Seven Meditations for Agritech Founders to review 2022 and plan for 2023

Hello ?? My name is?Venky Ramachandran ?and among other things, I write?Agribusiness Matters. ??While there are excellent agritech newsletters out there, Agribusiness Matters is read by those who seek interdisciplinary perspectives on a multi-variable, multi-agent domain called Agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change. Feel free to dig around the?2022 Agribusiness Matters Round Up ?if you are new here.

Over the last three years, having closely observed and interacted with several agritech founders in my line of work, I want to share a few meditations that could help aspiring agritech founders/agritech founders/agritech executives discover their highest potential.

Treat each of these meditations as pointers for you to do self-reflection on how you fared in 2022 and how you want to do differently in 2023.

Remember to pause between each meditation. Write your own self-reflection. You are welcome to share them with me. Or you can keep them private. Up to you.

Shall we get started?

01/ Earn Your Skin In the Game

Nobody who aspires to work in Silicon Valley gives post-fundraise PR interviews where they say things like,?“I slept in the Silicon Valley offices for 3-4 months to gain disruptive insights”.

And yet, when it comes to agribusiness, why do we hear such quotes a tad too often?

What is the underlying subtext behind such statements? Are we seriously saying that with technology, it is possible to disrupt forty-plus-year-old?mandi institutions? by studying their operations over a few weeks/ months?

Agriculture as a sector has always been the beloved bed partner of politics. And hence for any agritech founder, the bar to earn your skin in the game ALWAYS keeps increasing.

If we are building an app for smallholding farmers, how many of us have actually lived the life of a smallholding farmer to talk with authority about the problems faced by a smallholding farmer?

How many pivots have you done to discover the right set of problems that you are best suited to address?

Question for Self-Reflection: Before you propose any solution in agriculture, what did you do in 2022 and what are you planning to do in 2023 to earn your skin in the game?

02/ Agricultural Markets Come First, Technology Comes Second.

If we study the evolution of technology disruption in all other domains, we would discover that disruption happened because it was led by founders whose strengths in technology trumped their understanding of the industry domain they were operating in. Uber's genesis story is a classic case for instance.

Technology?>Domain Experience in most other industries. Except for Agriculture.

Question for Self-Reflection: In all that you do, what have you learned in 2022 about how traditional agricultural markets have worked? How have you incorporated those learnings into what you currently do with technology? How do you plan to incorporate those learnings in 2023?

03/ Inherit Your “Gharanas” (Ancestry) Carefully

From?Wikipedia:

The word?gharānā?is a system of social organisation in the?Indian subcontinent , linking musicians or dancers by lineage or apprenticeship, and more importantly by adherence to a particular musical style.

If you are a musician like me, your “Gharana”(ancestry) defines the “tradition”, the style you’ve picked up to play the instrument. “Gharana” is the tacit knowledge of how you were taught to sing or play.

If you are an agritech founder, your “Gharana” defines the company/industry whose mental model you are unconsciously/consciously trying to emulate and replicate, based on your work experience.

Most agritech founders I see in my midst often try to emulate the ”insider secrets” of the companies they have worked for in the past. If you have worked in ITC, you try to build another ITC by yet another name. If you have worked in logistics in the past, you try and solve the logistics problem in a new context setting.

If you have worked in the automotive industry, you try to solve a problem based on Toyota Production System. All of us inherit previous mental models. Nothing wrong. The point is to be conscious of?what?you are inheriting.

If you are not careful, you will inherit not just the mental model, but also the limitations associated with the mental model. In other words, you must make new mistakes. Not old mistakes.

Let’s say. You are trying to build a new ITC eChoupal. You will inherit the limitations of ITC eChoupal and its hub-and-spoke model. If you are trying to build Uber of X, if you are not conscious, you will inherit Uber’s blind spots.

Question for Self-Reflection: Which company’s model have you tried to emulate? What you have inherited from them? Most importantly, what have you not inherited from them?

04/ Choose the Game You Want to Play

Many moons ago, I tweeted this.

Many times, I see agritech founders building things based on what is trending in the agritech hype cycle

But is that the game you want to play? What is the game you want to play that will be sustainable for you and your business? Remember. You choose the players, betters (read as investors), the rules of the game, and how the game will be scored by you and your betters.

Question for Self-Reflection: What is the game you played in 2022 and how do you plan to up the stakes of the game in 2023? What game do you want to play for your sanity’s sake?

05 Embrace the Difficulty of Being a Capitalist in Agriculture

Most agritech entrepreneurs find it difficult to state it aloud that they are “capitalists” (Obviously not the scarecrow variety of ‘greedy fat pigs, exploiting people, extracting their money, sending little kids to dark dusty factories’.)

More often, they find it comfortable to state that they are “empowering” farmers" or worse, “saving farmers”.

If you are “empowering” farmers, are you doing so that they eventually don't need you? Or are you “empowering” enough that they never discover their own agency? What is the freedom of choice you offer to farmers?

01. Freedom of choice to sell or hold back the produce.

02: Freedom of choice to decide the composition of transaction costs to bridge the gap between the Farm to Fork.

03: Freedom to measure quality

04: Freedom to choose buyers and prices

There is a central, western (colonizing) idea of capitalism and there is also a native, cultural, traditional idea of capitalism. Which one do you relate to? Why?

Question for Self-Reflection: What freedoms did you offer in 2022 and plan to offer to farmers in 2023? How have you embraced the difficulty of being a capitalist in agriculture?

06/ Learn to Tell Your Own Story

Who is telling your story? Are you leveraging social media and newsletters to tell your own story of progress, your own story of mistakes, and learnings, or are you relying on PR agencies/ venture capitalists/ investment banks to do the job?

Question for Self-Reflection: How did you tell your story in 2022 and how do you plan to tell your own story in 20233?

07/ Learn the Wise Difference Between Markets and Marketplaces

If you want to understand what is to build a marketplace atop agricultural markets, look no further than?a living bridge.

From the BBC story on ingenious living bridges :

"Building these bridges takes decades of work. It begins with planting a sapling of Ficus elastica – a tree that grows abundantly in the subtropical terrain of Meghalaya – in a good crossing place along the riverbank. First the trees develop large buttressing roots and then, after about a decade, the maturing trees sprout secondary aerial roots from further up. These aerial roots?have a degree of elasticity , and tend to join and grow together to form stable structures."

Much like living bridges, agricultural markets have evolved over decades of work, and when you are building a marketplace, you are building something on top of a market.

My favourite T-shirt-worthy quote on agritech comes from?Avishek Gupta

“Move fast and break things” approach doesn’t work for building the bridge in food & agriculture, “Move steady and build things” works. Do you have the patience to build the bridge?

Never forget the difference between?markets and marketplaces.

Marketplaces learn, Markets remembers.?Marketplaces proposes, Markets disposes.?Marketplaces are discontinuous, Markets are continuous.?Markets control marketplaces by constraint and constancy. Marketplaces get all our attention, markets have all the power.

Question for Self-Reflection: What marketplace are you building and in what ways it is transforming markets?

I hope you find these meditation pointers useful. Do write to me about how you applied them and if there were any additional meditation pointers you would like to add to this.

Happy building! May we dream of a better food and agricultural system in 2023.