27: Mackenzie Burnett - Accounting for the American Dream

Speaker A: I think of the American dream as the ability for the individual to believe that their children's future will be better than their future. Not necessarily that they're starting in such a bad place, but there's a sense of optimism that I think is really important for societies. In fact, I have this longstanding theory that you can see, you know, maybe economic swings in the United States or in these other nations or any pool of population. The leading indicator is the general sense of optimism or pessimism. Freedom comes from a lot of different areas, but for me, when it, when I think about independent business or why I'm a business owner, it's about this sense of intellectual ownership over your time, over what you decide to do, over creating something in the world.

There is a sense of high agency in that work. Going back to why is the American dream so important, to me, it's actually also about plurality. It's a sense of you don't just want like one type of person to be accruing all the wealth. Not everyone's dream is to like become even a millionaire, like the ability to, to, to hold space for multiple different types of dreams, I think is what makes a more resilient fabric of society. Speaker B: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 27 with Mackenzie Burnett. Mackenzie is the founder and CEO of Ambrook, a startup aiming to change how farmers and eventually all kinds of independent American businesses do their accounting, move money, think in the long term, and more.

McKenzie has a unique background across government and policy, tech and software, and agriculture, which creates the unique perspective she has needed to build Ambrook. In many ways, the Ambrook story is ultimately about the American dream, and it was really cool to have McKenzie sit down and talk about why that's so important to her alongside the actual heartland of America that she gets to spend so much time in and on while working with Ambrook's customers. McKenzie is the rare person who, along with being broadly ambitious, is quietly and deeply focused for the long run.

I don't think it would be too unbelievable to imagine that Mackenzie is working on Ambrook in 15 years, and I suspect that the people who have backed her, including Josh Kushner and Thrive, as well as Dylan Field, who led her Series A, agree. It is amazing to see someone who is doing something so authentically them and has seemingly built the right container around them to go at it for a really long time. I think Mackenzie will inspire you to be ambitious on a long time horizon and ultimately, whether it be by starting new things or otherwise, find a way to play your infinite game.

I know it did for me. As always, please share the episode if you enjoy it. That is how dialectic spreads. A rating on Spotify or Apple or thumbs up on YouTube wouldn't hurt either. As always, thank you for listening, and here is Mackenzie Burnett. Mackenzie Burnett, we're here. Speaker A: We're here. Speaker B: I'm really excited for this. Speaker A: I'm so excited too. All right. Speaker B: I'm going to start with a quote from something you wrote. No one spoke. Tired but happy. It was the three of us, me and Micah and Atticus.

We had just signed our second customer, now driving the 2 hours back to the airport motel. The thunderstorm boomed in silence across the Arizona plains, lighting up the dust dark. The Strokes played on the radio. The long car rides driving past amber waves of grain that have emotionally contextualized my work in unexpected ways. America the Beautiful. Can you talk about why America's heartland is so meaningful to you? Speaker A: There, there are so many things that I have learned over the course of the past 5 years, but and working on my company and building for rural communities, which the heartland is one part of that, but there's so many different parts of rural America and America more broadly that have upended my conception of what, hmm, what America is, uh, who we are building for, who the people in tech are building for and their, I guess, their conceptions of what people want and what motivates them.

And I think the, the, that, that language was written to evoke this memory of a happy place that I'm in when we're on these road trips to our customers who are mostly farms and ranches across the US. And feeling as though I'm doing— like, you couldn't pay me, you know, you couldn't pay me more to do the thing that I'm already doing. It is just so— yeah, I feel like I'm getting access to a world or to parallel lives that I've always wanted to live. And yeah, so I think that has been— that memory is kind of evoking the patriotism or some of these other elements that I've always felt gravitated toward, but haven't really been able to live until the past 5 years doing this work.

Speaker B: Yeah. Reading that, when I read Amber Waves of Grain, I kind of got chills the first time. It was very, it was, it was special. We're going to talk a bunch about all of the aspects of you and Ambrook and the work you do. And in my mind, you're kind of synthesizing a handful of different ideas and categories. The first one is agriculture. But I think you kind of come at it from a standpoint of maybe a unique place, or at least a surprising place to people who might think you're either an agriculture person or a technology person, whereas government and policy is actually like a huge root, both personally and with regard to your family.

You've said US agriculture is mostly dictated by government incentivized market activity. Both of your parents, they worked for the USDA and they worked in government and civil service. And then you, I think, have interned in Congress, in Parliament, in Foreign Service, in the Foreign Service Institute. So like this huge government policy background, which is a little bit surprising. Obviously a lot of technology too. I'm curious how that swirl of things has broadly influenced you, and then maybe more specifically what you've learned either from the work you've done or from your parents about government service and the implications for US agriculture that kind of like laid the groundwork for Ambrook.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've always been interested in figuring out what path I could take or what tool I had access to at the time to have the biggest impact possible. And I think government and policy plays a huge role in people's lives and is a really great tool in some aspects and is not a great tool in other aspects. And I think I, you know, realized in college that I had done a couple of these internships and just wasn't, kind of went into my freshman year internship, freshman summer at the US Senate in DC, very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and left that summer being like, oh man, I don't know if I want to be the version of myself that I saw in those young staffers.

Whoa. And it just, it, it was a real big wake-up call. And then I was really fortunate to get introduced to the tech community on campus at the University of Maryland. Did not have a tech background, was a, was a government and policy kid, and just realized that I needed to do whatever I could to break into the tech industry my junior year. And so got involved in a lot of student groups there, started Hackathon at Maryland, met one of my co-founders now in that group, and then ended up starting a company and moving out to the Bay Area right after I graduated, like a week after graduation.

No lease. I turned down this like— Speaker A: Yeah, I've always been interested in figuring out what path I could take or what tool I had access to at the time to have the biggest impact possible. And I think government and policy plays a huge role in people's lives and is a really great tool in some aspects and is not a great tool in other aspects. And I think I, you know, realized in college that I had done a couple of these internships and just wasn't, kind of went into my freshman year internship, freshman summer at the US Senate in DC, very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and left that summer being like, oh man, I don't know if I want to be the version of myself that I saw in those young staffers.

Whoa. And it just, it, it was a real big wake-up call. And then I was really fortunate to get introduced to the tech community on campus at the University of Maryland. Did not have a tech background, was a, was a government and policy kid, and just realized that I needed to do whatever I could to break into the tech industry my junior year. And so got involved in a lot of student groups there, started Hackathon at Maryland, met one of my co-founders now in that group, and then ended up starting a company and moving out to the Bay Area right after I graduated, like a week after graduation.

No lease. I turned down this like— Speaker B: I'm surprised you graduated. Honestly, most of those stories don't involve graduating. Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's because I didn't have a— I was a gov and policy kid, so I had to get a degree. I couldn't fall back on the on the CS, the CS degree even without graduating. But, oh yeah, I turned down a, I actually accepted a master's program at Columbia and turned that down, which my parents were, you know, they were like, "We trust you, but are you sure?"

Yeah, and I ended up moving out to the Bay Area to work on a company with a friend of mine from college who had dropped out actually. Speaker B: 50%. With a CS degree. Speaker A: Good enough. Yeah. Yeah, and then it kind of, It was off to the races from there, but we ended up getting into YC and kind of opened up my whole, you know, opened up this huge world of impact that is, I think, what I was searching for when I initially tried to, you know, was trying to break into government and pursuing that.

And then I found my way back into gov and policy. I ended up going to grad school for that at Stanford, and it was, but I was able to come to it in my own terms, having an understanding of what impact I could have. In the tech sector and then going and saying, okay, now that I understand what impact I can have here, like what impact can I have now that I, that I understand sort of what the tools are. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: And kind of building that portfolio is something I've always been really interested in.

Speaker B: How did growing up in a house with two parents in civil service, obviously again, you had to kind of find your way into it your own way, but I'm curious how that even just framed how you think about government and policy and, and that kind of work. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: And kind of building that portfolio is something I've always been really interested in. Speaker B: How did growing up in a house with two parents in civil service, obviously again, you had to kind of find your way into it your own way, but I'm curious how that even just framed how you think about government and policy and, and that kind of work.

Speaker A: It really normalized it. Mm-hmm. In a way that I think a lot of kids in the DMV feel. I grew up right outside of DC in Maryland, and so it normalized it. I think it also— I think it also instilled, especially my mom who approaches her work in a very principled way, it instilled the sense of public service and public duty. And I never really questioned when I was young, like, a deep patriotism I had, and I still have. But like, it— I really do think that it was from when I was little, um, and, and growing up with parents who kind of talked about their day-to-day work in a way that felt very normal.

It wasn't like they were, you know, they were doing, I think, interesting things in ag policy, specifically in pest and, um, uh, pest and diseases and plants. So kind of plant health protection, uh, but it was always grounded in conversations at the dinner table. So it's just like what everyone else was talking about. I didn't realize it wasn't just like citrus canker, You know? Yeah. Speaker B: That's amazing. What do you think that most entrepreneurs or maybe technology type people could stand to know about how government works? Speaker B: That's amazing.

What do you think that most entrepreneurs or maybe technology type people could stand to know about how government works? Speaker A: Ooh, that's a very open-ended question, but I've always been struck, I think, by how black box most people think government is. Either it's, it this full faith that it's very incompetent or a full faith that they trust it or full, you know, it's sort of, but it's a collection of millions of individual people. It's an organism just like anything else. And it's a really hard ship to steer. It responds to incentives like anything else.

Like it is, it is a thing at the organization level if you subscribe to those theories, but it is also just a bunch of individuals who are trying to get their 9 to 5, you know? And I think in that way, especially the majority of the government, which is the true, you know, the civil service, and then you have the political appointees are kind of at this top layer. And those tend to be the folks who are the highest profile, most, you know, they change with administration, right? They might have big impact, but, but I think the takeaway that I had from my parents and my older sister actually still works at the USDA.

It's just a very slow ship to move. And people trying to do their best to do whatever job— most people are trying to do their best, you know? So that was, I think that's something that I've always been struck that people put either too little faith or too much faith. Speaker B: That's a really good answer. You mentioned it briefly, you went to work on an open source startup, then you went to Stanford, think about climate with particularly with regard to US military and like climate security. One core part, or at least adjacent part of agriculture is the environment.

And I know it's something you care a lot about. I was reading your thesis from Stanford, kind of talking about working with and talking to people at the DOD about climate. And one of the observations you had was that they see it as strategic importance, or they at least claim that it is, yet there's maybe unsurprisingly a lot of mixed beliefs on the sense of urgency there. This is again, a really open-ended question, but I'm curious, if you have a point of view in hindsight on what makes the like broader climate conversation so intractable, political, hard for people to maybe like wrap their minds around the urgency of it's this almost like this boogeyman that like clearly a lot of people care a ton about, but I think a lot of people's relation to, to it is just like, it's so big and overwhelming.

They don't really know how to make sense of it. Speaker A: Yeah, I think the literature suggests that The individuals who, who change beliefs on climate change— so obviously there is, there is, there's a whole body of work around climate change communication studying this exact problem, which is despite the science, why is there, you know, why is there so much debate on, on the, the realities or implications of, of climate change? And the literature says that the folks who change their mind are the ones who see the physical impacts of climate change.

So you're living at the edges of the Arctic, right? And you're seeing that. And I think you actually saw that mirrored in the US military as well when I was doing research with a number of— speaking with folks all up and down the ranks. And it was the US Navy, some of the folks within the US Navy or the Coast Guard who, especially the US Navy, was has been, and I think still is kind of at the forefront of pushing for adaptation, at least around climate activities, because they're seeing a melting Arctic, right?

So the Arctic Roadmap, they're like, you know, the ice is gone and there's an ocean there that wasn't there before, and that is opening up a little harder to ignore. Speaker B: Exactly. Speaker A: Security vulnerabilities, uh, from, from China and Russia. And so just tons of, of things there. You're also seeing a little bit actually with the Air Force because of rising sea levels threatening coastal Air Force bases. Bases, or other, like, low-lying Air Force bases being threatened by or having been, like, severely damaged by severe weather. So I think that's— I think when you, you know, it is— climate change is hard to communicate.

It's in the worst box of, like, human activity because it's long-term abstract, right? It's very hard to— Speaker B: Correct way of putting it. Speaker A: So it's very hard to prioritize action against, and it can feel very overwhelming. So, like, there's lots of normal responses to Well, there's paralysis, there's denial, right? There's depression, all those pieces. But bringing it back to, are there tangible impacts that people are seeing? And that was the, you know, a core part of the research was trying to understand, does the way that the US military communicate about climate change at that political layer that we were talking about, does that map actually to the strategic, operational, and tactical layers within the US military?

And I think largely we found that that yes, it does, but the timeline of the urgency is different. Um, and actually a really interesting thing that I've taken away from that is if climate action is seen as overtly political, then it actually is counterproductive, especially with the US military, which sees itself as and prides itself in being a non-political organization. Yes. And so if there are activities that are seen as just being done for political reasons, it can provide this backlash, especially when climate action, it doesn't actually make sense from a, from a strategic or from a budgetary or from a mission aspect.

There were actually multiple instances. Let's say, for example, under the Obama administration, there was an initiative called the Great Green Fleet within the US Navy. And the Great Green Fleet was trying to kind of push and show the benefits of using biofuel. US military is a huge sort of fossil fuels consumer and emitter. And so, but it's also the largest logistics organization in the world. So it's like, it kind of makes sense, you know, it maps to the activities. And so, but The Great Green Fleet, basically, I heard in my research criticism of that because basically what ended up happening was that these ships in the Pacific would have to reroute these very expensive long routes to then go and pick up very expensive biofuel, which by the way was coming out of their operational budget, not any sort of, you know, and so it just like creates this loops of resentment that makes no sense.

One of the largest sources of casualty in the Gulf Wars Gulf Wars and Middle Eastern wars, it was actually fuel convoy runs. Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Speaker A: Because they're these very predictable runs. Oh. So really easy to predict— Oh, wow. —shoot down planes. And so I heard another story from someone I interviewed that said that actually the biggest proponent of flexible, lightweight solar research and installation for these remote bases in the Middle East was the US Air Force. So just stuff like that where it, when it aligns, it makes a little sense.

Yes. You know, and you can find these win-win scenarios and doesn't have to be ideological. Yeah. Speaker B: On that note, and maybe a slightly more zoomed in level, you've talked about how Ambrook is built on this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. Uh, and in something you sent me, there's a quote, you say, building great tools that moves towards sustainability regardless of someone's political feelings about climate change. And you've talked to, you guys have talked about this in Ambrook Research or Off Range and in a lot of different cases where it's actually exactly along the lines of what you were saying, which is that people seem to be pro-sustainability, but when it becomes this political climate change conversation, they start to, farmers in particular, they start to kind of shy away from it.

And maybe an open-ended question, but I'm curious how you've seen, or at least how you expect sustainability to be able to actually just move the needle. On a business standpoint for some of the, maybe the Ambra customers or farmers that you work with? Speaker A: Yeah, we've seen, um, a lot of instances where sustainability, or I think the word that a lot of folks are starting to use is resilience. Um, sustainability is so loaded now. Uh, and actually it's, it's so, and this is what I mean by like learning new things about, uh, the work that I do from like the people that we get to interact with every day.

Uh, we have folks who are like all the way at one end of the spectrum, uh, like on the coast, you know, regen ag, everything, and they don't like the word sustainability because they're like, it's used for greenwashing, you know, it doesn't actually speak to the work that they're doing, right? And then we have folks on the other end of the spectrum like who don't like the word sustainability because it's, it's code for government regulation. Yeah. And, uh, and veiled incentives. And, and so it, it makes sense because actually the reality is both are true, right?

Like those efforts for the past 10 years I think have been co-opted in many ways, um, and the work that we're really trying to do is just meeting people where are and finding the win-wins, like the double bottom line, you know, and it doesn't make sense for a business to invest in anything related to resilience or sustainability or the environment or any of these things if they're going to go out of business because they did it. And so that is, that is the biggest lesson I took from my research with the US military.

It's like, you cannot, you cannot force people to go against their— Speaker A: Yeah, we've seen, um, a lot of instances where sustainability, or I think the word that a lot of folks are starting to use is resilience. Um, sustainability is so loaded now. Uh, and actually it's, it's so, and this is what I mean by like learning new things about, uh, the work that I do from like the people that we get to interact with every day. Uh, we have folks who are like all the way at one end of the spectrum, uh, like on the coast, you know, regen ag, everything, and they don't like the word sustainability because they're like, it's used for greenwashing, you know, it doesn't actually speak to the work that they're doing, right?

And then we have folks on the other end of the spectrum like who don't like the word sustainability because it's, it's code for government regulation. Yeah. And, uh, and veiled incentives. And, and so it, it makes sense because actually the reality is both are true, right? Like those efforts for the past 10 years I think have been co-opted in many ways, um, and the work that we're really trying to do is just meeting people where are and finding the win-wins, like the double bottom line, you know, and it doesn't make sense for a business to invest in anything related to resilience or sustainability or the environment or any of these things if they're going to go out of business because they did it.

And so that is, that is the biggest lesson I took from my research with the US military. It's like, you cannot, you cannot force people to go against their— Speaker B: they have a very clear hierarchy of priorities. Speaker A: Exactly. There's a really strong hierarchy of needs and you can't you can't afford to literally bet the farm on something that you don't know if it's going to work, you know? And these aren't businesses that can afford to just buy carbon credits when the market is hot and they want to recruit, you know, engineers.

These are businesses that if they make the wrong move, they will go out of business. You know, they're very thin cash flow or very thin margins and tight cash flow businesses. And so we're just really interested in that. And so there are a lot of instances in agriculture, the other natural resource intensive industries all along, honestly, the industrial supply where either through like value premiums you get from, you know, consumer preferences all the way to using less water, less inputs, right? So it's a higher profit margin for a lot of things that you're producing.

Like there's, you know, there's so many ways in which folks can build more profitability through building these more, you know, sort of through building resilience in that way. And that's sort of in the short term and be more resilient to things like drought cycles, right? To the actual impacts impacts of climate change. So not just the, uh, do the work in terms of the mitigation side, but also be resilient on the adaptation side. And so really interested on both the climate mitigation and climate adaptation parts of the business equation. That's cool.

Speaker B: they have a very clear hierarchy of priorities. Speaker A: Exactly. There's a really strong hierarchy of needs and you can't you can't afford to literally bet the farm on something that you don't know if it's going to work, you know? And these aren't businesses that can afford to just buy carbon credits when the market is hot and they want to recruit, you know, engineers. These are businesses that if they make the wrong move, they will go out of business. You know, they're very thin cash flow or very thin margins and tight cash flow businesses.

And so we're just really interested in that. And so there are a lot of instances in agriculture, the other natural resource intensive industries all along, honestly, the industrial supply where either through like value premiums you get from, you know, consumer preferences all the way to using less water, less inputs, right? So it's a higher profit margin for a lot of things that you're producing. Like there's, you know, there's so many ways in which folks can build more profitability through building these more, you know, sort of through building resilience in that way.

And that's sort of in the short term and be more resilient to things like drought cycles, right? To the actual impacts impacts of climate change. So not just the, uh, do the work in terms of the mitigation side, but also be resilient on the adaptation side. And so really interested on both the climate mitigation and climate adaptation parts of the business equation. That's cool. Speaker B: It's also really fascinating how language can— language can really matter, like both in terms of what people are willing to tolerate or believe in or try experiment.

Yeah, that's cool. Um, another component of Ambrook Beyond Agriculture is, I think, and I don't know if this is your language specifically, but sort of the sense that you are serving parts of society that have been left behind. This is a quote from something you sent me. What we're building is about enabling the original idea of American freedom and resilience. What kind of future America do you want to live in? It's a bullet point. Keep businesses independent, empower individual choices rather than corporate interests and how to steward land, reward sustainable, long-term focused investments.

And then another excerpt, I think. Of our work at Ambrook as American dynamism meets the American dream. Instead of top-down technological advancement, we're working from the ground up to enable family-run businesses to become more profitable and resilient. I'm going to, I'm going to stay open-ended and we'll, I promise we'll get more specific, but how do you maybe personally and in the business sense relate to and define the American dream? Oh, good question. Speaker B: It's also really fascinating how language can— language can really matter, like both in terms of what people are willing to tolerate or believe in or try experiment.

Yeah, that's cool. Um, another component of Ambrook Beyond Agriculture is, I think, and I don't know if this is your language specifically, but sort of the sense that you are serving parts of society that have been left behind. This is a quote from something you sent me. What we're building is about enabling the original idea of American freedom and resilience. What kind of future America do you want to live in? It's a bullet point. Keep businesses independent, empower individual choices rather than corporate interests and how to steward land, reward sustainable, long-term focused investments.

And then another excerpt, I think. Of our work at Ambrook as American dynamism meets the American dream. Instead of top-down technological advancement, we're working from the ground up to enable family-run businesses to become more profitable and resilient. I'm going to, I'm going to stay open-ended and we'll, I promise we'll get more specific, but how do you maybe personally and in the business sense relate to and define the American dream? Oh, good question. Speaker A: I think of the American dream as the ability for the individual to believe that their children's future will be better than their future.

And not necessarily that they're starting in such a bad place, but there's a sense of optimism that I think is really important for societies. And in fact, I have this longstanding theory that you can trace back, you can trace, you can see that, you know, maybe economic swings in the United States or in these other nations or through any pool of population, the leading indicator is the general sense of optimism or pessimism. And before it shows up in real life— Speaker B: In this generational sense specifically? Speaker A: I think there's a generational, I think that it relates to the generational sense.

I think optimism is about the, you know, the future in some way. And then on top of that, I think the American dream is about generational. Resilience. Yeah. Um, because it was all— I mean, my, my mom is an immigrant, so she came to India, uh, when she was 8. Speaker B: So my grandfather came to the US from India. Speaker A: Sorry, yeah, came to the US from India when she was, uh, 8. And so my grandfather had, uh, gotten hit, you know, had been on this one of these, um, uh, immigrant engineer visas in the '60s.

And so came over for his master's degree and then decided that he wanted to immigrate his whole family to the US and gave up his inheritance in India to do that because he believed that the US would be such a better life for his children. And a lot of versions of that story too, by the way, I'm sure. Yeah, totally. And so, um, yeah. And so, and so she grew up with this, this sense of, of— and actually, in fact, she told me many years later, um, a couple years ago, that the reason why she was in public service was to give back to a country that she felt had given so much to her.

I was like, it's like, so I mean, I got chills when I heard that because it, it, it also just mapped. It was when I was just starting Ambrook, mapped to a lot of the reasons that I was just kind of, I think, realizing for myself what was so interesting and important about the work that we were doing at Ambrook. And, um, you know, in Ambrook we build financial management software for farms, ranches, and increasingly these other, these rural businesses. So a lot of businesses that are these industrial mom-and-pop shops that have really— are too complex, you know, for existing tools but can't afford to move on to like the $100,000 ERP.

So the team or resources to do that. And so, but it's all about like helping folks understand their bottom line, helping folks be able to open up a second business line and not completely overwhelm their books and or, you know, under— understand the cash flows and those types of things. And so for me, a lot of the cycle of what I've been thinking about and doing is about enabling the American dream in that way. Where it has gotten harder and harder, I think, to do that at the individual business level, just given all the market pressures that exist today.

Speaker B: There's a thread that ties into what you just said that I noticed kind of running through some of the language you guys use. There's an excerpt where you had observed along the lines of what you were just saying that increasingly, for the first time in generations, many Americans are not believing that their children will have it better off than them. You wanted to say starting a small business used to be the way to build a better future for your family, owning your time, owning your owning that identity and tradition over generations, staying independent.

And then another excerpt, most of all, this investment in the, in the case of your Series A, this investment helps us stay focused on our mission to give independent businesses the tools they need to stay independent. There's this thread of independence running through. I can't help but notice that there's a connection there to like a very foundational, if not the foundational American myth, which is freedom, freedom from all kinds of things. Why are independent small businesses so essential for optimism in the economy and more broadly in the US? Speaker A: Yeah, I think there is something— there's two, I think there's two parts.

I think it's about a sense— I think freedom comes from a lot of different areas, but for me, when it, when I think about independent business or why I'm a business owner, it's about this sense of intellectual ownership over your time, over what you decide to do, over creating something in the world. It feels, it there is a sense of high agency in that work. Yeah. And I, so I think that there's a, yeah, there's a freedom in the sense of that way. And then I think there's also a freedom in the sense of, um, you know, not every independent business necessarily is attached to, you know, is also attached to a property.

You know, it's, it's not, there aren't, it doesn't, you don't have to have real assets in order to obviously have an independent business, but for farms and ranches, oftentimes it is attached to real assets. And I think, or even a place, a place. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely a place. And I think I think that sense of place actually is something that I have come to realize over the past couple of years is just as important for many people. Because I don't think most people who live in, who spent, you know, grow up in suburbs or live most of their lives in cities really have a sense of true freedom when you are on acres and acres of your own property.

You know, it's like if something breaks, you fix it. You know, there's a sense of like, maybe fiefdom's the wrong word, but there is a sense of like that, like you wake up, this is mine. Speaker B: Almost self-reliance too. Self-reliance is huge. Speaker A: And so I think that there's a sense of freedom is not just about the access to that. Freedom is the feedback loop that you can figure things out on your own. Like the feeling of free, like what does it mean to feel free? There's a sense of like there's serendipity, there's self-reliance, there's high agency, there's intellectual interest and ownership and all those different pieces.

And it kind of like the swelling of the chest, you know, feeling. So I've thought about, I've thought about that a lot. And so I think when it comes to staying independent, there is a piece of that that is really important. Obviously you can get financial freedom in some ways, but it doesn't come necessarily with all the other parts of freedom. Speaker B: Yeah, they're very intertwined in a way. Hmm. Why, maybe to drill down a bit, why, and honestly, maybe part of this was in your last answer, but why is farming specifically such a quintessential example of the American dream?

Why set out to serve them first with Ambrook? Speaker A: I think farmers are the first, and maybe not the last, but I think it's definitely the first entrepreneurs in the first American entrepreneurs. There were farmers and fishers and trappers and folks who were turning natural resources into you know, into their own sense of freedom, I guess. And so, yeah, entrepreneurship on the frontier. Speaker B: Yeah, entrepreneurship on the frontier. Speaker A: And so I think that is still— and even the, um, the Homestead Act of 1862, you know, made it possible for individuals to become citizens or to otherwise, like, get access to, like, 160 acres, right?

And a lot of the farms of today were the stacking of all those over time. And then like, basically what ended up happening is that folks who ended up having a lot of that land, and there was lots of, you know, there's a lot of issues with maybe the way that the land was parceled out, but the folks who did have the ability to get access to that land were then able to like, leverage that land over generations. And so you can take out mortgages on it, right? You can take out like, you know, you can secure loans on property, right?

And ended up building these, uh, their own domains and businesses and empires,, from that act of, you know, basically the S. giving away like a ton of, of, um, of property. Speaker B: And it was an early way to really invest time into something that could be truly durable, like, yeah, totally beyond just the traditional labor you were coming to New York or wherever else to— hmm. And the homes, do you, do you maybe a little in the weeds, but how did the homestead, like you went out and as long as you got, I don't know, you, as long as you stake some claim to land and you were willing to farm it, you, the government gave it to you?

Speaker A: Yeah, I was, I mean, there were some, there were some, yes, you had, you had to basically make it productive. Speaker B: Okay. Speaker A: Okay, cool. And so, and so because the US was, it had an interest of like settling, right? Yeah. Imagine what that would look like today if the US government had some ability to give away like that sense of foundation for people to be able to do that. And I think that is actually like, the American dream is built on some semblance of that. And the foundation shifted, I think, from raw acreage to this, like, the myth, the laws, like the ability of like economic and class movement, right?

Like there were a lot of things about America that had enabled Individuals like my, like immigrants, like my grandfather would come and start his own business. So he built up his own engineering practice when he was here, and that kind of paved the way for all my, um, my mom and her siblings to go to college. Right. And I think that was a sense of you, you could do that. And I think people can still do that today, but there's the thing that is slightly different is the sense of optimism around it.

Speaker B: Right. Well, it's also the, the going west for land. Is this super tangible, it's like the, it's like the perfect kind of like metaphorical and very tangible version of that idea. Yeah. In this way that's so, yeah. I'm, I'm sure young people like today would be like, yeah, what am I gonna do on the internet? Like stake a claim to a domain. Totally. Speaker A: And actually this is like part of my, that thesis I was talking about, which is like, you can trace, you can, you can, the leading indicator of these, these macroeconomic cycles are like optimism or mass optimism or mass pessimism.

Speaker A: And actually this is like part of my, that thesis I was talking about, which is like, you can trace, you can, you can, the leading indicator of these, these macroeconomic cycles are like optimism or mass optimism or mass pessimism. Speaker B: Right. Speaker A: I also think that, you know, the biggest reason why I think Elon should take us to Mars is because we need a new frontier. Yeah. You know, there's a sense of, of expansion and like, and net new opportunity in space. And just think about what's happening with AI now, right?

It's, it's not just like, yes, there's a land grab to try to, to try to stake a claim with a number of new workflows or other things, but there's, I also think it's a bit of a relief, you know, like there's a sense of, oh, like was SaaS just kind of like all the, the— Speaker B: Yeah, generational opportunity. Yes, yes. Yeah, there was a— there was people in their 20s for the last decade kind of like got the short end of the stick and now there's something new. Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's— and I think the generational opportunities, they come in, you know, in these waves and they take different forms.

But that is, I think, and it's about, you know, but the people who are poised to take advantage of the generational opportunity that is AI looks very different than the customer base that we're necessarily serving. Yeah. And I think going back to why is the American dream so important, to me it's actually also about plurality. It's a sense of you don't just want like one type of person. Yeah. You know, to be accruing all the wealth, or even not even like, not everyone's dream is to like become even a millionaire.

Like, you know, it's like the ability to, to, to hold space for multiple different types of dreams, I think, is what it makes them more resilient, to use that word again, fabric of society. Speaker B: And so Also on some level, the upstream of being a millionaire, that's like a specific flavor of independence. To go back to your earlier point, and independence can come in a lot of different ways, including like I have a farm that I'm able to sustain and is productive or whatever. Totally. And other part of the question, which is just like, why start with farms for Ambra?

Speaker A: Yeah. So in part, cause I wanted to, like, I was just, I kind of fell in love with the space when I was in grad school. I had an opportunity to work at a firm that owned a lot of farms and and water assets in the Central Valley in California. And I spent some of that summer kind of driving around the Central Valley talking to farmers about water rights and like everything else. And I just fell in love with the space in my own way. And now I recommend books like, uh, like, like The Land Where Lemons Grow, uh, to you, which is right there.

Um, but, uh, just really, I think it also, I am just so interested interested in, like, I love, I love traveling with a mission that, uh, where the mission is basically go and find like this niche thing everywhere you can go or something, right? Like, I love the rabbit-holing that can exist with like industries that we don't see, or, or yeah, I love, it almost feels like a secret mission or like a treasure hunt. And so when I was getting to know folks books that summer, it felt like that, like a treasure hunt.

Like every question that I asked and every answer I got begetted more questions, right? And more interesting answers. And it was just, you kind of went down and I was like, wow, what if I could just make this my whole life? You know, talking to people about their most intimate, you know, like questions and answers, which when you rabbit hole the way down gets you to build accounting software. But that is, it is a true joy honestly, to be able to like sit down and talk to someone at the kitchen table about some really privileged and like intimate things and, and to feel like you can actually help them with it.

Speaker B: Yeah. The texture of their like daily life. Yeah. Hmm. We've talked about agriculture in America. We've talked about business and the American dream and independence. We're going to talk about accounting and money in a sec, but before we do, I think it's a helpful backdrop since we're talking about farms. I think in theory, maybe my intuition is wrong, but I think in theory people might assume that farms are like kind of simple, at least from a business and accounting standpoint. Can you talk about why maybe the combination of multi-P&L, balance sheet heavy, any range of other things make farms like way more complex than people might assume?

Totally. Speaker A: Farms are like biological factories. They're like the only, they're one of the only businesses where your inventory it like gets born, it grows, it dies, you know. It's very complicated. And I think actually— and it's largely actually only— there's only like 16, 15 or 16,000 farms in America that make more than $5 million a year in annual sales. So the vast majority of these operations are run by effectively mom-and-pop shops, very small teams, usually family-run. So they're enormously complex businesses. And so they— and, and getting more— despite being super small, despite being super small, so they're overly complex for their size.

So a good example is dairy, a dairy, most of the acreage in a dairy is actually growing feed. So it's growing feed to feed to the cows. So you have that enterprise. When we talk about enterprises, probably like maybe like a P&L or like a business line. So one enterprise is the hay. Speaker B: And the hay is just its own P&L. Speaker A: It can be its own P&L because you're basically, you're buying, you're not just, you might just be growing your own hay and feeding it to the cows, but even then you have to accrue the costs over, right?

If you're trying to figure out, okay, the end equation is like how much You know, how much does it cost to produce a pound of milk? So we're going to work backwards from there. And so, like, okay, so you're starting through hay. You have all of your— you're growing your feed. Maybe you have a, like, a forage mix. Um, but then you might want to buy some hay, right? You might want to sell your hay. So you're making money maybe off of that if you have excess, right? Okay. And you're storing it.

So there's like another multi-year cycle of storing. Okay. So, so that's, that's one enterprise. You feed some of that hay to the cows. The cows are the reason why cows produce milk is because they're pregnant and so they're birthing all these babies, you know? And so it's like you keep the females, you sell off the males, right? The old cows get turned into dairy beef. And so you're buying and selling and accruing the inventory basically there. And then those cows are producing milk, which you might sell wholesale, you might sell direct to retail, right?

You might have a farm store, you might be turning that milk into value-added products. So ice cream and cheese. And so like flowing the costs all the way through the business, we have seen dairies hire ex-bankers to figure out, you know, figure out that. Speaker B: And so isn't there like a specific, like, cow-related GAAP accounting thing where it's like super— Speaker A: No, it's just, it's just GAAP, but it's, it's, it's like, it's what we call managerial accounting. Okay. So being able to understand your true cost of production, unit economics, what most businesses do across America, not just farms, is they just really file things for their taxes.

And so at the end of the year, they can figure out, did they make or lose money at all? But they might not know that actually next year it was— it didn't make sense at all for us to be, uh, buying any hay. We should only— we should only grow extra and sell it because we are able to get such a premium, right? Or, you know, like, actually, like, gelato is higher margin than ice cream. And it actually is because gelato has a, um, less of a— it's more milk for cream content.

So you can use more milk basically in gelato versus ice cream. You need to like have more milk to get more, you know, to get all the cream anyway. So stuff like that where, where that is what we help. Speaker B: And so isn't there like a specific, like, cow-related GAAP accounting thing where it's like super— Speaker A: No, it's just, it's just GAAP, but it's, it's, it's like, it's what we call managerial accounting. Okay. So being able to understand your true cost of production, unit economics, what most businesses do across America, not just farms, is they just really file things for their taxes.

And so at the end of the year, they can figure out, did they make or lose money at all? But they might not know that actually next year it was— it didn't make sense at all for us to be, uh, buying any hay. We should only— we should only grow extra and sell it because we are able to get such a premium, right? Or, you know, like, actually, like, gelato is higher margin than ice cream. And it actually is because gelato has a, um, less of a— it's more milk for cream content.

So you can use more milk basically in gelato versus ice cream. You need to like have more milk to get more, you know, to get all the cream anyway. So stuff like that where, where that is what we help. Speaker B: You need like a McKinsey person would actually help. Exactly. Speaker A: And so these, these like a lot of in order to figure that out, these businesses, if you were a startup, you'd be on Sage or NetSuite, like you would have already moved off of QuickBooks, right? You'd be on like $100,000 a year accounting software.

You'd have a full finance team. But these are usually mom and pop shops that can afford maybe $1,000 a year software. And so building for that level of affordability is what we're building for. Speaker B: On that note, you've said accounting, everything goes back to accounting. And though in many ways it seems like sort of the meta frame here is that you have a group of people who are very trapped in the day-to-day, who you are enabling to think about things on a more long-term basis. I'm curious what goes into that.

Like part of this is just a simply like a cost thing and a resources thing, but like, yeah, what is, what is the leverage that comes about? You started talking about it a little bit, but what What kinds of leverage emerge by giving people that ability to think long-term and why is accounting specifically like the right tool for that? Speaker B: On that note, you've said accounting, everything goes back to accounting. And though in many ways it seems like sort of the meta frame here is that you have a group of people who are very trapped in the day-to-day, who you are enabling to think about things on a more long-term basis.

I'm curious what goes into that. Like part of this is just a simply like a cost thing and a resources thing, but like, yeah, what is, what is the leverage that comes about? You started talking about it a little bit, but what What kinds of leverage emerge by giving people that ability to think long-term and why is accounting specifically like the right tool for that? Speaker A: Yeah, so, so we actually did not try to start building accounting software. Okay. We tried to do everything but build accounting software cuz it's so, you know, it's so hard.

It takes, you know, you have to, it, it takes a while to build it, right? But we tried starting by solving more symptom-level problems. Like could we get, you know, folks access to working capital faster? Okay. Like we could do some programs for the simple ones, but actually when we try to help them with more complex ones, we needed to go into their accounting software, which was not, you know, well organized, you know. So just like it kept on coming back. All roads lead to accounting. But I think there's two, there's two things that enables.

There's the very tactical. So like you can, you can save time, save money, you can figure out where you can make more money, right? There is that view. So if you have a, like, for example, if you have a really good FP&A person on your team, this is what they do. If you're a, if you're a startup, they are like breaking down all your marketing costs, right? All of your R&D, etc. And you're getting to your gross margin. Your understanding. And so, um, uh, we help folks who don't have financial backgrounds do that level of analysis.

And, um, but I think the thing— there's the tactical side, but I think that actually the thing that also enables long-term decision-making is like anxiety reduction. Like, it's the emotional side of the software that I have been— it's been so unexpected. Yes. Speaker B: Um, I think a lot of great systems do this. Or tools do this. So in many ways, like a great tool's job is not always like, it can definitely be leverage or agency or whatever, but I think in many ways, like I just can hold a system in like in my head more or less, and then actually do the real work.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I think, I think actually great tools should, great tools shouldn't actually, and this is going a little bit into thesis I've been, we've been kind of developing at Amburker, kind of thinking about around building with AI, but you don't actually want to reduce complexity or critical thinking all the time. Like, you, you wanna be able to get to obviously convenience and time savings, and maybe for people who don't wanna access that, you can. But actually what we're trying to do is make it so that people can engage the intellectual side of their brain.

Can move into the complexity. Yes. They can move into, yeah, exactly. They move into the complexity in a way that, that feels accessible and that feels stimulating and like they're, they're, they're feeling good about the loop of making good business decisions and those things. And, um, yeah, so I, that, that has been a big part of thinking about how we build and even it, it shows up in small ways like, uh, we've built, done a lot of work to build workflows around co— what would otherwise just be core journal entries, um, which are, uh, kind of the base level of, of, uh, double entry accounting.

But we've done it in a way that really emphasizes, okay, we know that someone, most likely most of our customers are going to have loan payments. And so we make it really easy to split out the loan and the, you know, sort of the principal and the interest and those types of workflows. We are continuously looking for ways in which we don't dumb down what's happening, but we enable people to make the right decision in their own words instead of having to translate that into whatever jargon the software wants you to use.

Speaker B: Another part of what you guys do beyond accounting is money movement. Money movement. There was a note you had sent after you'd returned from Stripe Sessions, and I thought it was really fascinating. You say, my main takeaway from Sessions was that instant movement is becoming table stakes. The new frontier becomes who can read and act on the story inside the payments flow. There's so many ways to go with this. This obviously ties broadly to fintech and crypto and so many things. I'm curious, maybe specifically, like how you think about the opportunity with money movement.

You've speculated a little bit on the implications of like if Ambrook gets big enough, or if your payment network specifically gets big enough, like what could happen? But yeah, I'd be curious for like why that's, and maybe specifically why money flow as like a signal around narratives and what's happening in the world is so interesting. Speaker A: Yeah, totally. I, this is, this is the long-term game plan of Ambrook and I, I am constantly impatient, you know, for us to get to enough nodes in the network such that this can start to really become true.

But the takeaway that I had when I was wa— I was sitting there and watching all these in sessions and had some conversations with some Stripes afterwards was just, it was clearly big. Not to like discount, clearly had been working hard. It's gonna be a big deal. Instant money movement. It's not quite here yet, but I would— my takeaway was like, check, you know, like that seems like it's gonna be taken care of. And we even see it now in Ambrook. Like we, you know, so at the core of Ambrook is something called the Ambrook Wallet, which is optional, but most of our customers use it.

And it's, it's a, you know, a checking, it's under the hood, a checking account. We partner with Stripe and Fifth Third for the banking services, but an Ambrik wallet to an Ambrik wallet transaction is instant and free because it's a book transfer, right? It's the same deposit network. Speaker B: How long has that been possible? Like if you were doing this 5 years ago, could you have done that? PayPal did it. Speaker A: Wow. PayPal's early days was built on Wells Fargo book transfers. Cool. Funny. Yeah, so what was not possible was like PayPal had to do a ton of work basically to enable that, right?

And they were doing a lot of instrumentation. What was now possible is the embedding in any sort of SaaS product. You can in theory spin up embedded bank accounts really easily. Speaker B: That's mainly thanks to Stripe. Speaker A: Stripe is a big, big part of that with their BAS program. There's lots of BAS players that are doing that. Speaker B: Got it. Cool. Shoulders of giants though. That's not— Speaker A: timing, timing is important. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Shoulder of giants. And so that is, that to me felt like it was going to be a standard.

And we're already seeing within Ambrook when there are two Ambrook customers that, that transact with each other, we notice it because we know, you see the payment flows and we'll turn on Ambrook Pay for them, which is the wallet-to-wallet transactions. And that default becomes their, it becomes their immediately becomes their default payment method, right? Because it's so much better than writing a check and so much, and it's reconciled in both systems, right? And like, my invoices in your bill and it just, you know, 1 to 3% of, of payments get basically of like revenue basically gets lost to administrative, right?

Like through just like the ARAP shuffle fraud, that kind of stuff. That was one. The thing that I am really interested in now is the context of money movement. And so being able as an ERP, we are able to have a lot of context, so metadata documentation about these payments that are happening in our system. And in theory, you should be able to see the, you know, supply chain disruptions come down, right, for whoever has like access to that sort of information and to be able to like better serve our customers.

Speaker B: If you're saturated enough, at least in Africa. Speaker A: If you're saturated enough, right. And I think that's why we really think about business communities. And so growing via vendor networks is something that we're going to start to start to, you know, invest in and do in the coming months. And so there's just a lot of pieces of that that are about— first, you have to basically build, like, step 1, like, replace QuickBooks. Step 2, you know, build a payments network. But I— but no, but I think that there's, there's a sense of, like, you have to become this, this really well-loved, really accessible ERP that can enable complex businesses to— Speaker B: ERP is just That accounting software, like Enterprise Resource Planning.

Speaker A: Yeah. So it's ERP kind of is, is any— it usually has the GL. So the accounting software at the core, but also people kind of use it to broadly apply to a lot of different business processes that you might do. So that's sort of it. It generally covers that. But if you are the ERP and you do, you are in the payments flow, you can have that context because, you know, because really what I mean, what is accounting software but just like like data entry. It's just like, make data entry as easy as possible to tag a bunch of financial transactions with like arbitrary metadata, you know.

So Ambrook is basically what we're making really easy for our customers to do is we, we make it just far— you can imagine, we just make it far easier to tag these transactions with the metadata you need about the business that isn't just for taxes. Speaker B: And it's so easy so that even if you're not immediately— it's not immediately obvious why there's value there, you're going to do it anyway and then get the long-term value. Exactly. Speaker A: Yeah, so we use a lot of— we try to use a lot of AI to pull that out.

We— there's there's lots of other reasons and incentives for folks to do it, because if you want to see, you know, your enterprise profitability, you might do that on a more often basis. We're building an inventory so that that automatically tags it. So there's lots of reasons why you would do that, but that is also what builds the context for the payments network that should benefit the whole business community. And so our goal, again, on the theme of resilience, is there is too much money lost to administrivia and middlemen fees.

And actually, 90% of payments in, in America, S. agriculture, is still flowing through paper checks. And it's, it's not because they're left behind. It's not because they're backwards. It's because it is really expensive to— like, digital payments are expensive. They're like, you know, cards are 3%. Like, they will use the tools as needed, but like, what if we could at least provide some relief and also reduce all this other administrivia, right? By like having a really strong deposit-backed payments network that has all the context in your business, has the context of other businesses, right?

And So that's something that we've been thinking about a lot. Speaker B: And it's so easy so that even if you're not immediately— it's not immediately obvious why there's value there, you're going to do it anyway and then get the long-term value. Exactly. Speaker A: Yeah, so we use a lot of— we try to use a lot of AI to pull that out. We— there's there's lots of other reasons and incentives for folks to do it, because if you want to see, you know, your enterprise profitability, you might do that on a more often basis.

We're building an inventory so that that automatically tags it. So there's lots of reasons why you would do that, but that is also what builds the context for the payments network that should benefit the whole business community. And so our goal, again, on the theme of resilience, is there is too much money lost to administrivia and middlemen fees. And actually, 90% of payments in, in America, S. agriculture, is still flowing through paper checks. And it's, it's not because they're left behind. It's not because they're backwards. It's because it is really expensive to— like, digital payments are expensive.

They're like, you know, cards are 3%. Like, they will use the tools as needed, but like, what if we could at least provide some relief and also reduce all this other administrivia, right? By like having a really strong deposit-backed payments network that has all the context in your business, has the context of other businesses, right? And So that's something that we've been thinking about a lot. Speaker B: It's cool to see the emergent benefits of building for a vertical slice of the economy across like so many different parts of that answer.

Yeah, totally. Like both on that, like, and theoretically the traditional like wide cut horizontal fintech would be really hard to have that, but maybe for a consumer thing like Cash App or Venmo, but it'd be really hard to have like that much network concentration that you could actually get some of those things. That's, that's really cool. Speaker A: Yeah, we have it on consumer, but we don't have it on B2B. Speaker B: I want to zoom out a little and talk more about kind of Ambrook from a holistic standpoint. You have talked about at least the theory of this being a long-term project, like a 20— could this be something you could work on for 20 years?

What is it about this, the setup, so the vision, the container of the company, the category, the mission, what about that is something you could conceivably spend decades on? Speaker A: I think it goes back to that memory that you shared at the very beginning. I think there's just something about— I had imagined before I started Ambrook, one of the criteria that I had written down for myself was I want to be able to take as many road trips as I want to as many weird places. That's amazing. Speaker B: In America as I want.

Sometimes it's that simple. Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, uh, I think there's just a joy that I get from, from our customers, but also from, yeah, the, the, the doors that they very genuine, like very kindly open for me. You know, like that, like, and I'm not saying like doors for networking, I'm saying like an actual door to someone's home. Like that is incredible. How many people, I mean, we, we did this thing where we sent, uh, disposable film cameras to Wow. Some of our customers and we said, just take whatever photos you want and send them back and we'll develop them.

Wow, cool. And we have just started getting some of them back and it's like, what kind of business can you build where your customers are just this pen pal for you? Mm-hmm. You know, just like snapshots of their lives. And I think that that is what's so rewarding about building for, building for like a independent small businesses across America. They typically are family owned. They typically are so intertwined with personal lives and like the family itself and the family finances and And it just feels like, I mean, obviously with the story with my grandfather, but it feels like I'm building for an extension of the family that, or like the type of life that I want to enable more of in the US that I'm trying to build for myself.

And so yeah, I just, it's been something that has been super rewarding. Uh, the mission is definitely, definitely super important from a, from a resilience, not just from an environmental perspective, but also the economic perspective. Speaker B: On that note, maybe that's beautiful. You're also a really ambitious person and like there are plenty of businesses that I think might satisfy some of the answer you just gave that also wouldn't be like, you know, people talk about like the infinite game that, that we were talking about Stripe earlier, like increase the GDP of the internet can run for a while.

Totally. What is it about the market you've chosen and the structure of Ambro And I, I'm not meaning to, I think your, your previous answer clearly is the motivating engine, but also you've actually built a really good like car or vehicle to be able to, I don't know how long you can run this down, but it seems like it's pretty like blue ocean. Speaker A: Yeah. I, I, I think that, you know, the idea of pragmatic environmentalism, I think also speaks to another way you can kind of think about it is like pragmatic idealism, which is like, what does that mean?

Speaker B: You know, I think that you embody that very well. Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. Um, I think, uh, it's something that for me is just this very horseshoe, like makes total sense in my head where in order to last very long, you have to just build this very solid vehicle that can get you like as long as you can, you know, to that. And I think the thing, the nice thing about accounting is that it scales. It's like everyone, it's like, it's all GAAP, you know, everyone needs the GL, you know, it doesn't matter how big you are.

Yeah. And so there's something about about choosing to be at the very heart of, um, these businesses. And, and, and something that's very simple under the hood, which is, um, you know, at its heart, this— the general ledger is just— it's double— it's a double-entry ledger. And all the stuff we build around are all these workflows, right? It's trying to make it easier. Like, there's these rules that we should comply in, but at the heart of it, it's just sort of like a— it's a ledger, you know? And I think I really love that being being the heart and kind of the solid foundation and then building a sustainable, like, business with good margins.

Right. And, and, but also not seeing— I, I don't see myself or Ambrik even as, like, trapped in the whatever vehicle that we're in now. It's kind of like— and I actually think that the really interesting thing about that I've been thinking about with just the macro environment today is that I think that you'll see a lot more experimentation with hybrid entity structures where you might have a venture-backed software company, but also might— you might have a holdings company and maybe you'll have, you know, it's sort of in what is that district?

Like maybe you can actually think about the distribution that you're getting from the proprietary distribution that you might try to access as the company is actually part of the sister fund or, you know, or some of these other, you know, or maybe you have a cash flow positive side of the business or a publication, which we also have. And like, I think that there are all these ways in which you're going to start to see these, you know, it's, you know, my, my, one of my teammates jokes that like every time time someone comes up with an idea, I'm like, that sounds great, like we can just do it under Ambrook, you know?

It's like Ambrook Processing. Great. Speaker B: That's kind of what I mean about the, the question though, is like in many ways this is this like ever-expanding aperture for you, and much more than you of course, but like it's like a vacuum for just like all— you, you've somehow designed a thing that can hold a lot, which is cool. Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's actually because I— and I was talking to my friend Joe about this, um, in the park this weekend, and we were talking about how Ambrook's brand feels feels very distinct.

And for me, it's actually that I feel as though we've built, we've built a vehicle or like, like a brand or an ethos kind of that happens to be shaped like a venture-backed software company right now, but it's super extendable to a lot of these other things because actually what we're trying to do is we're trying to achieve the mission. And so it's sort of like, okay, what do we need to achieve? The mission is the first piece and then it just happens to continuously be shaped like this venture-backed software company.

Speaker B: Going maybe earlier in the, in the journey, we talked about government a little bit. It seems that understanding policy and subsidies, particularly around farming early on, was really core to kind of like some of the early work you guys did and broadly the economics of American agriculture and maybe like openings for the business. Can you talk about that a little bit? Or at least why like subsidies are so important to farming? Yeah. Speaker A: Agriculture is, you know, I can't really think of a nation-state where agriculture isn't both naturally and nationally strategic.

And so I think, thoughts on subsidies aside, which is, you know, lots of takes on either side of that, I think the most important piece around it is, is what do you want to incentivize as part of domestic capacity? Subsidy. And this is actually where I'm super pro, um, uh, super pro any incentives or subsidies that— or, you know, subsidy is kind of a loaded word, but like incentives or grants or these financial vehicles that further stand up domestic manufacturing and production. So like, uh, Off Range, we recently just did an article on the Dubai pistachio chocolate craze.

Speaker A: Agriculture is, you know, I can't really think of a nation-state where agriculture isn't both naturally and nationally strategic. And so I think, thoughts on subsidies aside, which is, you know, lots of takes on either side of that, I think the most important piece around it is, is what do you want to incentivize as part of domestic capacity? Subsidy. And this is actually where I'm super pro, um, uh, super pro any incentives or subsidies that— or, you know, subsidy is kind of a loaded word, but like incentives or grants or these financial vehicles that further stand up domestic manufacturing and production.

So like, uh, Off Range, we recently just did an article on the Dubai pistachio chocolate craze. Speaker B: I've been hearing little things about this, so I don't really know what it is. Speaker A: It's basically just everyone's obsessed with like this very specific type of of chocolate that is like stuffed with this, with like pistachio, like cream, and like some other, um, bits. Should probably know it better. I was bringing up— but actually I'm more interested in the fact that like implication on American pistachio growing. And that's what Off Range was covering.

And it basically— the, the, the, the article basically talks about how American pistachio growers were kind of overblown, like sort of overwhelmed by the sudden like demand for this pistachio act actually a pistachio byproduct. And so it's not even like pistachio nut, it's like you have to like take all the byproduct pistachios and then process it. But there were no— there was not enough like domestic processing facilities for these pistachio growers. And so they were like, they were not able to— Speaker B: they're buying in Dubai, or it's a product that's made here?

Speaker A: So it's a, it's a, it's— you can make the product here basically, but it's like basically America was like caught flat-footed in trying to respond to this demand because it did not have the domestic processing Philly, which you never think about. You always think about like other countries like export raw materials and then, and then they get processed elsewhere and then they reimport. Like, that is happening to the US as well. Fascinating. Um, so yeah, I just, I've been thinking about that a lot actually recently, just in terms of building back up the domestic like value.

It's sort of like, it's called value-added, but it's basically the layer of, of you take raw materials off a farm or, or, um, or a ranch or something, and then you process it and you do value-added processing. So it basically, uh, you process in a way that increases its value, right? Turns it into something else or turns into cuts of beef or whatever for like more consumer consumption. Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting to think about. Obviously there are other industries where this is true, but agriculture in particular is sort of like deeply embedded into not just anybody's individual business incentives, but like a national identity, security, health, GDP, like all so many things, which is, yeah, I'm sure we could talk a lot about.

One thread I want to talk about in the context of Ambrook, and I'm curious how you think about it now, but it actually, you once, we were talking about Dialectic, my podcast, and you observed that in your words, I, it's illegible right now and that's a feature, that's a benefit. And eventually maybe I'll have to become legible. And we were talking about like, I don't know, the different gas and so on. And I've referenced that so many times in so many different contexts. I've been thinking about it a lot and I I think my sense is that you have thought about Ambrook at least in a somewhat similar way where you actually spent several years building technology, not doing a ton of, at least publicly talking to the market.

And more recently, I'm sure you're going to continue to do more. You've also done Off Range, which is your internal media company. But yeah, I'm curious how you thought about that sequencing. Another phrase I saw somewhere, which is almost this like anti-YC methodology a little bit. Yeah. What is, what has your frame been on the arc of Ambrook when it comes to how exposed it is to your customers in the world? Speaker A: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot. You know, I, I trained, you know, my formal entrance to Silicon Valley was YC when I was like 21.

Yeah. Speaker B: This is your first company. Oh, my first company. Speaker A: And so I, I had this sense of, of what building a company should look like. And YC has produced so many wonderful companies and has a very, like, a methodology by which. But I think I actually was— I think Sam Altman, right, talked about how OpenAI, he regretted the advice that he had given so many YC founders about the way to build this very MVP scope. And I think it's, it's actually that there's not a one-size-fits-all, especially now that I think a lot of the low-hanging fruit around SaaS companies has kind of been picked, right?

And so now you actually need to return back to like what venture capital was originally about, which is like making bets on these like very moonshotty— Yes. Not just ship and iterate. Not just shipping and iterate. And so we kind of did something a little bit in between, which was we, we spent about 3— so the first year and a half we were building kind of, we were kind of figuring out what to build. We were building this working capital solution and then ended up starting to build the accounting software.

And then we basically we just worked with a core set of, um, like a couple dozen producers. So, and these are small ACVs, right? This SMB accounting software. So it's not like we were making a ton of money during that time either. And so I, but I, I was fortunate to be backed by investors who really believed in the sort of long haul vision of like build the valuable thing that will be the moat right in the future. Speaker B: And so, and accounting software is not super easy to build.

Speaker A: It's not super easy to build. And actually the reason why is because I talk about how it's like simple at its core, but accounting software and also ERPs, there's such a high future floor of expectation, right? These giants have been in the market for so long that it's not just— and there's so many different types of users that can use in different ways. And so you have this, you know, it's really hard to just do the, do the thing that might fit exactly fit for the MVP accounting software no one wants, you know, so like, and so we've convinced like a couple dozen farmers to do the MVP accounting software and to like build it over time.

But, but it's not just accounting software. It's also bill pay. It's also invoicing. It's also, you know, that is the expectation now with like how to use a one-stop shop for everything that you, everything that you need. But so it's not just, it's not just that you can get the primary workflows right for one user. You have to get tertiary workflows right for several different types of users, the accountant, the bookkeeper, the owner-operator, right, their staff member to really start to, to get over the switching costs. Because, because that's the nice thing about building accounting software.

It's very sticky, right? It's like a lot of historical records in there. It's very hard to switch. And so to convince people to move over to us, you had to kind of eclipse that a bit. Speaker B: Huh. Hmm. Farming and agriculture, as we talked about, is the beachhead market. You have wider ambitions. You've talked about kind of like serving this like broad base of complicated businesses, maybe that are natural resource oriented. Maybe even that's too specific. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what the potential scope is, what expanding adjacently looks like, trading off focus and scale, especially now that you do have a product that can really serve some large chunk of the market really well?

And then maybe as a last note, if you want to opine on it, like what does Ambrook roughly look like on a 10-year time horizon, assuming things go well? Speaker A: Yeah, I'm just writing this down. Speaker B: And yeah, there's a bunch of aspects of that question. I mean, the broad scope of it is just like, yeah, how do you think about, um, you have a product that's serving, as I understand, thousands of farms now. Um, how do you think about going wider? How do you think about deepening that relationship?

And how do you think about what broad expansion looks like for, for Amber? Speaker A: Yeah, so we, we work with several thousand operations today. Um, about 80% of them are farms or ranches. About 20% are actually not They are either the, the side businesses or the other types of businesses that farms might also be doing. Um, often the same owners, often the same owners. So that, or it's like sort of, uh, we had like a book publisher recently who signed up for a free trial and like waded their way all the way through our Ag-specific accounting software and they're like, will this work for me?

And we're like, actually, yes, it will. And like, I'm so glad you saw through all of our like farm-specific marketing. Um, cause really what they're trying to get at is the multi-P&L part. Speaker B: Like, like, got it. Got it. Got it. Speaker A: Actually, our second customer tugged us into multiple industries, which was, uh, they were a cattle feeder operation in Arizona. We had just, we had, we'd actually, that was actually the, the customer that we were driving back from, um, uh, from, uh, yeah, the Amber Waves of Grain.

And they, uh, were like, okay, great. Onboarded this entity. And, uh, they were like, okay, like, can we onboard our other for businesses now. And we're like, what? And like, yeah, we have like a trucking business, we have, you know, like we're getting into— we do custom hay, like, um, sure. Yeah, exactly, custom services. And so you basically realize that, uh, we actually, I think, very fortunately realized that our software that we had built was very horizontally applicable. And what we've been doing since then is still focused on agriculture, uh, for a number of reasons, but also because agriculture is industry rich, like in sense of it, it is just so, it has the big diversity in the industries that it's in.

And so we get good testing for all these other adjacent industries. So like equipment, uh, you have some, um, like processing, uh, construction, contracting, like these other adjacent verticals that if we had, that we just get for free kind of because we are working with, with agribusinesses. And so that has been really, I think, unexpected. And I think in terms of thinking about expanding, it's actually now about what I call, kind of call like the infinite, like infinite vertical, like go-to-market motion where you need to make sure that you are doing, you are well serving your core, your existing core ICP, but you are kind of see like a Venn diagram of, right, all the different types of industries you can do.

And again, fortunately accounting software is pretty applicable to a lot of you. A lot of folks need invoicing, bill pay, accounting software, payments, that kind of stuff. But like a farm needs to be able to export to the schedule F, which is a very specific, like, tax form for the, for the farm. Um, it wants to be able to see, like, a custom chart of accounts, right, which is behind the, behind the hood, like, sort of a, like, a database sync. And so, so, so there are things that we're doing that, um, that are really helpful there, and we're focused, and that has given us the focus to do that.

But now we're starting to tug, and I think you basically want to, you want to, basically there's two inflection points in the business coming up when it comes to multi-industry. It's the next vertical that we really focus on. So that's one. So it's going from one to two, and then it's going from two many. I think once you go from two to many, then you, then you've built kind of that engine. Speaker B: Yeah, you bolt on one extra thing. Exactly. Speaker A: You've built an engine of a team that knows how to, like, it doesn't break the team's brain to like deal with multiple people.

Right. But I think that in this new era, I think in, you know, the early 2000s, it was basically just folks are moving online. So it's literally just like from desktop to like the cloud or whatever. So it's the internet is here. And then the 2010s, I think, was the rise of smartphones and social media. So you had a marketing, your distribution You could sell something that was mobile first and you could distribute it through ads. And then that largely became saturated in most, for most business types. Um, very expensive now to like sell SaaS to other SaaS companies, for example.

Not as expensive to sell SaaS to farmers because it's like, that wasn't actually, so there's a lot of techniques from like marketing in 2010s, but like, and then, uh, the 2020s I think will be about hyper-personalization. So you have the ability to like assume As soon as, you know, as soon as someone like sees an ad, they're able to see a landing page that should be spun up with their brand, with their brand. Like there are things that you can do like that we're getting toward that will be hyper-personalized in a way that everyone should touch software that feels kind of customized to them.

Doesn't mean that all the workflows need to be like vibe-coded, you know, 'cause you don't really wanna like do that for accounting software. Yeah. Speaker B: You want the engine to actually be really bulletproof and like, exactly, exactly. Huh. A couple thoughts or questions on leadership. You're the CEO and founder of Ambrook. You, I found some tweets that I thought were really interesting. The first set, you say, I have increasingly conceptualized the job of a CEO as quote, make intractable problems tractable for a team about a market for investors, et cetera.

And then a follow-up tweet, framing it this way feels more actionable to me than the idea of having quote, unique insights vision or quote, connecting the dots for others communicating vision. Can you try to simply describe what that process of making intractable tractable sort of means on a day-to-day basis? Speaker B: You want the engine to actually be really bulletproof and like, exactly, exactly. Huh. A couple thoughts or questions on leadership. You're the CEO and founder of Ambrook. You, I found some tweets that I thought were really interesting. The first set, you say, I have increasingly conceptualized the job of a CEO as quote, make intractable problems tractable for a team about a market for investors, et cetera.

And then a follow-up tweet, framing it this way feels more actionable to me than the idea of having quote, unique insights vision or quote, connecting the dots for others communicating vision. Can you try to simply describe what that process of making intractable tractable sort of means on a day-to-day basis? Speaker A: Yeah, totally. For me, it's about making sure that I'm in the information flow. So, my team makes fun of me, but I love, I'll just pop up in random Slack threads they don't want me in. I'm sure, I'm sure you do.

Like the Kool-Aid man. And I was like, love. Yeah, exactly. I love information. I love, give me that raw, like drip into my veins. Speaker B: I think most, by the way, most really, um, successful leaders, maybe I would assume this is true in all industries, but at least in technology, like this seems to be a pretty common trait. It's like air traffic control. Speaker A: Yeah, totally. And so I think, but I, and I remember talking to my executive coach about this and I was like, is this a problem that I just like need to read every Slack message?

'Cause I, I think I'm fine. Like I, I feel like I can handle it. But my team actually asked me, you know, Mackenzie, how do you come up— you know, like, some of my team members was like, love coaching around how you turn all this raw information flow into make the intractable tractable. Like, yeah, you actually do that. I was talking to my executive coach, I was like, can I just— is it okay to just recommend, like, well, I actually just read every support message, every Slack message, every, you know, every PRD that I can, like, every whatever.

I'm just constantly just like sitting in all this information for our company. Yeah, exactly. Like, and then I'm I end up seeing enough information and seeing the patterns across things and you're like, okay, this over here and this over here makes sense and you can start to break down the problem and you can apply frameworks and some of these other things and it does end up making it smaller chunks or tractable or you can put your finger on it, but it has to come from that information flow. And my executive coach said something that I really appreciated, which was, no, he told me a story about a headmaster in, I think Baltimore, who he had read a book about who had said that one day, he just decided to move his desk into the main hallway.

And so every day when he was just doing his work or whatever, he would see students' faces kind of pass. And so he would notice the change in emotion for one kid, like over the course of a week or whatever. And that was just how he kept a pulse, like on the students. And I was like, oh, got it. I will continue to burst it into these Slack threads. Speaker A: Yeah, totally. And so I think, but I, and I remember talking to my executive coach about this and I was like, is this a problem that I just like need to read every Slack message?

'Cause I, I think I'm fine. Like I, I feel like I can handle it. But my team actually asked me, you know, Mackenzie, how do you come up— you know, like, some of my team members was like, love coaching around how you turn all this raw information flow into make the intractable tractable. Like, yeah, you actually do that. I was talking to my executive coach, I was like, can I just— is it okay to just recommend, like, well, I actually just read every support message, every Slack message, every, you know, every PRD that I can, like, every whatever.

I'm just constantly just like sitting in all this information for our company. Yeah, exactly. Like, and then I'm I end up seeing enough information and seeing the patterns across things and you're like, okay, this over here and this over here makes sense and you can start to break down the problem and you can apply frameworks and some of these other things and it does end up making it smaller chunks or tractable or you can put your finger on it, but it has to come from that information flow. And my executive coach said something that I really appreciated, which was, no, he told me a story about a headmaster in, I think Baltimore, who he had read a book about who had said that one day, he just decided to move his desk into the main hallway.

And so every day when he was just doing his work or whatever, he would see students' faces kind of pass. And so he would notice the change in emotion for one kid, like over the course of a week or whatever. And that was just how he kept a pulse, like on the students. And I was like, oh, got it. I will continue to burst it into these Slack threads. Speaker B: It's funny. I mean, it, there's so many, the thing that comes immediately, immediately to mind, which I talked about with Tammy recently on, on the podcast, but comes up everywhere with taste is it's the same.

It's like the people with the best taste have consumed the most music, have consumed the worst. And I almost wonder if just like so many things around judgment are just like, yeah, consume more, get closer to, get closer to the data and the signal. And which maybe isn't, uh, like, um, soundbite advice, but it's— Speaker A: oh, actually, I really like— I think it's— it doesn't feel hard if it's something that you're genuinely interested in. And it feels like— it's like scrolling on Instagram, you know? It's like— I like— it feels— and I— Ava actually had a piece recently that I really liked, uh, on affinity.

Yeah, yeah. And I— when you were saying that, it reminded me of that, which was she had a a line in there kind of talking about doing, you know, figuring out what you like and then doing it in the most like irrepressible, like original sort of like almost playful, obsessed way possible. Yes, exactly. Um, and I think it would be really hard to build a business that I didn't have affinity toward because of the way that I like to consume information and the way that I like to like live my life.

Yes. Speaker B: Yeah, it's the Novak Djokovic thing again. It's like he likes hitting the tennis ball. You're gonna compete with that? Like, you better find the thing where it's fun for you to scroll. Yeah. Uh, one, one more pair of tweets. You say people assume startup founders are unusually risk tolerant. I don't think this is quite true. Rather, founders I know tend to be anxious or neurotic in a way that has forced them to be way better at de-risking things than other people. And startups are nothing if a series of de-risking steps to some outcome.

What have you learned about de- de-risking? Hmm. Speaker B: Yeah, it's the Novak Djokovic thing again. It's like he likes hitting the tennis ball. You're gonna compete with that? Like, you better find the thing where it's fun for you to scroll. Yeah. Uh, one, one more pair of tweets. You say people assume startup founders are unusually risk tolerant. I don't think this is quite true. Rather, founders I know tend to be anxious or neurotic in a way that has forced them to be way better at de-risking things than other people.

And startups are nothing if a series of de-risking steps to some outcome. What have you learned about de- de-risking? Hmm. Speaker A: I've learned that— what have I learned about de-risking? It feels way easier to do after you have a bunch of reps on it. So there's actually— it can feel risky almost to go into the steps of de-risking because it requires you to slow down sometimes or requires you to like face the problem more. Like, there's a sense of anxiety, you know, you can, you can, when you have anxiety, like a common response to it is avoidance, right?

And de-risking is all about just like seeking it out, you know, like becoming friends with the anxiety and be like, where are you pointing? You know? Um, and I think that has been, yeah, I think that's something I've really, really learned is I am always rewarded when I face it and de-risk it and like defuse the bomb. You know, and I think there's also something— Speaker B: and start with even just like, look at the bomb. Yeah, totally. Like, really sit with the bomb. Speaker B: and start with even just like, look at the bomb.

Yeah, totally. Like, really sit with the bomb. Speaker A: And I, I think also, but it's also, I think the important lesson about de-risking is that it's also okay when the bomb goes off. Like, you'll be fine. Like, most things are not actually existential. And I think that also, that has done two things. One, I was actually telling, I was talking to someone about this the other day. I kind of get into a flow state when there's crises. Buzzes. Like, some— I get at the end of like a crisis that we just are— we see, we handle, we do the comms out, we whatever.

Or if it's internal, I, I kind of have a buzz at the end of it. Speaker B: The stakes are really clear. Speaker A: There's so much clarity. Yeah. And suddenly that thing— priorities are clear. Exactly. That anxiety that was like pointing and pointing, pointing, they were ignoring, you were like, yep, like you were right. Maybe not about the exact thing, you were right? But it suddenly— most of my job in the attract— talking the intractable part, most part my job is sifting through the intractable. And so suddenly when something becomes quite tractable, super, super clear, I'm like, I know what I'm going to do today.

And so that's one piece. And so it's a sense of like, I can get into a flow state. I can de-risk. I can solve these things. But even when they do happen, like, you know, they're fine. Like it— the company still exists, you know, like hopefully it'll exist for a while longer. Yeah, that's a great answer. Speaker B: Uh, you are the founder and CEO, but Ambrook is also a lot more than just you. We were talking about this fairly recently. Um, you had a— you put a big announcement out about your Series A.

There was an excerpt you had said something where, uh, you're talking about Haley on your team. Haley, a mother of two from Montana, from a Montana ranching family, on why she joined our operations team at Ambrook. I watched your Stripe video, she said, I felt as though we both wanted the same thing for different reasons. You had also sent me just like a bunch of the notes your team had sent upon that announcement. And my observation, and we may have talked about this a little bit, my observation is like this really interesting thing where like Ambrook for a long time, and obviously still now to some degree, is like deeply authentically you and yours.

But also in real time, it is becoming more than just you and more than yours, not only obviously in the context of your partners and your team, but your customers and other people relate to the brand. What is it? Yeah. What has that experience started to feel like? Such a good question. Speaker B: Uh, you are the founder and CEO, but Ambrook is also a lot more than just you. We were talking about this fairly recently. Um, you had a— you put a big announcement out about your Series A. There was an excerpt you had said something where, uh, you're talking about Haley on your team.

Haley, a mother of two from Montana, from a Montana ranching family, on why she joined our operations team at Ambrook. I watched your Stripe video, she said, I felt as though we both wanted the same thing for different reasons. You had also sent me just like a bunch of the notes your team had sent upon that announcement. And my observation, and we may have talked about this a little bit, my observation is like this really interesting thing where like Ambrook for a long time, and obviously still now to some degree, is like deeply authentically you and yours.

But also in real time, it is becoming more than just you and more than yours, not only obviously in the context of your partners and your team, but your customers and other people relate to the brand. What is it? Yeah. What has that experience started to feel like? Such a good question. Speaker A: This, I think, goes back to the answer around eligibility versus legibility, which it's super— after being illegible for such a long time, it's really uncomfortable sometimes to be legible. Yeah. And, um, and to be perceived and interpreted, I think, in these ways.

And it, it— I think, I think when it comes to Ambrook's culture, there are lots of it. There's absolutely tons of it that, um, that is me, but it's also, um, my co-founders. It's also, um, like a huge part of our aesthetic is our creative director, Allie, who's just so talented. And I talk about this with Ally where it feels as though she can kind of interpret gestures of my brain and make it something that is real. And so there's so much— there's so— yes, there's so much about the externalization and legibility of Ambreok that has to do with everyone else, right?

Outside of me. And I absolutely could not do it alone. And I don't create it alone either. And I think that that is like the really interesting thing to— kind of the out-of-body experience to watch is like this something that gets co-created outside of me and is like part— and it also has a relationship to me in that, and that Ambrok also affects me, right? So it's like I interact with Ambrok, but it's like a being, it's like a creature, right? It's a creature. And so, um, so yeah, that has been— that has just been really kind of this wild out-of-body experience in seeing that.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's really cool. Uh, unfair question, I'm asking anyway, Okay. I want 3 words that define the culture and the people at Ambrook. Speaker A: Curious is one. Very, very deeply curious. I want to use the word empathetic, but it isn't actually quite, it's not as nuanced. It's a sense of meeting people where they are, um, which empathetic is sometimes you can understand that, but I think the empathy, the version of empathy that we have is like literally driving to someone's like home and like, you know, and sitting with them and actually deeply trying to understand their day-to-day in context.

So does that maybe be like a lived empathy or something? Um, there's an intimacy there too. Yeah, intimacy. Yeah, there's intimacy there. Um, and I think, uh, pragmatic. Speaker B: Do you think those were— would you have said the same three those words 3 years ago? Oh, good question. Speaker A: I think so, actually. That's amazing. I think we've been extremely consistent in culture and who we've hired and the values that Jeff, Jane, and I, my co-founders, wrote when we— it was just us, have largely, I think, stayed the same.

Speaker B: That is pretty amazing. One last thing, I guess, on the, on the broader Ambrook brand, let's say. And well, and I, and I guess I should include, you have Ambrook and you have Ambrook Research now Off Range. Which is a, as far as I understand, basically an independent media company that you guys fund. It has something like 150,000 subscribers, which is amazing. It's been running for 2 or 3 years. Yeah. You're building financial tools basically. Why does narrative— financial tools for now? Yes. Yes. To be fair, it's a big container.

Why does narrative and stories and research and these types of things broadly, even just brand, both on the Ambrook side and on the Offrange side, matter from a business standpoint? Speaker B: That is pretty amazing. One last thing, I guess, on the, on the broader Ambrook brand, let's say. And well, and I, and I guess I should include, you have Ambrook and you have Ambrook Research now Off Range. Which is a, as far as I understand, basically an independent media company that you guys fund. It has something like 150,000 subscribers, which is amazing.

It's been running for 2 or 3 years. Yeah. You're building financial tools basically. Why does narrative— financial tools for now? Yes. Yes. To be fair, it's a big container. Why does narrative and stories and research and these types of things broadly, even just brand, both on the Ambrook side and on the Offrange side, matter from a business standpoint? Speaker A: Totally. I honestly, for a long time, because we were building something that we couldn't show people, the only thing we had Huh. Interesting narrative and storytelling. Speaker B: And you were pointing at where you were going to go, pointing at where we wanted to go.

Speaker A: But also, I don't like the version of storytelling where you're always talking just about the future. I think it— I want to be able to point people where we can go, but not have that be exclusively like what we talk about. And so Off Range, which used to be called Amber Research, now is called— we recently rebranded to Off Range because to represent that it's becoming more of an independent publication. It was originally a way to, to build something that would be of value and interest to the audience that we wanted to work with.

And so we started actually, it was called Amber, or Amber Research, because we started by co-writing, like, and actually had one of these papers published with academics. Cool. Wow. Um, with just some of the early data, like anonymized data that that we had from the pandemic relief grants that we're helping people get. And then we found Jesse, who is our editor for Off Range, and he's wonderful. And the reference check I did on Jesse, I always remember this, she said Jesse is a capital J journalist. Whoa. And what she meant by that was— What were they doing before?

He was the managing editor of a food and ag-focused publication called The Counter, which was nonprofit that shut down after 7 years. And so I kind of saw that and I was like, hey, really sad about The Counter, but trying to build something here at Ambrook. But yeah, I remember his reference said that she was like, yeah, Jesse's a capital J journalist. And what she meant by that was just someone who had such a level of integrity and craft in his work and had been an editor, which is what I wanted.

And so brought him on and he shaped kind of, this is talking about the flavor of like— How did you get someone like that? Speaker B: To join a, like, yes, independent funded, but like ultimately join a startup, a commercial startup. Like, totally. Was that hard or were they— Speaker A: Yeah, I had to, I had to convince him. I, well, I, yeah, we, I remember I first reached out to his editor, uh, um, editor-in-chief, and she recommended that I chat with Jesse. Okay. And, um, I sent her a long email, LinkedIn.

I was like, I know we're a tech company, like, this is the vision of what we're trying to do. Speaker B: Just meet with me. Speaker A: Yeah, just meet with me. And so she did and she was like, okay. Like, I think you should meet Jesse. And, um, Jesse has something I make fun of him for. He's a face called, uh, like, it's like Stonewall Jackson, but Stonewall Jesse, like just this like, like wall, you know, of a face. Like, and so that was like what I was greeted with.

And by the end, I feel like we were really talking about something that we could build together that would be really interesting. And he was game. I mean, he ultimately was game. We started out with just a contract to see if we liked it and game to try to build, and it has some, you know, try to build a publication publication that was editorially independent as much as it could be within Ambrook. And it hasn't always been easy. I mean, there's been, yeah, you know, moments where like something that the publication wants to publish is not necessarily what the Ambrook, the company, like wants it to publish.

And so, but like for the vast majority of, of the time, it's just been such a— and I think even in that, it's been such a wonderful partnership. And even in that, the thing that I think works with me and Jesse is that I can put on my publisher publisher hat, right, of this publication and, and work with him, and then also put on my CEO hat. And Jesse never feels like we're never on the other opposite ends of the table. We're always on the same side of the table looking at it together, being like, okay, how do we build this experimental publication in a way that feels like high integrity and, you know, respects the capital J journalism part of it?

Speaker B: I have a bunch of miscellaneous things before we wrap up. Speaker A: Okay, perfect. Speaker B: I don't know if you published this publicly, but you said it somewhere. MIT economist David Autor calls AI an inversion technology. This is in a Noem, I forget the name. Noem, yeah. Yes, Noem publication. One that can democratize knowledge and bring decision-making power back to the middle class. That's exactly how we think about it too. Can you make a case for this? I think many people feel like AI is very much a concentrating technology.

Speaker A: Totally. I think his point that I just thought was interesting was because it was this different take than I had seen in a lot of the headlines, his argument was that computerization was this concentrating technology because it turned people, you know, calculators used to be, you know, a role, you know? And it turned people into these algorithms, or these roles into these algorithms. And so the argument that he was making, which I thought was really interesting, was that there is actually democratization of knowledge and skill set almost that where you have, you have basically what ended up happening is that that sort of computerization kind of hollowed out the middle class because you had a lot of these like lower middle class jobs that then essentially either got pushed down or end up having to get pushed up, right?

And so like it put a lot of pressure basically on like downward wage pressure, right? Because you had a lot more like sort of supply basically for these like lower skill roles basically. Basically provided leverage for much, much, much like higher skill, higher paid roles as well. And now what you're kind of seeing is, is the ability for a lot of folks who are, who don't necessarily have like these multiple degrees of education and certification for these much higher paid jobs, being able to access the things that those higher paid jobs are now.

So it was, it was a little, you know, it basically, it basically is, is looking at a different slice, is enabling a different slice. Versus computerization, kind of his argument was that it took out this like lower middle class slice of skill set and kind of pushed all the wage demand down. And then versus AI, what it's doing is it's accessing these like skill sets all along, like this sort of thing. Speaker B: Making, giving everyone access to them. Exactly. Speaker A: Maybe like a, yeah. Exactly. So it's basically, you kind of re, you know, you can enable folks to be able to access higher skilled work or be able to do higher skilled, quote unquote skilled things because you are able to like access this knowledge.

Database, which feels much more like an assistant or a junior employee than it does a replacement. Speaker B: Huh. Do you, have you thought much about how that specifically applies to Ambra? Speaker A: Yeah. So there's, I mean, there's, I think a lot, and I was, I was actually talking with Linus about this, um, about what is going to be table stakes in the future for what we need to build and what will separate the, the average teams from the 99th percentile teams, uh, in 6, 12 months or years from now.

And I think the thing that we were talking about that I have been kind of noodling on and thinking about and seeing at Ambriq as well is that I think you'll see a lot of the average— there'll be lots of things that are table stakes, like you're pointing, pointing LLMs at BigQuery and Intercom and these other types of tools that we use to be able to access and do data analyst work and those types of things. You'll be able to build leaner teams. But I I think there's also, I think average teams will end up building, building things that, that get to the V1 very quickly, but end up decelerating the team over time versus 99th percentile teams will build in a way that compounds.

So it'll, you'll see the acceleration over time. And so I think about that in terms of, okay, how do we build in a way that we can accelerate over time? And how do we build in a way that, that honors and enables like the, and draws the super talented people who want to engage with their critical thinking, who want apply discipline and taste to their work and not just replace that. Because I think that's also when— what you're maybe like the specific tactical skill or whatever, but like, yeah, exactly. Or the folks who actually do have the skills, like software engineers, right?

Like on our team, I remember one person on my team said like, I'm mourning what my job used to be. And that is, woof, like that is like such a powerful, powerful statement. And I don't think it necessarily— I think we can build— we are— we then took that statement or essentially are building the version of the company that we want to that will basically turn everyone into super, you know, all the superpowers basically. Speaker B: With their Iron Man suit. Exactly. Speaker A: It's just like enable that level of critical thinking at the system level, right?

Or at these other types of hard problems. Um, it's about access to, to more in the acceleration, not, not the replacement, do something that's quite brittle, hard to maintain, right? And then just like kind of sucks to work on that code base. Hmm. Speaker B: A, a quote from a, uh, book, I believe it's from, from the biography. Now at age 76, he had no reason to break the tradition tradition of secrecy that began with his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel G. Boswell, the founder of the company. The colonel created a culture around the idea that if you ever talked about it, you'd have to give up the game.

One Boswell cousin recalled, at family gatherings, they talked about the virtue of stealth this way: as long as the whale never surfaces, it is never harpooned. Talk about legibility and illegibility. Who was G. Boswell? Speaker A: Yeah, it's one of my favorite quotes, uh, that, that quote, honestly. Is what convinced me to get into ag. Wow. So Boswell, the Boswell family, it was a— still is like a— but started in the 1800s in California, which just kind of had built an agricultural empire over time. And there was this book written, The King of California, where that quote is from.

And it's this like this anthology, I think is the right word, of this, not just this family, but like this, the time and place, the Homestead Act, right? Like a lot of folks, like the land grab in California was like folks who were kind of like San Francisco capitalists were like, actually found out that as long as we put different names under each one of these parcels, we could stack them all together. Wild West. You know, the Wild West. And so, no, it was It was this discussion about the transformation of California landscape via agriculture.

And so, you know, all sorts of things. And we talk about the environment, like, some— sometimes it's like, you know, the legacy that we have left in transforming and like terraforming our own land is like really intense, right? Like, and we can almost like something never, you know, probably never get some of that back. Like, I don't know if you know that like just north of LA used to be, um, the largest freshwater lake in North America. Um, it's totally gone. Speaker B: Yeah, it's totally gone. Speaker A: 800 square miles.

It actually used to— like, when during the, like, supercycles of, like, the California wet-dry seasons, um, during the wet season, sometimes it actually rained so much and flooded so much that it would connect to the Pacific. Speaker B: Oh my God. When did it— Speaker A: when did it, uh, the last When did it dry? It, um, the last of the lake I think was drained in the early 20th century. Um, but when you have really these like wet-dry cycles, which is natural in California but is exacerbated by climate change, you, um, you actually, the lake returns to the lakebed sort of, and you have these like extreme flooding, which is, um, which is mostly how far from, how far north of LA, you know?

Uh, how far north? Not that far north. Speaker B: Oh my God, I'm gonna have to go a rabbit hole. Yeah, crazy. Speaker A: Anyway, so just, I think there's a sense, but yeah, it's a, it's a family that basically The book outlines this legacy of a family over multiple generations, but uses it— I love those types of books, history of X books. Yeah, it's like such an interesting slice or way to kind of think about the history of a place. Speaker B: Speaking of, uh, on the table we have The Land Where Lemons Grow.

The first thing you ever recommended me, uh, I think this is from a tweet, you say one of my favorite things to do is read some niche history of X book before traveling to a related area. For example, a few years ago I I read the history of Italian citrus before hiking through the Amalfi Coast and actually could nerd about, nerd out with a friend about what could have otherwise been a random pile of posts on the trail and terraces in the distance. I was on my way to Italy. I was very grateful.

I would highly recommend anyone, certainly anyone going to Italy or interested in Italy. My broader question is what you just started to talk about, which is it's sort of the, most people are inclined, especially if they're trying to learn about something they don't know anything about, they're inclined towards like a very high-level generalist, give me the basics, me the kind of map of the territory approach to learning. What is it about this like highly targeted, whether it be learning about history or otherwise new, uh, uh, country, whatever, like what, yeah, what about that niche approach is interesting to you for understanding?

Speaker A: I think I'm, uh, I don't retain information in these like broad swaths. I have to be like highly interested basically in something very very like niche, um, or it's like very focused. And so I've, I've never been able to like read and memorize a bunch of facts or something, uh, that feel kind of random or generalized. And so for me, I think there's that, and I think it makes more fun and focused to kind of feel like you have this augmented reality like filter on the world where you're going, you're going around, you're going to Florence and you're walking by, you're, oh, actually that's the Medici lemon grove.

Speaker B: I would have never known. I had something hold on to. Yeah, like it was, it was like I had something to look for. Speaker A: Yes, totally. You have something to look for. I think that, that is— it feels, again, going back to the treasure hunt, it's not something where you're going and you're gonna see a bunch of tourists there. It's like the corner that no one's paying attention to with the plaque, you know, that only you know. It's like, it feels special. It's a secret. It's a secret, and it's a secret that you can keep with yourself or you can share with a friend.

But like, I— that trip in Italy, the first half of it I was alone, and And honestly, not even sometimes purposely looking. It was just like, I would happen to notice like that, that the Medici courtyard that had all the lemon trees in these big pots, I just happened to be looking by and my brain knew what it was because I had read the book. And those types of moments are so rewarding. It was like such a dopamine hit, you know? Yes. So yeah, I love that kind of stuff. Speaker B: Why are you inspired by the Disney Magic Band?

Speaker A: Oh my God. Um, okay, my whole family is a Disney family. Speaker B: Okay, I was a little surprised by this. I did, yeah, super into Disney. This is a Disney World thing, or do they have it at both? Speaker A: Disney World? Okay. Um, the— so, but I think I, I have a little bit more claim to it because I was born in Orlando. Okay. And the largest employer in Orlando, I'm pretty sure, is Disney. Yeah, this is culture, important culture, important, important sort of like history arc.

And And my mom actually, when she was a teenager, she worked at Disney, I think in Frontierland in Magic Kingdom. So she was like in one of the shops. And so we have this sense of, and then my brother and my sister are just equally as nerdy as I am in these different ways. And so like my brother especially just has like, loves anything, you know, he's a software developer, but he also just loves anything like mechanical. And so like since he was a kid, he just like became obsessed with like anywhere we go, like, you know, obviously like trains and those types of things.

Like when he was— I remember when he was really little, but also like going to Disney basically when you're young. He's, he's not just into— he's not really interested in the characters. He loves like— he'll tell you all about the Air Trans and like the history, you know, exactly. Yeah. And so I think that there's a sense of that. But, but the MagicBands are super interesting because essentially what, what they are is they're, um, they're, they're Disney's like spend man management tool. And MagicBands, basically— so MagicBands, for folks in the audience who aren't as big into Disney as I am, um, they are, uh, they're basically, uh, like little wristbands, um, that you connect to your credit card and they become your money source.

And so, and they, and they're also access to the park, all that kind of stuff. And so it just feels like you're spending play money. But what it also does is it turns— Speaker B: you like tap it to pay, tap it to pay, tap again, etc. Speaker A: But also turns Disney into a giant supercomputer. And so there's just constantly collecting— we talk— we're talking about context of money movement. Like, they're constantly collecting context. Yes. On the move, like the physical network mapping live. Exactly, they're network mapping live. And so they have information on like where they need to like store, where inventory is going to get low, or they have— they understand the supply chain of their own parks, you know, and the people in the parks.

Speaker B: The most you Disney overlap possible. Speaker A: That's amazing. So yeah, I think that's, that's why they're really cool. Speaker B: Uh, another old tweet. One of the mo— this is you. One of the most important concepts I learned in the past year was that of quote, strange math, where multiple conflicting things, feelings, phenomena, et cetera, could coexist without canceling each other out. It helped me realize, for example, that sadness was not the opposite of happiness, but rather could coexist and was even meaningful to experience in parallel parallelism in parallel.

How do you— how does one begin to learn this, this sort of ability to hold multiple things in concert? Speaker A: Hmm, I don't know. Speaker B: I've been— since that you— something prompted that experience, I think. Speaker A: Oh, sorry, I guess I, I don't know how you learn it because I've never not been able to do it, but I finally had words to explain, I think, or to put me out. So I think I'd learn— I've taken the lead leadership course called Leaders in Tech, and they talk about this idea of strange math, which is what you explained.

And I think they call it strange math, and it's useful to put a word to it because usually what happens when people have what they think are conflicting feelings, they just won't say anything. Like, they just think that they kind of cancel each other out, and so maybe not give someone feedback or whatever. So that was sort of the leadership course was on interpersonal dynamics, but I also found it to be really helpful for myself and understanding how to sit with my feelings more. I think that's the thing that I have to learn how to do better, is like, very good at identifying.

So I'm like, ah, 6 different like complex emotions I'm feeling at the same time. But like, as soon as I categorize it, I'm like, oop, you're going to box, you're going to box, you're going to box. Like, don't have to think about that anymore. Speaker B: How do we sit with them? Speaker A: Yeah, how do you sit with them? And so I think that, that tweet was about me thinking about, yeah, how sad sadness is— sadness just is sadness. It's not a counterweight to happiness, and you can feel these things at the same time, and we want to counterweight them.

We want to think about things on this linear spectrum of positive to negative. Yes. But actually, the blue side of that spectrum are just as important to be able to sit with and understand, and they teach us things just like the positive, like the sunshine portion of that spectrum, and Yeah, I think that's, that's what I was kind of thinking about then. Speaker B: Hmm. We're filming in your apartment, which I'm very grateful for. You also have an amazing office, the Embark office, if people are lucky to go there. You have a deep care for space and place and maybe specifically like the aesthetics of space and place and how they feel, but also very much like, like literal aesthetic beauty design.

I'm an owner of a similar dining table to the one we're sitting at, thanks to you. And and that applies whether at home in New York or in all the places that you go, as we talked about a little bit earlier. A couple of quotes I wanted to read. First, agriculture is one of the last places in America where you can live where you work. We talked about this a bit. This creates a hard to articulate wholesome aesthetic that is actually present in other countries. Consider why Seoul and Tokyo feel so interesting because these countries don't have restricted zoning that separates out where one lives and where one works.

Also in Tokyo, the multi, the third dimension going upwards, the The real loss seems to be the abstraction of rural communities to absentee landlords and generic strip malls. And then in a, in a note you had sent me talking about how spaces can create narratives, you say, what's the difference between clutter and lovely objects? Maybe it's hard for others to put their finger on it, but I know it when I see it. The easiest way not to be overwhelmed by the need to curate all these small details is to create a strong, consistent system where all the pieces can ladder up together in different formations and still rhyme okay even when they are messy.

I love that. They, they evoke some feeling that you can only experience by being in the space. It's hard to fully describe with words, but people get it, get us, when they are in it. I think of our New York office as a manifestation of our physical design system. Wow. Um, yeah, can you talk about— you, you just did a little bit in what I read, but can Can you talk about the creation process of these sort of aesthetic systems and how you iterate to them or even maybe like feel your way into them?

Speaker A: I think the first thing, so I think when I, from a personal aesthetic, I think that's something that can be built up and definitely is curated over time. There's a sense of, you know, actually even this apartment is, is me deliberately trying to shift slightly from that. But for years and years I kind of just built up and accrued a set of furniture instead of clothes. And it just, if you look at that in the organic sense, I think that's step one for me was just like, what is my personal aesthetic?

What, what do I want it to feel like? It's, it's feminine, but it's also a bit like, you know, hard to place in sort of time. It's not, it's not really modern, but there, there's a, um, or it's not, not, not like postmodern, but there might be more modern elements to it. Um, and then I think the office was the first time that I had to think about, um, from a space perspective, applying an aesthetic. That was very deliberately not— it is me. Like, there is a sense that I do— I do think that, like, people— Speaker B: but through a lens or a frame.

Exactly. Speaker A: It's a fractal, basically, of me. And, uh, it's a fractal that is like that, that, that organism we talked about earlier, that is Ambrook. Like, so how do you build an aesthetic that is that, that feels quite— and that's where I think, um, leaning on, like, my opinions, um, Allie, our creative director's opinions, who worked with a really talented interior, uh, sort of designer who helps, like, source and, um, stage a lot of those pieces. But they worked in, you know, in concert with a lot of that aesthetic.

And so yeah, I think that there's that place. And when I meant by like the, the objects rhyming, it's sort of like, you know, like it doesn't really matter where I put like this, you know, coaster or this like glass on this table. Like they all, it all kind of rhymes together in a sense of like, and I think you start to get a feeling of what that can look like. Um, which I think is what, what, yeah. So I think that there's, there's a sense of that and I think there's, there's some rules.

So some of the rules for that, like, you, you know, a design system, a digital design system is like you have colors this certain color scheme, right? You have certain buttons are shaped the same way, your fonts. What does that look like in a physical space? Okay, you have color schemes, but you also might have rules like, I really only want to, to get objects that are made out of natural materials, that there's metals or wood, or, um, and if you are going to use plastic, it has to kind of feel like this.

And there's a sense of, you kind of build it over time. And I think that's where you can start to— and I think the Amber office also is a bit relaxed and playful in that it's like not all perfect. Like there's a there's like a, there's a nook that we have that just looks like a grandma's basement nook. That's what we call it, you know. And every, everything in the space has like a name. So we have a big cabinet we call the Cabinet of Curiosities, and we have like a chest that like has, it's called the Chest of Secrets.

There's all of our swag in it. And like, I think there's like, there's a playfulness, I think, with it. When, when you like have an affection toward the space, it also makes people treat it better, you know. And so yeah, I think that that's been really fun to think about. Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's interesting how freedom can come out of a set of constraints too. I, I also think you— that quote in particular, just one of the things I've always admired in great spaces is like when they can feel messy but like good.

And it's like if you tried to set up the books in this way like deliberately, you could never get there, but it sort of spills out in an organic— Speaker A: yeah, yeah, you have to create— I think about this actually with community building with Interact, for example. It's like you have to create— it's like, um, coral starters. Like, you have to create the structure underneath, and then you, you create the conditions such that the people, the environment,, such that the organic— the coral structures grow organically. The books kind of grow organically, you know, kind of.

Speaker B: It's also Jane Jacobs. Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that's also like a good space enables you to move freely through it. Like, you're not worried about like messing up the thing on the couch, not worrying. So everything in our space in the office is just like meant to be used. Like there's no preciousness about it. And I think that adds to that as well. Speaker B: A final quote, or maybe a pair of them. I firmly believe that, quote, are we the right people to do this is just a matter of sheer will.

No one wakes up one day and is the perfect machine to build the perfect thing. You just make yourself into that person. That's a quote from a Stripe video that they made. And then later on in that video, you say, you have to create the opportunities you want to pursue. That's one of my life mottos. I like to start things. My final question is, why is starting things, willing things into existence, so core to you, to who you are? It's a great question. Speaker A: I think it's the ultimate manifestation of agency.

There's just creating something from nothing and the creative act. It's the same way that artists, I think, really like that. Or as I've been getting more into photography, realizing that like, that's also like the frame that you have or the perspective that you have can be like frozen in time. In a way that like, actually makes it easier to see the thing that you were seeing and showing it to other people or something. And so I think there's something around like, the creative act in starting companies and building them and building software or building products that people use that is this like, feedback loop that is just very intoxicating.

Speaker B: That's all I got. Thanks, Jackson. Thank you.