Larry Ellison’s leap into farming along with his firm, Sensei Farms, serves up a basic reminder: being a genius in a single area doesn’t imply success in one other. As the WSJ reviews, the Oracle co-founder got down to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million again in 2012. Eight years and greater than $500 million later, the challenge continues to be floundering.
Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robotic harvesters feeding the world sustainably. Instead, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls — like Wi-Fi points and photo voltaic panels battered by Lanai’s winds — and rookie errors. Think greenhouses designed for Israel’s desert local weather, when Lāna‘i is usually muggy. The firm additionally combined mature and child crops collectively, a blueprint for a pest paradise.
Sensei, co-founded by a medical physician and led at the moment by a tech exec who runs Sensei from Boston, has had small wins, reviews the WSJ. Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now seem on the island’s few native markets and eating places. But fixed delays, management shake-ups, and expensive blunders, together with hashish develop homes that wanted to be gutted and rebuilt, spotlight a tricky fact: even bottomless funding is not any match for the laborious classes of a specialised business.
Above: Larry Ellison and his co-founder in Sensei Farms, David Agus
