20 issues. 5 months.
Left Field has had one rule since day one: one new company per issue. No repeats.
Today we’re breaking that rule.
Twenty issues in, you've met a company printing houses, one turning air into jet fuel, and one sinking data centers to the ocean floor — among many other greats.
So for our 5-month anniversary, we're going back out to Left Field.
Back in Issue #17, you met TRIC Robotics — Adam Stager, Vishnu Somasundaram, Ryan Berard, and their team building autonomous UV-light robots that fight mold, mildew, and bugs in strawberry fields at night with zero chemicals. If you missed it — start here.
That issue told you what they built. This one tells you how they got there in the founder's own words.
After #17 ran, co-founder and CEO Adam Stager graciously answered a few questions I sent him. His answers were too good to leave in my DMs.
Last time, you met the robot. Today, you meet the guys who drove it to a strawberry field 3,000 miles away.
Giving credit where credit is due
Before TRIC, there were warehouses.
For about two years, Adam watched robots get deployed in manufacturing — controlled warehouse and factory environments. The easy deployment of robotics. Let's be honest, none of it is easy. But a flat floor under even light, where nothing ever surprises the machine, is the easier side of it.
Then he went back to school for a PhD with one goal: build a company that put automation to work outside the controlled box.
Because somewhere in grad school, Adam landed on the line that ended up defining the whole company:
"There are a lot of great technologies that never make it out of the lab."
Most founders trip over their idea. Adam went hunting for his. He started looking at agriculture and emailed the USDA directly, asking if they had any promising technology that just needed automation to reach the field. I'm sure he was referring to Left Field.
A researcher named Dr. Fumiomi Takeda emailed back and told him about the UV work.
"It was the perfect combination of promising science and automation to unlock it at scale."
Ten years of government research nobody had commercialized, a robotics guy who'd gone looking for exactly that, and an email that landed on the right desk.
He had his problem. What he didn't have yet was a farmer in Delaware about to tell him he was in the wrong state.
HEAD WEST, YOUNG MAN.
Didn't think twice
So westward they went.
The push came from a strawberry farmer in Delaware named Bobby Fifer. TRIC had run a small pilot on his farm, Fifer Orchards, and the results looked promising. Bobby gave Adam and his team advice that changed the direction — literally — of the company.
"He told us that if we were serious about building a company around strawberries, we needed to go to California, where most of the U.S. strawberry production is. So that's what we did. We didn't really think twice about it."
Here's what "didn't think twice" actually looked like. TRIC wasn't some huge funded operation with a pile of cash. There was no big budget, no cushion. What they had was a robot, a hunch, and a direction.
So that's what they used. They strapped their robot to the roof and pointed the car west. That was the plan.
Then, right before they left, everything changed. The National Science Foundation grant that Adam and his team applied for came through.
"That was one of the few moments in my life where I was laughing and crying at the same time. I could not believe it came through, and I was so relieved."
Laughing and crying at the same time. He described the whole startup experience in six words and didn't even mean to.
Then reality hit
The first week felt like an adventure. Then reality hit pretty hard.
Adam and his team picked two farms — one near Salinas, one in Santa Maria. It seemed smart at the time. The two regions plant a little differently, so they figured they'd learn more.
What it actually meant: a three-hour drive between the two farms, and both had to be treated every three nights.
There's also the scale. The California farms dwarfed anything they'd seen on the East Coast. The robots hated it.
“Nothing worked the way we expected. We were basically working 24/7 just to keep the machines running, and we still did not know if the technology was actually going to work in a real commercial field. Those were definitely moments where we looked at each other and thought, 'What are we doing?'"
Talk about nerve-racking. You're running a live test on a real farm, and you can't see the results right away. You just keep treating, keep driving, and keep hoping.
Not grinding toward a sure thing. Grinding toward a maybe. Broken robots, a three-hour drive past midnight, and no proof any of it mattered.
And then they saw it.
A line. On one side, the strawberries TRIC had treated. On the other, the ones it hadn't. You could see the difference standing in the field.
"That was the moment where all the chaos started to feel worth it.”
The farmers built the robot
That line in the field proved the tech worked. But the farmers taught them what to build with it.
Here's the part Adam kept coming back to — maybe something every engineer reading this should tattoo somewhere:
"Early on, we honestly wanted to build cool robots. I think a lot of engineers fall into that trap and focus on the wrong things. Farmers were the ones who helped us realize that they did not really care if the robot was cool. They cared whether we could control pests and disease in a way that worked for their farm."
So TRIC listened and started improving what actually mattered — the treatment, the reliability, the value.
The clearest example was size. The original plan was small robots. Lots of them. Little machines you could ship anywhere, swarming fields around the world. Great on paper. Challenging on real fields.
Covering a commercial farm that way would've meant tens, sometimes hundreds of little machines — more to move, more to break, more to babysit. Fun problems if you're a roboticist. Bad problems if you're the one growing the strawberries.
So Adam and his team made the robots bigger. Fewer machines, more acres, tractor-scale. Less to babysit, more strawberries covered — exactly what the farmer actually wanted.
What about the next iteration? A grower looked at the robot already driving his field every night and asked why it couldn't run vacuums too, and pull the bugs while it was at it.
"It was not just a UV robot anymore. It became a way to bring multiple non-chemical tools through the field using the same autonomous base."
That's the whole model now. Not a UV robot — a platform that happens to start with UV. Every piece of it came from listening to the person in the dirt instead of the person at the whiteboard.
Complexity isn't value. Ask a farmer.
The farm that never sleeps
So that's how they got here. And here's where Adam thinks it goes.
Right now, a farm is primarily a daytime thing. The sun comes up, the work happens, the sun goes down, the work stops. It's the same unused-resource problem Exowatt is chasing with energy storage — except TRIC's untapped resource is the night itself.
Adam looks at that dark half and sees the whole opportunity.
"As we bring new tools and autonomy to the farm, nights will become at least as productive as the daytime."
Picture it. Machines moving through the rows while everyone sleeps — treating the crop, pulling the bugs, collecting data, so the farmer wakes up to a field that's already had a full shift of work done on it. The night stops being downtime and starts being a second workday nobody has to be awake for.
And UV and vacuums are just the start. The plan is to keep stacking tools onto the same autonomous base — more sensing, more precision, eventually the harder jobs like harvest.
"If we can focus right now and build a profitable foundation in strawberries, that will be the fuel that TRIC uses to become a globally important agricultural innovation company."
Strawberries aren't the destination. They're the trailhead. And my god, it's a sweet one.
Five months in Left Field
Let's go back to the line that kicked off Adam's whole story.
"There are a lot of great technologies that never make it out of the lab."
I think that's true of almost everything. The business you talk about but never start. The race you want to run but never sign up for. Most great ideas never leave the lab — not because they're bad, but because dragging them out into the real world is hard and a little terrifying. So most of us don't.
Five months ago, Left Field was an example of that. An idea that could've stayed an idea.
Here's where it stands now: 51 subscribers. 70% open rate. 0 unsubscribes. It started with about a dozen readers and now founders and companies are engaging with it on X.
And this is a great 51 subs.
Issue #19 — Carbon Robotics — only exists because Michael D. sent it to me. A reader found the company, we told the story, and Carbon engaged with our post.
That's the loop. That's the thing I want this to become.
So — two asks for our anniversary.
Be the next reader to send me a company that belongs in Left Field. Email, social, or drop a comment below. Doesn't matter what our subscriber count is — a good tip is a good tip, and if we write it, you get the credit.
Let's get to 250. Something about that 250 number recently… Anyway — if we hit 250 subscribers, I'll buy a plane ticket to the first founder who'll have me. Boots in Left Field, camera rolling. Not a DM interview. The real deal. Might need that new camera, Peri.
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Five more months coming, and awesome companies in the queue. Too many good ideas making it out of the lab for us not to cover them.
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