never thought I'd see that. Do you have one that you can share with us? 

34:04 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
I was thinking about this last night, right for your listeners. You know you gave me the heads up that this question was coming. I wanted to come up with something original for you but honestly, like, did any of us see a global pandemic happening? And I'm sorry that might be a very boring answer Like I can't get over it because that was still impacted by it. I mean, i remember that day, at that time, 80, 90% of our revenue was coming from selling food to restaurants, and then one day, in one day, they all closed. 

34:40
So now you have to figure out okay, there's a pandemic. I've got my operations to figure out how on earth we're going to keep people safe, right, and it's not as easy as just saying, okay, everyone's now working from home because we've got farms. You kind of need to be there. So how do we sort of re architect every workflow to ensure social distancing and what are the health and safety procedures? You know how do we get people comfortable with this, and you know, right. So there's that side of the business. And then on the other side, literally all my customers have just gone away, right. So now we have to think about an entirely new go to market. So yeah, that's pretty crazy. There are a couple of pretty crazy weeks, there must be said. So I'd love to give you kind of a pithier or you know a funnier answer, but I'm just like I'm still living with this crap, right? 

35:36 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Yeah, that's wild. I mean when you think about it in one single day, how all of your customers just go away. But then there are those physical operations. You can't just send your farmers home to work remotely. There are actually crops that need to continue, and these are end of the farm. 

35:52 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
That's right, that's right. 

35:54 - Michael Koenig (Host)
So there's climate controlled informs. It's not just oh well, let's open up the windows. No, that completely breaks everything. 

36:01 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Yeah, so that's crazy. That is totally. And actually back to some of the questions that how Amanda and I work on. So I was actually on a ski trip the week the world shut down. You know I went on holiday and I was like if COVID saying, looks like it could be a problem, and then you know, on the ski trip I remember someone saying, oh, it was that. It was actually like Tom Hanks got COVID and it was like, because it's a celebrity like America now thinks this is real Right, and it was like, oh shit. And then five minutes later, the NBA is closed and this closed and this closed and this closed. And I remember getting a phone call from Amanda and she was like I know you're offline this week and trying not to follow the news, but you need to get your ass back to New York. Like no, just ski off the hill, ski to an airport and come back. We're in like an all day warring session tomorrow. And you know we figured it out. Yeah, it was pretty extraordinary time. 

36:59 - Michael Koenig (Host)
That's exactly what you want in a COO is someone who guards your flank, flags the risk and gets everyone together to get the hell through it. So sounds like Amanda is incredible. Well, well done, Good job hiring Well everyone. There you have it. Thanks for listening to Between Two COOs and a very special thank you to our guest, Tobias Peggs. Tobias, where can people go to keep up with you? 

37:23 - Tobias Peggs (Guest)
Sure. So as a company, we're very active on social media. You can follow us at square roots grow on Insta and Twitter and all the rest of it, and our website is square roots growcom Fantastic. 

37:34 - Michael Koenig (Host)
Well, tune in next time for our next COO or potentially CEO chat on Between Two COOs, and be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcast, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. Just visit BetweenTwoCOscom for more And if you have a minute, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast and tell others about the show so you can get great advice from phenomenal operators. Thanks for listening and until next time. So long,