You join a foodtech startup on Monday. There’s funding. A team. Patented
technology. A pilot machine that makes something nobody else can make. There are
no products. There are no customers. What do you do for the first 100 days? My
answer after 20 years of launching new products: try very hard not to launch one.

Days 1–20: Break the machine
First, forget what the pitch deck says the technology does. Use it. Taste everything.
Change the inputs. Push the process too far. Calculate what comes out of the other
end and what it actually costs. Talk to the inventor. Then talk to whoever has to
clean the machine. I want to know what this thing is unusually good at. And where it
sucks. Not its potential. Its capability.

Days 21–40: Leave the building
Now look for problems. Not markets that look enormous on a slide. Not consumers
who say they care about sustainability. Find places where somebody is already
spending money. Could we make an existing food cheaper? Tastier? Easier to
manufacture? More nutritious? Could we replace an ingredient somebody hates
buying? The wrong question is: what can we make with our technology? The better
one is: who has a problem our weird machine happens to solve?

Days 41–60: Make too many things
Now I want products. Lots of them. Ugly prototypes. Wrong formats. Applications
that probably won't work. Get them in front of chefs, manufacturers, buyers and
consumers. We're not building a portfolio. We're looking for a reaction.

Days 61–80: Learn to hear bullshit
Foodtech has a dangerous sentence “that's really interesting”. It sounds positive.
Often it means nothing. I'm looking for “can you make 500 kilos”? That's not
validation either. But we're getting warmer.

Days 81–100: Kill almost everything
This is where I'd expect the company to become smaller. One application. One
customer problem. One production route. And a long list titled: NOT NOW.
Talking Heads didn't start with Remain in Light. They started as three people playing
stripped-down, slightly strange songs at CBGB. David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina
Weymouth. Jerry Harrison and Brian Eno came later. The expanded instrumentation
and African polyrhythms came later. First they had to discover what was interesting
about Talking Heads.

Day 1, I want 50 ideas for what the technology could become. Day 100, I want one
product somebody wants to buy. Then repeat this cycle.

Jere Vento is a food founder, operator, investor and advisor. He's also a musician, pizza geek, whisky enthusiast and culture critic. His Factory Settings column explores why food startups and high school bands have so much in common; both dream of starting a revolution without quite understanding how mass culture works. And why changing the world is considerably harder than writing a great song.