Fifteen years ago, I was an out-of-place finance reporter in San Francisco, trying to reinvent myself as a tech journalist. That’s when I scored a lucky meeting with Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, two former Apple engineers with a wild idea to make thermostats sexy.
Last week, I went to see Matt Rogers again. He’s still turning ordinary household objects into extraordinary gadgets at his latest startup, Mill.
When I first met Fadell and Rogers above a store above the Town and Country Village Mall across from Stanford, the two were on a quest to build internet-connected home devices at their startup Nest. They didn’t know me, but they let me in, and that act of generosity changed my career.
“I’m gonna show you something, but you have to promise not to write about it. Yet,” Tony said at that first meeting 15 years ago.
I agreed, and they took me into a side room where an early version of the Nest Thermostat sat on a table. I wrote a big story when they launched a few months later, and Google eventually bought Nest for $3.2 billion.
I was reminded of all this when I saw Matt again on Friday. A lot has changed since we first met. After the Google exit, Matt started a group called Incite that tackles climate change. And he worked on transportation policy with former US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
Some things stay the same, though. At Mill, Matt is trying to make food waste sexy (like an iPhone) through a high-tech trash can that turns your uneaten scraps into sweet-smelling powdery sediment.
As you enter the office, there’s a giant yellow sun logo hanging from the ceiling. “That’s the Walmart logo,” Matt said, pointing up at it. “This is Walmart’s old e-commerce office in Silicon Valley, and we didn’t bother to take the sign down.”
I had another flashback. I’d been here before as part of my quest to refashion myself into a tech writer. Over a decade earlier I’d walked this same floor with Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, another pair of tech entrepreneurs, who ran Walmart’s e-commerce incubator in Silicon Valley.
The “stink bomb” area
Back in the present day, Matt took me on a tour and introduced me to Adam Mittleman, Mill’s head of engineering (another former Apple designer).
I saw testing areas where the devices are opened, closed, rotated, heated, shaken, and dropped to ensure they last for years.
We visited the “stink bomb” area, where chemical engineers work on new ways to keep your food scraps smelling fragrant, not foul.
They showed me a tub of old food and pointed to a giant bin of the finished product: light brown “food grounds” that are 80% lighter and completely dry. This can be stored for months and put on gardens and other areas to fertilize plants. Or Mill can pick it up for you, for a fee, and put it to use elsewhere.
The key is transforming wet, sticky old food into much lighter material that doesn’t go off. The sleek Mill device can turn 100 pounds of food waste into roughly 20 pounds of dry “grounds.”
Making food scraps lighter
Why does this matter? It turns out that a big chunk of the cost of collecting and processing garbage is related to food waste. It’s heavy and goes off so quickly that garbage trucks must run collection routes regularly, and they burn more diesel carrying that extra weight.
If Mill can turn everyone’s food scraps into much lighter, storable material, then garbage collection can happen less frequently and use less energy.
Mill Food Recyclers are currently in tens of thousands of homes. Customers either buy the device upfront, for about $1,000, or they rent it for $35 a month.
The fanatical, Apple-style attention to detail was evident everywhere at the office. Mill engineers have spent years designing and re-designing every part to meet Matt’s simple but ambitious promise: If you can eat it, you can throw it in a Mill Food Recycler and (in the words of the late Steve Jobs) it just works.
That includes processing big sloppy stuff like watermelons. Even gelatin, which apparently is very hard to turn into dry powder. Matt keeps a jar of gelatin in the corner of the office as a reminder — along with a bunch of other food items that are challenging to recycle.
What’s next for Mill? The startup has raised more than $100 million, enough to fund big plans.
Matt wouldn’t say much, other than the goal is to scale from here. Designing and making hardware is hard. To be really profitable, you have to sell in huge volumes (like an iPhone).
At first, Mill sounds quixotic. But there’s potential, if you think different. Dishwashers were expensive, luxury items when first sold to homeowners. Now, everyone has one.
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