Larry Ellison’s leap into farming along with his firm, Sensei Farms, serves up a basic reminder: being a genius in a single area doesn’t imply success in one other. As the WSJ reports, the Oracle co-founder got down to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island, which he scooped up for $300 million again in 2012. Eight years and greater than $500 million later, the venture remains to be floundering.

Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robotic harvesters feeding the world sustainably. As a substitute, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls — like Wi-Fi points and photo voltaic panels battered by Lanai’s winds — and rookie errors. Assume greenhouses designed for Israel’s desert local weather, when Lāna‘i is usually muggy. The corporate additionally combined mature and child crops collectively, 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, studies the WSJ. Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now seem on the island’s few native markets and eating places. However fixed delays, management shake-ups, and dear blunders, together with hashish develop homes that wanted to be gutted and rebuilt, spotlight a tricky fact: even bottomless funding is not any match for the onerous classes of a specialised business.

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