David Friedberg's Billion-Dollar Exits

A story about David Friedberg's entrepreneurial journey and his latest venture in beverage technology.

"David Friedberg was early Google pre-IPO, one of Larry Page's favorite people, working on special projects. He left and started Climate Corporation, which was basically telling farmers about weather data and giving them information about what they should be doing with their crops. They sold it to Monsanto for about $1 billion.

Then he started Metromile, an insurance company with an innovative idea - pay per mile insurance. They install a device in your car that could see if you speed a lot. If you don't speed much, you pay less for insurance. It went public via SPAC but later got bought by Lemonade for about a third of what it went public for.

Now he has an incubator called The Production Board. Google backed it for about $1 billion, along with BlackRock and others. They build companies in-house, and their latest venture is a beverage printing machine. The concept came from a dinner with a scientist who explained that most drinks are 90+% water, with only 1% being flavoring. Instead of manufacturing drinks in factories and shipping them around, they created a machine that uses your home's water supply and adds precise amounts of flavoring, sugar, and alcohol to create any beverage on demand."