The Production Board (TPB) / Canna

David Friedberg's entrepreneurial journey began at UC Berkeley studying astrophysics, but the dot-com boom redirected him toward tech. After an early failed venture called "telebomb.com" (a telecommunications services aggregator), he built Kadanga, a Q&A website he coded himself using PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and MySQL. The site made money through AdWords advertising and helped him land a job at Google in 2004, just before the company's IPO.

At Google, Friedberg joined a three-person corporate development team when the company had under 1,000 employees. His most impactful work came from pitching Google Analytics to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Despite initial objections about third-party tracking cookies being "evil," Friedberg convinced the founders that analytics would improve user experience by helping advertisers optimize their websites. Google acquired Urchin for approximately $25 million, and within a year, Friedberg demonstrated through analysis by chief economist Hal Varian that Google Analytics increased AdWords revenue by half a billion dollars. He also worked on acquisitions like DMarc, a radio advertising platform that later became contentious in litigation.

During his Google years, Friedberg learned crucial lessons about infrastructure advantages and audacious thinking from Larry Page. Page always zoomed out 100X to ask bigger questions—like "why can't we search all the world's books?"—rather than focusing on near-term roadmaps. Friedberg absorbed this philosophy of "daring to dream."

After Google, Friedberg co-founded Climate Corporation, which applied machine learning and satellite imagery to agricultural data. The company was acquired by Monsanto for approximately $1 billion. He later founded Metro Mile, an insurance company tracking driving patterns, which was backed by major investors and eventually acquired by Lemonade.

Friedberg established The Production Board (TPB) as a foundry—combining R&D and venture building. In late 2018 or 2019, over dinner with a UC Davis professor, Friedberg learned about research from Munich's Technical University showing a wine's 500 compounds could be reduced to just 37-40 without sensory difference. He immediately envisioned a "Star Trek replicator for beverages."

Launching a three-year development program with Lance (a scientist in residence), TPB spent the first year validating the chemistry. They used gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS) to analyze thousands of beverages—wines, beers, sodas, teas, juices, everything—to understand their molecular composition. The chemical insight: all beverages are 99% water (or water plus sugar/alcohol) and only 1% is the chemistry that determines flavor, smell, color, and texture. Moreover, while a wine might have 500 compounds, only 30-40 matter to human taste buds.

The team built spreadsheet models proving the economics could work and solved multiple hardware challenges: how to dispense microliter and submicroliter volumes of flavor compounds into a water stream in 15-20 seconds, maintain taste quality, ensure high precision, keep costs low, and deliver cold beverages.

Canna (named after the Galilean town where Jesus turned water into wine) launched pre-orders during this interview. The device pricing: $499 for the first 10,000 units, then $799 after. A $99 refundable reservation fee secured early access.

The model is subscription-like but usage-based: three cartridges (master flavor, sugar, alcohol) auto-ship to customers monthly. The flavor cartridge lasts 1-3 months; sugar and alcohol cartridges last about a month. Customers are charged per drink consumed—estimated 25-50% cheaper than retail prices for equivalent beverages. The system handles all logistics invisibly.

Friedberg sees this as analogous to the media shift from broadcast (three TV channels) to cable to YouTube, where infinite niche content thrives. Today, retail stores have ~150 slots for wine, beer, coffee, and soda—dominated by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Minute Maid. Canna will enable thousands of brands on its platform, including user-generated ones. Podcasters, influencers, and niche creators can launch proprietary beverages instantly. Early brand partners were not yet disclosed but announced during the interview week.

Beyond consumer choice, the environmental impact is significant: localized production eliminates trucking, storage, and packaging waste. Instead of shipping physical beverages globally, users combine home tap water with lightweight flavor cartridges—a massive reduction in resource consumption and carbon footprint, aligning with Friedberg's core mission to "change systems of production on planet Earth."

Generation One ships early next year, with full working prototypes completed. The device is chilled and carbonated (or still), works with three cartridges, and offers hundreds of drink varieties from coffee to cocktails, with personalization options like caffeine levels, vitamin boosts, and sugar reduction.