Known in Silicon Valley as the first Google CEO, David Friedberg is also the founder of the agricultural insurance company Climate Corporation and sold to Monsanto for $1 billion in 2013.

Friedberg is also known as the King of Quinoa, a nickname he was given by the popular All-In podcast discussing entrepreneurship, having earned the title when he bought Canadian quinoa supplier NorQuin in 2014.

Friedberg is also still chairman of Norquin and president of Metromile, the software-based auto insurance company he started a decade ago and went public earlier this year.

All of these projects are not enough for Friedberg's ambitions. He now spends the bulk of his time on a project he started 4 years ago with the help of an old friend and co-founder of Google, Larry Page.

Production Board Company

After leaving Monsanto in 2015, Friedberg began speaking with Page about a way to build and fund a whole new set of startups focused on agricultural technology, sustainability, and advances in the life sciences.

He didn't want to go back to Google, so Page, through his parent company Alphabet, agreed to help fund a holding company that Friedberg would run.

Friedberg launched The Production Board (TPB) in 2017. The company, which Friedberg describes as the core of the project, raised $300 million from AlphaBit along with Investors including Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global.

Neither he nor his investors need the money, Friedberg said, but they are all trying to find solutions to some of the most dangerous existential challenges on the planet.

With climate disasters emerging around the world and other parts of the world becoming uninhabitable, TPP is investing in science and research to create new food, agricultural, and health systems.

Google co-founder Larry Page is a strong supporter of Friedberg's idea of ​​creating TPP (Reuters)

A hunter of scholars and talents

Friedberg explains that TBB has only 15 employees, but its companies have hundreds of workers combined.

His strategy is to seek out and hire top scientists, pursue scientific research trends for breakthroughs in genomics and life sciences, and then fund research and development to determine if his team is able to develop a marketable product.

But if more people are needed in an area, TPP will set up a company and appoint a CEO and management team, while continuing to provide central services for legal, human resources and finance.

“The goal of the company is to focus on building a product or making it fit for the market, and then over time and as the idea matures, we start finding some jobs to run this company so they can operate independently,” Friedberg said.

TPP's current investments include Soylent, the meal-alternative beverage and nutrition company, and Culture Biosciences' bioreactor lab.

TPP has also started with the Triplebar Project, a company that uses biotechnology to try to make food production, processing and packaging more sustainable.

To power Triple Bar, Friedberg teamed up with Jeremy Agreste, a scientist and former fellow at Harvard University whose research was one of the most important in the field of biotechnology.

Finding and hiring talent is an essential part of his job, Friedberg says. "I love science...finding great scientists and trying to get them to do this work is fun for me and a good use of my time."