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Friedberg may advise Trump, but won’t serve in administration

By Jerry Hagstrom, The Hagstrom Report
David Friedberg, a founder of the Climate Corporation and other ventures and a host of the All In podcast. Photo by Jerry Hagstrom, The Hagstrom Report
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INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — David Friedberg, a founder of the Climate Corporation and other ventures and a host of the All In podcast, said here last week that he may advise President-elect Trump’s administration, but that he does not plan to take a job in Washington.

Friedberg made the statement in reaction to a question from The Hagstrom Report after he spoke here at the Independent Professional Seed Association meeting.

President-elect Trump has announced that David Sacks, another one of the All In podcast hosts, will be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” leading to speculation that Friedberg might be up for an agriculture-related job in the administration. 



Friedberg, best known as a founder of the Climate Corporation, an agricultural data company that was sold to Monsanto, now Bayer, for $1 billion, told the independent seed professionals that they need to take chances even if that feels threatening.

Colin Steen, president of IPSA who interviewed Friedberg, noted that seed executives “have been burned” by technology companies.



“If you want to stay ahead, you have to take a lot of risks. If you want to lose, you won’t take any risks,” Friedberg said when he addressed executives from companies at which a lot of seed innovation takes place. If something works, Friedberg added, that needs to move into production on a large scale.

But on the adoption of technology, “there is a lot of bullshit out there,” and it’s important to lean on experts to help in the evaluation of proposals, he said.

Friedberg described the evolution of the Climate Corporation as “a meandering, iterative process,” which was similar to what he said in an interview with AgFunder News. 

Friedberg noted that he had invested in a quinoa company that was sold for a big loss.

“You live and learn,” he said.

He has since founded The Production Board, a San Francisco-based firm that invests in agriculture and food companies as well as other ventures.

One of the companies financed by The Production Board is Ohalo Genetics, which has developed a technology called boosted breeding, which involves bringing in the beneficial traits from each male and female plant rather than a random half of the traits from each parent.

“Boosted plants are healthier, larger, and deliver outcomes not possible with traditional breeding methods,” according to the Ohalo website.

Ohalo has partnered with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida Foundation Seed Producers Inc., and the Florida Strawberry Growers Association to leverage Ohalo’s breeding technology to combat the serious threat of neopestalotiopsis in strawberries.

Friedberg, who is now CEO of Ohalo, said he is excited about a program to try to develop potato seed to replace the usual system of planting a potato to grow another potato, a method of asexual reproduction known as vegetative propagation. Friedberg said he believes the seed technology can be applied to other plants that are now reproduced by planting a fragment of the parent plant. 

“Smallholder farmers are the most challenged by vegetative propagation,” he said, citing cassava grown in Africa as an example. “If you can do true seed in potatoes, you can do it in cassava,” Friedberg said.

Bananas are vegetatively propagated and are being devastated by disease, he noted.

Friedberg said he is running Ohalo “to change how we bring seeds to the market.” He said he is not sure how the Trump administration will handle seed policy. He added that he is “not a big believer in the government having to fix the market power problems,” viewing that situation as an opportunity for disruption and competition.

Friedberg said that “no matter how optimistic you are about AI, it will do more. Think of all the knowledge humans have created over history. AI will do this in a matter of minutes.”

Friedberg is one of the hosts or “besties” on the All In podcast, which describes itself as “insider takes on business, technology and society and interviews with the world’s most influential thinkers.”

Friedberg said the podcast started because the besties played poker together, but when COVID started some of them moved away.

In May 2023, the All In podcast featured an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was then running for president and is now Trump’s choice as Health and Human Services secretary.

The latest All In podcast is a discussion of the wild fires in Los Angeles.

David Friedberg, a founder of the Climate Corporation and other ventures and a host of the All In podcast. Photo by Jerry Hagstrom, The Hagstrom Report
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