Upcoming Substack Lives & SFTW Convos
No-Code for June 26th, 2026
Welcome to No-Code, Software is Feeding the World’s occasional round-up of curated topics. Today, I want to highlight some upcoming programming.
Substack Live with Mike Lee, Food Futurist, today at 10 AM Pacific
What the hell is a Food Futurist???
This was my first reaction when I stumbled upon Mike Lee’s writings. I especially loved his essays on how food systems are both fragile and anti-fragile by design. When I connected 1-on-1 with Mike Lee, I realized we had been thinking about similar system design problems in food and agriculture for some time now.
So we decided to discuss these topics live on Substack Live. Neither Mike nor I have done a Substack Live before, so it should be a fun experience.
Mike is the founder of The Future Market, former head of Innovation & New Ventures at Chobani, and author of Mise: On the Future of Food. He grew up inside a multi-generational restaurant family in Detroit and has spent two decades watching the gap between the pitch deck and the dinner table.
We will explore the following questions in this conversation.
Software’s real footprint in food. The gap between the pitch deck and the dinner table. Which “concept cars” actually reached the production line, and where the disruption was theater.
How food companies innovate and whether the signal reaches the farm.
MAHA & GLP-1s. A policy-and-culture movement and a class of drugs are both reshaping what America eats. It is rippling all the way upstream to what gets grown.
The supply chain underneath it. Can a system built to push volume out even sense and act on a pull toward quality?
I hope many of you will join us today.
Substack Live with Preethy Iyer, Advocate of Climate Resilient Agriculture, and Women Farmers in India on June 29, 2026, at 8 AM Pacific
I am spending a lot of time thinking about the challenges facing Indian farmers and the role of technology through my AI advisory work with the Gates Foundation in India and Africa.
The first time I met Preethy was when we appeared on Venky Ramachandran’s podcast. Preethy has a very interesting story about how she went from being in tech to helping women farmers. I was really surprised by her observations about the differences between women and men farmers in India. (Men, we don’t show up very well, which is not very surprising!)
So I decided to have her 1x1 on another Substack Live, scheduled for 8 AM Pacific on June 29, 2026. It will be 8:30 PM India time on June 29, 2026, which is supposedly the best time for folks in India.
We will explore the following topics in this conversation.
What is a Kai Thota, and why did she choose this framing for her work?
What is the big gap in understanding about farming between AgTech and farmers, and what are its implications?
How and why do women farm differently from men, and why did Preethy decide to do collective farming?
Why is entry into and exit out of farming in India so difficult, and what are its implications?
Technology adoption, the role of AI, and what it misses.
What is the role of Digital Public Infrastructure, and what does she think the future of Indian agriculture will be?
I hope many of you will join us on Monday.
Two SFTW Convos coming up
An SFTW Convo is a slightly different format from an SFTW Live. It is presented in written form and is a lightly edited version of a conversation I had with an agrifoodtech leader. I typically enrich the transcript with additional links and context.
SFTW Convo with Eshan Samaranayake of Better Bite Ventures
Eshan is a VC at Better Bite Ventures in Hong Kong. He writes the Better Bioeconomy newsletter and has a very good handle on what’s happening in APAC.
Eshan Samaranayake came to food and agriculture by an unlikely route. He trained as a molecular biologist in Hong Kong and was drawn to the commercial side of biotech. After cutting his teeth at a food-biotech startup, he began writing a newsletter that helped him enter the venture capital industry. Today, he invests across Asia-Pacific in upstream technologies, including ingredients, fermentation, and ag inputs.
This SFTW Convo will be published on July 1, 2026. You can read previous SFTW Convos here.
SFTW Convo with Sarah Garland of Triple Helix
Sarah Garland has spent her career working on that gap. A plant scientist with a PhD in CRISPR gene editing from Cambridge and postdoctoral work at Columbia’s Earth Institute, she founded Triple Helix Institute for Agriculture, Climate, and Society. Triple Helix is a nonprofit designed to serve as the connective tissue among researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and the public. Her premise is that much of what holds agricultural technology back is coordination, capital, and trust.
I spoke with Sarah shortly after Triple Helix launched its newest experiment, an Investment Council that brings together eight investors from across the capital stack. Our conversation ranged across the origins of the organization, the economics of farmer adoption, the design of the council itself, and how a self-consciously nonpartisan group navigates a politically charged moment in food and agriculture.
This SFTW Convo will be published on July 15, 2026. You can read previous SFTW Convos here.