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Feel Good

Reading about mission-driven startups is a lot like watching feel-good movies. You can feel complacent about having your heart in the right place and caring about things that matter without having contributed anything at all. This one is about replanting trees at a mind-boggling pace to undo the ills of deforestation. At first blush you would think this is all a done deal and there are millions of acres of land that this drone has successfully greened and there will be before and after pictures to prove it. That would be more than a feel-good movie. So reality as it often turns out is a lot more modest

"After launching the company in early 2019, the small team had a working prototype by the middle of the year and ran a pilot test in August, followed by larger tests in September and October. So far, Ahlstrom says, they’ve seen high rates of survival in controlled studies, and are hoping to replicate those in real world settings."

It begs the question why a credible publication would write about a re-forestation startup under a year of launch even before the show has got on the road. Time scale does matter here- we are not talking about the next coolest coffee machine that can pour the more perfect espresso. A tree is going to take whatever number of years it takes to mature. No drone technology will speed that process up. Consequently, evidence of any of this working is several years out. But the times demand happy stories couched as news so we feel better about what lies ahead.
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