The lesson of Larry Ellison’s misadventures in farming

Larry Ellison’s leap into farming with his company, Sensei Farms, serves up a classic reminder: being a genius in one arena doesn’t mean success in another. As the WSJ reports, the Oracle co-founder set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012. Eight years and more than $500 million later, the project is still floundering.

Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robot harvesters feeding the world sustainably. Instead, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls — like Wi-Fi issues and solar panels battered by Lanai’s winds — and rookie mistakes. Think greenhouses designed for Israel’s desert climate, when Lāna‘i is typically muggy. The company also mixed mature and baby plants together, a blueprint for a pest paradise.

Sensei, co-founded by a medical doctor and led currently by a tech exec who runs Sensei from Boston, has had small wins, reports the WSJ. Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now appear at the island’s few local markets and restaurants. But constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders, including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt, highlight a tough truth: even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.

Above: Larry Ellison and his co-founder in Sensei Farms, David Agus