Photo: Jeffrey Sanderson and his father, John, both work at TechFarms.
Pommes fondant.
For cooking enthusiast Jeffrey Sanderson, they are a favorite side dish — potatoes sectioned into chunks, infused with au jus and cooked to produce a crispy exterior and a creamy center.
“They’re delectable,” said Jeffrey, who favors French cuisine and Creole-influenced Southern cooking.
Both his fascination with culinary art and his arrival at TechFarms make perfect sense. Jeffrey is a lifelong tinkerer who loves the design-build-test-refine cycle.
When cooking, he respects chefs by first closely following recipes and preparing dishes “the way their creators intended them.” Then, unable to help himself, he plays around with variations, paying attention to both the science of cooking and what his gut tells him.
Entrepreneurship and product development can proceed in much the same way. What starts with an idea leads to sketches, plans, prototyping, proof of concept, market analysis, capital acquisition and startup launch.
At TechFarms, Jeffrey is emerging as a utility infielder or a “jack-of-all-trades,” as he says, and has become involved in product refinement and testing, website development and more generally, problem solving.
TechFarms founder and owner Steve Millaway anticipates that Jeff will become part of a team focused on AI and its ever-widening circle of applications.
Asked to describe a great day at work, Jeffrey hesitated not a second before describing time spent working with a colleague to solve issues related to Bluetooth in meeting a deadline and making a product ready for a demonstration.
“The collaboration, it was just a great experience,” he said.
Jeffrey appreciates the opportunity to learn from others at TechFarms and to tap into their expertise.
“I have a mechanically inclined brain and can visualize how I want things to be, but I want to become better able to produce my vision,” Jeffrey said, noting that he hopes to concentrate on software, firmware and mechanical design at TechFarms.
Landon McCoy, the CEO at Chaos Audio, a TechFarms incubator tenant, brought Jeffrey to Steve Millaway’s attention. The friends got to know one another and traded advice when both were presiding over startups. (Jeff once had a vapes business in California.) When Steve learned how quickly Jeff had developed an email response bot for Chaos Audio, he knew he wanted to meet him.
Jeffrey is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity from Dakota State University, a school that specializes in that field. He has plans to pursue a master’s degree in computer science and to one day own a home — one large enough to accommodate dinner parties and with a kitchen to his liking.
