Farewell, Agrilyst. Hello, Dwell & Lightstock!

Yesterday, April 20th, was my last day at Agrilyst.

I’ll try not to be a tech industry cliché with an overwrought blog post about leaving one job and “moving on to new adventures.” But I do want to commemorate my 21 months at Agrilyst with some standout memories:

• 🐻 My first company retreat at Bear Mountain State Park, just a few days after I joined, where I laughed harder than I can ever remember laughing as we played ridiculous team-building games. That was when I realized that the environment at Agrilyst was going to be much different than I was used to.
• 📈 Seeing how much traction our annual State of Indoor Farming survey would get, and being really proud of my role in bringing the website and PDF to life.
• 👥 Working with all those great people. I won’t list them all by name, but I feel truly privileged to have been able to work with such a smart, driven, caring group of colleagues.
• 🗝 Doing an escape room as a team-building exercise. The resulting pictures are ridiculous.
• 🚒 Sleeping at a creepy Airbnb in Brooklyn during one of our company on-sites. It was a reconditioned old firehouse, which sounds cool and Ghostbusters-esque until you get there and realize that the pipes made a noise like a tea kettle the entire night.
• 📸 Going to Indoor Ag Con in Las Vegas and finding out we had Agrilyst groupies. Seriously — one customer rushed up to our booth and insisted on getting a picture with us to send home.
• 😊 Hearing from customers who genuinely loved our product. When doing product work, it’s easy to fixate on everything you know could be better, and forget to appreciate everything that’s already working. Having customers tell you they’re happy is a good way to snap out of that.

When I started at Agrilyst I’d been reading a lot of Michael Pollan books, and this job seemed like the perfect way to fuse my skills and talents with my interest in the food and agriculture industry. I love that I can say that I worked for a company that genuinely cares for farmers, and is doing something important to help feed the next billion humans.

So what’s next?

I’ll be joining the team at Little Lea, a company that builds two products:

Lightstock, a stock photography site aimed at churches and other faith organizations. Their photos are really solid, and free of the cheesiness that has unfortunately become a hallmark of church graphic design — other organizations source images from them too, including National Geographic and Penguin Random House.

Dwell is an audio Scripture app — think Audible or Overcast, but specifically for the Bible. It started as a Kickstarter, and became the fourth most highly-backed app of all time. This is something I’ve wanted for a while, ever since I tried to find a good audio Bible and found one read by James Earl Jones… only to realize that it had background music of cheap MIDI renditions of early 90s worship songs. Dwell is the remedy to that. Think of it as NeuBible for audio.

If you know me well, you probably know that I’m passionate about helping the Church pursue excellence. For too long, believers have been willing to settle for music, art, and design that’s a pale imitation of what the rest of the world has to offer. In my conversations with the Dwell/Lightstock team, I was impressed by their dedication to doing truly excellent work — not because they want to outdo anyone, but because they want to do justice to their calling. I love that. I’m thrilled to be joining such a team — I think I can both learn a lot and offer a lot. And I’m looking forward to doing my part for a cause I care about — helping the Church to rekindle its love and appreciation of beauty.

Let’s go!