Is Product-Market Fit All That Really Matters? A Conversation with Jorge Heraud, Co-Founder, Blue River Technology and VP, Automation and Autonomy, John Deere

It’s not often that a company comes along and develops a product so game-changing, that it not only disrupts an entire industry, but sets the bar for any other company innovating in that area. Blue River Technology is that company. The startup was launched by Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden when they were Stanford grad students. Their mission was to help farmers take on some of their biggest challenges by making agricultural equipment smarter through robotics, AI, and machine learning. Blue River focused on precision agriculture - its first product was a piece of computer vision hardware you hitched to a tractor that targeted weeds and sprayed them with surgical precision - saving farmers time, money, and product. From the earliest stages of developing their product, Jorge and Lee talked to farmers and had them test it out again and again. In 2017, ag giant John Deere acquired Blue River in what turned out to be a seminal deal in agricultural innovation. Five years later, Heraud is still with Deere - doubling down on his mission to ensure the world’s rivers are clean.