Meet the Funga Team: Sofia Reitsma

Get to know the Funga crew with this newest installment of our "Meet the Team" series. Come back monthly to meet more team members, hear about their journey to Funga, and understand their vital role in our community.

We’re big fans of the “Today I get to….” mentality. So, what do you get to do every day at Funga?

I get to collaborate with every team at Funga and build systems to connect our workflows. Together we get to build Funga’s mycelium, ensuring that our nutrients (data) are effectively absorbed, stored and shared across the whole team.

If you had to explain what Funga does to a third grader, what would you say?

Funga reunites trees with old friends! You may not see them, but trees have a lot of really good friends living underground. These friends are called microbes, and the trees and the microbes create a community that supports each other. When they’re together they grow bigger and stronger and are better able to survive big storms. Sometimes they lose touch though and while they always manage to find each other again, it can take a really long time. That’s where Funga comes in! We find the microbes and reunite them with their tree friends, so that their community can grow big and strong again.

Tell us a little bit about your life. How did it lead you to Funga?

My background is in biology. I learned as much about the biological world as I could for eight years, until it came time to build a career. At that point I had to face the fact that I hated lab work. I found ways to continue my biological education in my personal life by volunteering in the paleontology collections of a museum, building a garden, and climbing rocks full of fossils, then I began to figure out what I wanted to do for work. I decided to start anywhere that would take me.

For a while I worked in computational pathology at a biotech company, where I became very adept at identifying tumor cells. While there, I realized that the way that I had studied and explored evolutionary systems was actually very applicable to process improvement and operations management in a corporate setting. I wanted to build highly effective systems and I had studied the best of them.

From there, I jumped into the startup world. I had the opportunity to build localized supply chains around salvaged lumber, honing my more technical skills as a product manager while also traveling around the U.S. to work out solutions on the ground. I felt tremendously lucky to work in a role where I got to nerd out on systems, touch dirt, stare at trees, and work with incredibly passionate suppliers.

Eventually I came across Funga, and everything seemed to come full circle. In school, I had spent years studying the relationships between plants and fungi, briefly pursuing a career in sustainable agriculture before I fell in love with systems work. When a role opened up at Funga, it felt like a merging of worlds. I jumped at the opportunity to apply my operations skills to a company that was leveraging the symbiosis between fungi and trees to implement scalable climate solutions.

What is your favorite part of the job?

Working alongside a bunch of other “dirt” people. As a kid I spent a lot of time crouched in the dirt. I still do. I’m happiest when my hands are covered in soil or my legs are caked in desert dust, and that rings true for so many people at Funga. Even when we’re tapping away at our computers, I know that at any given moment a good portion of this team is thinking about dirt, and that makes me happy.

What is one workflow/productivity tool or trick that you can’t live without?

Coworking. Changing context from my home desk to a coffee shop, whether sitting next to strangers or friends, always unlocks something.

What trivia round would you know every answer to?

The Irish potato famine.

Can you share a favorite memory of/with the Funga team?

We recently had the opportunity to kayak through a channel of bioluminescent algae as a full team. That would have been awesome under any circumstance, but to do that with a hoard of biology nerds who I get to call colleagues made me feel very lucky to work at Funga.