Commentary

Rooting All Our Metaphors In The Language Of Nature

In a column earlier this week, the ever-thoughtful and interesting Doug Weaver asked: "What if we abandoned architectural and industrial language —  exchanges, marketplaces, servers, platforms — and rooted all our metaphors in the language of nature — gardens, forests, ecosystems? How might that change the way we act and the values we bring to the business?”

Well, it would certainly change this release I am working on:


Greg The Gardener Closes $2.5 Million Series A Financing

 Wheelbarrow to Carry Harvest

Automates The Last Mile Of Veggie Garden Operations

New York (October xx, 2014)Greg The Gardener, who lives down the street and has turned a good part of his backyard over to vegetables and flowers, today closed a $2.5 million Series A round of institutional financing led by White Flower Farms, with participation by Home Depot Incubator and Jackson Perkins Combiner.

Having broken ground on his garden in 2005, Greg The Gardener says that the investment will be used to "keep the goddamned rabbits and deer out of my cucumbers, tomatoes and squash, and replace some Russian sage that didn't make it through last winter. Oh, yeah and buy a new wheelbarrow."

Greg develops and provides a weekly TO DO list which provides his wife of 28 years and his kids, (grown, moved away, hardly keep in touch) with a way to be easily updated on which stretch of garden Greg plans to weed this Saturday and which plants face replacement.

“We've automated the last mile of garden operations, with pencil and notepad reporting and analytics,” says Greg. “Everyone in the industry has their own challenges -- from scale, to not enough rain, from trying to eliminating the last of that relentless Japanese climbing fern that my cousin Rob tried to warn me about, to keeping the guy who cuts the grass from weed-whacking too close to the trees. It's a battle out there every day, but since these morons gave me a couple of mil, I might just head to Punta Cana for a while and screw the nitrogen levels in the soil, know what I mean?"

"The garden landscape is getting more complicated every day and Greg is an essential tool to simplify this world for other dirt lovers," says Rosa Multiflora, Founder and Managing Partner of White Flower Farms Ventures. "As a founder of and investor in many seed and tool companies, it became clear to me that Greg's TO Do list is critical for today's gardeners to be successful."

Greg The Gardener lives just down the street and has a pretty nice garden, which he works his ass off maintaining from May through October. Among the many lovely scapes Greg features are perennials Peruvian lily, Astilbe chinensis, Coreopsis verticillata Moonbeam, and Digitalis purpurea Candy Mountain. He mixes in colorful annuals such as impatiens, verbena, heliotrope  and his favorite from his acid-head days in college: coleus. He has offices out back in the shed.
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