For one of the most fun conversations I’ve had on the podcast so far, today I was joined by Matthew Rooda, the CEO and Founder of SwineTech. Rooda’s career began at Hawkeye Community College, a time in which he worked on a pork worked on a pig farm caring for sows and delivering piglets - perfect preparation for med school. It was also at Hawkeye that he met his co-founder. The two would then transfer to the University of Iowa, a place where Rooda would learn that he was not meant to be a med student after all, but a founder. An email came; a startup was pitched; an accelerator program happened (over a missed semester); and half a million dollars (raised) later, SwineTech was born. The focus of Swinetech was to reduce cases of overlaying - the event where a sow rolls over and kills a piglet. However, there was a bit of a disconnect - they were saving all these piglets but farms were not capitalizing on the additional ROI. So SwineTech expanded their services and now provides advanced management solutions to pork farms.
