27: Mackenzie Burnett - Accounting for the American Dream

[00:00] I think of the American dream as the ability for the individual to believe that their children's future will be... [00:09] 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 [00:33] a lot of different [00:35] areas. But for me, when I think about independent business or why I'm a business owner, it's about the sense of [00:41] intellectual ownership over your time, 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. [00:56] The 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 hold space for multiple different types of dreams, I think is what makes a more resilient fabric of society. Welcome to Dialectic episode 27 with Mackenzie Burnett. Mackenzie is the founder and CEO of Ambrook, a startup aiming to change how farmers, [01:21] And eventually, all kinds of independent American businesses do their accounting, move money, and, [01:27] think in the long term, and more. Mackenzie 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 Mackenzie 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

[01:57] who, along with being broadly ambitious... [02:01] is quietly and deeply focused for the long run. I don't think it would be too unbelievable to imagine that McKenzie 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. [02:17] 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. [02:26] 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. [02:37] As always. [02:38] Please share the episode if you enjoy it. [02:41] That is how dialectic spreads. A rating on Spotify or Apple or thumbs up on YouTube wouldn't hurt either. [02:47] As always, thank you for listening, and here is Mackenzie Burnett. [02:51] Mackenzie Burnett. [02:53] We're here. [02:55] We're here. I'm really excited for this. I'm so excited, too. All right. I'm going to start with a quote from something you wrote. [03:01] No one spoke. [03:03] Tired but happy. It was the three of us, me and Micah and Atticus. [03:08] We had just signed our second customer, now driving the two hours back to the airport motel. The thunderstorm boomed in silence across the Arizona plains, [03:16] Lighting up the dust dark, the Strokes played on the radio. [03:20] The long car rides driving past amber waves of grain that have emotionally contextualized my work in unexpected ways. America the Beautiful.

[03:30] Can you talk about why America's heartland is so meaningful to you? [03:38] There... [03:40] There are so many things that I have learned [03:43] over the course of the past five years, and working on my company and building for rural communities, which the heartland is... [03:52] one part of that, but there's so many different parts of [03:55] rural America and America more broadly that have, [04:01] upended my conception of what... [04:05] what America is, who we are building for, who... [04:10] the people in tech are building for and their, I guess, their conceptions of what people want and what motivates them. [04:21] And I think the [04:23] the that that [04:25] language was written, um... [04:28] to evoke this memory... [04:30] of a happy place that I'm in when we're on these road trips to... [04:36] our customers who are mostly farms and ranches across the U.S., [04:40] And feeling as though I'm doing... [04:44] You couldn't pay me more to do the thing that I'm already doing. It is just so... [04:53] Yeah, I feel like I'm getting access to a world or to parallel lives that I've always wanted to live. And yes, I think that has been that that memory is kind of evoking.

[05:05] the [05:06] patriotism or some of these other elements that I've always [05:09] felt gravitated toward but haven't really been able to live until the past five years doing this work. [05:15] Yeah, reading that when I read Amber Waves of Grain, I kind of got chills the first time. 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. [05:31] 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 a 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 U.S. agriculture is mostly dictated by government incentivized market activity. Both of your parents, they work for the [06:01] and they worked in government and civil service. And then you, I think, have interned in Congress, in Parliament, 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... [06:17] 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 U.S. agriculture that kind of like laid the groundwork for Ambrook. [06:34] Yeah, I've always been interested in figuring out

[06:38] what path I could take or what tool I had access to at the time to have the biggest impact possible. And I think [06:45] 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. [06:56] I... [06:57] realized in college that [07:01] I had done a couple of these internships and just wasn't kind of went into my freshman year internship, freshman summer at the U.S. [07:12] Senate in D.C., very bright eyed and bushy tailed and left that summer being like, oh, man, I don't know if if I want to be the version of myself that I saw in those young staffers. Well, and it just it. [07:30] It was a real big wake-up call, and... [07:34] 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. [07:44] Was it with a [07:45] 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... I'm surprised you, Greg. I mean, honestly,

[08:15] involved graduating. Yeah, well, it's because I didn't have a, I was a government policy kid, so I had to get a degree and I couldn't fall back on the CS degree even without graduating. But [08:27] Oh, yeah, I turned down to I actually accepted a master's program at Columbia and turn 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 Bay Area to work on a company with a friend of mine from college who had dropped out, actually. 50 percent. Yeah. And then it kind of was off to the races from there. [08:57] We ended up getting into YC and kind of opened up my whole... [09:01] you know, open up this huge world of impact that 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 politics. [09:13] government policy. I [09:15] 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'm here, like what impact can I have now that I understand sort of what the tools are? Yes. And kind of building that portfolio is something I've always been really interested in. How did growing up in a house with two parents in civil service work? [09:40] Obviously, again, you had to kind of find your way into it your own way, but I'm curious how that [09:43] even just framed how you think about government and policy and that kind of work.

[09:48] It really normalized it in a way that I think a lot of kids in the DMV feel. I grew up right outside of D.C. in Maryland and... [09:57] So it normalized it. I think it also... [10:00] I think it also instilled... [10:03] especially my mom who approaches her work in a very principled way. [10:09] instilled a sense of [10:10] 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 [10:29] They were doing, I think, interesting things in... [10:33] And... [10:34] Ag policy specifically in pest and diseases in plants, so kind of plant health protection [10:42] 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. [10:53] That's amazing. What do you think that most people, [10:57] entrepreneurs or maybe technology type people could stand to know about how government works. [11:04] Ooh. [11:05] It's a very open-ended question, but... [11:11] I've always been struck, I think, by how... [11:16] how black box most people think government is. Either it's this full faith that it's very incompetent or a full faith that they trust it. Or a full, you know, it's sort of... But it's a collection of...

[11:28] 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. 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 another nine to five, you know? And I think in that way, especially the majority of the government, which is the civil service, and then you have the political appointees are kind of at [11:58] the folks who are the highest profile, most, you know, they change with administration, right? They might have big impact. But I think the takeaway that I had for my parents and my older sister actually still works at the USDA is, [12:12] 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. [12:27] That's a really good answer. [12:28] Um, you mentioned it briefly, you went to work on an open source startup, then you went to Stanford, think about climate, particularly with regard to US military, and like climate security. One core point. [12:41] 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 [12:57] 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 –

[13:08] if you have a point of view and hindsight on what makes the like broader climate conversation so, um, [13:16] intractable political hard for people to maybe like wrap their minds around the urgency of [13:21] It's almost like this boogeyman that clearly a lot of people care a ton about, but I think a lot of people's relation to it is just like it's so big and overwhelming they don't really know how to make sense of. Yeah, I think the literature suggests that. [13:34] The individuals who... [13:37] who change beliefs on climate change. 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 climate? [13:54] the realities or implications of of climate change and [13:58] 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. You actually... [14:14] Saw that mirrored in the U.S. 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 U.S. Navy, some of the folks in the U.S. Navy or the Coast Guard who, especially the U.S. Navy, was a. [14:32] 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 Arctic roadmap, you know, the ice is gone. There's an ocean there that wasn't there before. And that is opening up a little harder to ignore. Exactly. Security vulnerabilities from from China and Russia. And so.

[14:55] Just tons 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 or other like low lying Air Force bases being threatened by or having been like severely damaged by severe weather. [15:14] So I think that's, I think when you... [15:17] 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. It's very hard to put it. It's very hard to to prioritize action against. And it can feel very overwhelming. So like there's lots of normal responses to overwhelm. There's paralysis. There's denial. Right. There's depression and all those pieces. But bringing it back to are there are there tangible impacts that people are seeing? [15:47] Research was trying to understand, does the way that the U.S. military communicated about climate change at that political layer that we were talking about, does that map actually to the strategic, operational, tactical layers within the U.S. military? And I think largely we found that, yes, it does, but the timeline of the urgency is different. And actually a really interesting. [16:08] Interesting thing that I've taken away from that is [16:11] if climate action is seen as overtly political, then it actually is counterproductive, especially with the U.S. military, which sees itself as and prides itself in being a nonpolitical organization. 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 strategic or from a budgetary or from a mission aspect. There are actually multiple instances that.

[16:38] Let's say, for example, under the Obama administration, [16:42] There was an initiative called the Great Green Fleet within the U.S. Navy. And the Great Green Fleet was trying to kind of push and show the benefits of using biofuel. [16:51] U.S. 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 kind of makes sense. You know, it maps to the activities. And so but. [17:04] The Great Green Fleet, basically, I heard... [17:07] 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 creates this loop of resentment that makes sense. One of the largest sources of casualty in the Gulf Wars, Gulf Wars and Middle Eastern Wars, it was actually [17:37] So really easy to 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 U.S. Air Force. So just stuff like that where when it aligns, it makes a little sense. Yes. You know, and you can find these win-win scenarios. It doesn't have to be ideological. Yeah. Yeah. [18:04] 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. And 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.

[18:21] And you talked to you guys are talking about this in Ambrook Research or Offer Engine 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. [18:37] shy away from it at an, maybe an open-ended, [18:41] question but I'm curious how [18:43] 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 Amber customers or farmers that you work with? Yeah, we've seen... [18:55] 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 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 [19:25] 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 code for government regulation. Yeah. And and veiled incentives. And and so it it makes sense because actually the reality is both are true. Right. Like those efforts over the past 10 years, I think, have been co-opted in many ways.

[19:55] 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. [20:07] And so that is that is the biggest lesson I took from my research with the U.S. military. It's like you cannot you cannot force people to go against. They have a very clear hierarchy of priorities. There is 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. [20:37] that if they [20:38] make the wrong move, they will go out of business. You know, they're the very thin cash flow, 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 chain where [20:54] 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 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. [21:13] build more profitability through building these more, you know, sort of through 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 of climate change. So not just the do the work on 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. It's cool. It's also really fascinating how,

[21:40] Language can really matter. [21:43] Like both in terms of what people are willing to tolerate or believe in or try experiment. Yeah, that's cool. [21:48] Another component of Ambrook, Beyond Agriculture, is... [21:53] is [21:54] 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. [22:02] 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. It's to keep businesses independent. [22:14] 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. [22:35] I'm going to stay open-ended, and I promise we'll get more specific. But how do you... [22:40] maybe personally and in the business sense, relate to and define the American dream? [22:45] Oh, good question. I think of the American dream as... [22:50] The ability for the individual to... [22:54] believe that their children's future will be [22:58] better than their future. And it... [23:02] 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, 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.

[23:29] And before it shows up in real. [23:32] that specifically? I think there's a generational, I think, I think that it relates to the generational sense. I think optimism is about the, you know, the future in some way. And, and then on top of that, I think the American dream is about generational resilience. Yeah. Because it was all, I mean, my, my mom is an immigrant, so she came to India when she was eight. So my grandfather came to the U.S. from India. Sorry. Yeah. Came to the U.S. from India when she was eight. And so [24:02] had gotten hit, you know, had been on this one of these immigrant engineer visas in the 60s. And so he came over for his master's degree and then decided that he wanted to immigrate his whole family to the U.S. and gave up his inheritance in India to do that because he believed that the U.S. 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, yeah. And so and so she grew up with this this sense of of. [24:32] She told me many years later, a couple years ago, that the reason why she... [24:37] 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 also just mapped. It was when I was just running 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. [24:59] at Ambrook and um,

[25:02] 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 hundred thousand dollar a year piece on the team or resources to do that. [25:32] understand the cash flows and those types of things. And so, [25:35] 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's. [25:44] 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. 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 that. [26:00] Along the lines of what you were just saying, that [26:02] Increasingly, for the first time in generations, many Americans are not believing that their children will have it better off than them. You want to say starting a small business used to be the way to build a better future for your family. Owning your time, owning your labor, owning that identity and tradition over generations, staying independent. And then another excerpt. Most of all, this investment... [26:20] 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. [26:29] 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.

[26:38] freedom from all kinds of things. Um, [26:41] Why are independent small businesses so essential for optimism in the economy and more broadly in the U.S.? [26:48] Yeah, I think there is something there's I think there's two parts. I think it's about ascent. I think freedom comes from. [26:55] a lot of different [26:57] areas. But for me, when I think about independent business or why I'm a business owner, it's about this sense of [27:04] intellectual ownership over your time or 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. [27:15] So I think that there's a freedom in the sense of that way. [27:19] And then I think there's also a freedom in the sense of – [27:23] 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, [27:30] 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 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. [28:00] when you are on acres and acres of your own property. It's like if something breaks, you fix it. There's a sense of like, maybe fiefdom is the wrong word, but there is a sense of like that, like you wake up, this is mine. Almost self-reliance too. Self-reliance is huge. 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, what does it mean to feel free? Yeah.

[28:28] 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 that a lot. And so I think when it comes to [28:43] 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. [28:54] 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... [29:05] specifically, such a quintessential example of the American dream, and why set out to serve them first with Embrook. [29:15] Thank you. [29:15] Thank you. [29:16] Farmers are [29:18] the first and maybe... [29:22] Not the last, but I think definitely the first entrepreneur's [29:26] And... [29:27] the first American entrepreneurs. They were... [29:31] farmers and fishers and trappers and folks who were turning natural resources into [29:38] you know, [29:39] into their own sense of... [29:43] freedom, I guess. And so, yeah. Entrepreneurship on the frontier. Yeah. Entrepreneurship on the frontier. And so I think that is still, and even the, um, [29:52] the homestead act of 1862 [29:56] you know, made it possible for

[30:00] for individuals to become citizens or to otherwise like get access to like 160 acres right and a lot of the farms of today are were the you know 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's lots of you know there's a lot of issues with the maybe the way that the land was um [30:23] 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, their own domains and businesses and empires, etc. from that act of, you know, basically the U.S. giving away, like, a ton of, of, of, [30:53] of property. 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 did. And the homes, do you know, 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, as long as you stake some claim to land and you were willing to farm it, you, the government gave it to you? Yeah, I was. I mean, there were some, there were some, yes, you had to basically make it productive. Okay. Okay, cool. [31:23] So and so because the U.S. was it had an interest of like settling. Right. Yeah. [31:28] Imagine what that would look like today.

[31:31] if the U.S. government had some ability to give away that sense of... [31:38] 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 [31:51] 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 – [32:03] individuals like my like immigrants like my grandfather to come and start his own business 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 right well it's also the going west for land and [32:29] is this super tangible. It's like the perfect kind of like metaphorical and very tangible version of that idea. Yeah. In this way, it's so, yeah, I'm sure young people like today would be like, yeah, what am I going to do on the internet? Like stake a claim to a domain? And actually this is like part of my thesis I was talking about, which is like you can trace, you can, you can, the leading indicator of these macroeconomic cycles are like optimism or mass optimism or mass pessimism. I also think that, you know, [32:59] The biggest reason why I think Elon should take us to Mars is because we need a new frontier. Yeah. There's a sense of expansion and net new opportunity in space. And just think about what's happening with AI now, right? It's not just like, yes, there's a land grab to try to...

[33:15] 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 generational opportunities. Yes, yes. Yeah. There was a, there was people in their twenties for the last decade, kind of like got the short end of the stick and now there's something new. Yeah. I think there's, and I think the generational opportunities that they come in, you know, in these ways and they take the different forms, but that is, I think, [33:45] 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... [33:54] going back to why is the American dream so important to me, it's actually also about plurality, the sense of you don't just want like one type of person, 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, [34:13] The ability 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. Yes. [34:24] Also, on some level, the [34:26] But upstream of being a millionaire, that's like a specific flavor of independence, to go back to your earlier point. [34:32] 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. Mm-hmm. [34:39] And... [34:40] Other part of the question, which is just like, why, why start with farms? [34:43] Yeah. So in parks, I wanted to like I was I kind of fell in love with the space when I was in grad school. I had an opportunity to to work at a at a firm that owned a lot of farms and water assets in the Central Valley in California.

[34:59] 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... [35:08] I just fell in love with the space in my own way. And now I recommend books like, like, like the land where lemons grow to you, which is right there. But just really, I think it also, I am just so interested in, [35:22] in [35:23] Like, I love... [35:25] I love traveling with a mission that is, [35:29] where the mission is basically go and find like this niche thing everywhere you can go or something. Right. 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 that summer, it felt like it felt like that, like a treasure hunt, like every every question that I asked and every answer I got begetted more questions. [35:59] 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 that is it is a true joy, honestly, to be able to like sit down and talk to someone at the kitchen table about. [36:18] some really privileged and like intimate things and, and to feel like you can actually help them with it. [36:24] Yeah, the texture of their daily life. Yeah. Hmm. [36:28] Okay. [36:28] We've talked about agriculture in America. We've talked about

[36:32] Business and the American Dream and Independence, we're going to talk about. [36:35] accounting and money in a sec. But before we do, I think it's a helpful backdrop since we're talking about farms. Um, [36:42] I think in theory, maybe my intuition is wrong, but I think in theory people might assume that farms are kind of simple, at least from a business and accounting standpoint. [36:51] Can you talk about why maybe the combination of multi-PNL, balance sheet heavy, any range of other things make farms like way more complex than people might assume? Totally. Farms are like biological factories. They're like the only they're one of the only businesses where your inventory like gets born, it grows, it dies, you know, it's very complicated. [37:21] 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 family mom and pop shops, very small teams, usually family run. So they're enormously complex businesses. And so they and getting more being super small, despite being super small. So they're overly complex for their size. So a good example is a dairy. [37:43] 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, maybe a P&L or a business line. So one enterprise is the hay. And the hay is just its own P&L. It's its own P&L because you're basically you're buying, 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

[38:13] 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 like a forage mix. 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 cycles of storing. Okay. So, so that's, that's one enterprise that, [38:38] 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, you know, accruing the inventory basically there. And then those cows are producing milk, which you might sell wholesale, you might sell direct retail, right? You might have [39:08] cream and cheese. And so like flowing the cost all the way through the business, we have seen dairies hire ex-bankers to figure out, you know, figure out that. Also, isn't there like a specific like cow related gap accounting thing where it's like super? No, it's just it's just gap. But it's it's it's like it's what we call managerial accounting. So being able to understand your true cost of production economics, what most businesses do across America, not just farms,

[39:38] And so at the end of the year, they can figure out, do 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 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. [40:08] 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 that is what we help. Yeah, you need like a McKinsey person would actually be helpful. Exactly. And so 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 [40:38] of affordability is what we're building for. [40:41] On that note, you said accounting. Everything goes back to accounting. And the... [40:46] In many ways, it seems like sort of the meta frame here is that you have a group of people who... [40:53] are very trapped in the day-to-day, who you are enabling to think about, [40:59] things on a more long-term basis. [41:01] I'm curious. [41:03] What goes into... [41:05] that like part of this is just a simply like a cost thing and resources thing. But like, yeah, what is what is the leverage that comes about? You started talking about a little bit, but what kinds of leverage emerge by giving people

[41:16] that ability to think long-term and why is accounting specifically like the right [41:20] tool for that? Yeah. So, um, so we actually did not try to start building accounting software. We tried to do everything but build accounting software because 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. Um, but, uh, 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, [41:50] guys 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's that view so if you have a like for example if you have a really good fpna person on your team this is what they do if you're a [42:08] If you're a startup, they are like breaking down all your marketing costs, right? All of your R&D, et cetera. And you're getting to your gross margins, your understanding. And so... [42:19] We help folks who don't have financial backgrounds do that. [42:23] level of analysis. And, but I think the thing, there's the tactical side, but I think actually the thing that also enables long-term decision-making is like anxiety reduction. Like it's the emotional side of the software that, [42:37] I have been, it's been so unexpected. Yes. I think a lot of systems do this. Yeah. [42:43] or tools do this. So in many ways, like a great tools job is,

[42:47] Not always. It can definitely be leverage or agency or whatever, but I think in many ways I just can hold a system in my head, more or less, and then actually do the real work. Yeah, totally. I think actually great tools should... [43:02] Great tools that shouldn't actually, and this is going a little bit into [43:06] thesis we've been kind of developing at Amberger, kind of thinking about around [43:10] building with AI, but you don't actually want to reduce complexity or critical thinking all the time. Like you want to be able to get to obviously convenience and time savings and maybe for people who don't want to access that you can. But actually what we're trying to do is make it so that people can understand. [43:27] engage the intellectual side of the business they can move into yeah exactly they move into the complexity in a way that that feels accessible and that feels uh stimulating and like they're they're they're feeling good about the loop of making good business decisions and those things and um [43:43] Yeah, so that has been a big part of thinking about... [43:48] how we build and even it shows up in small ways like [43:52] Uh, we've done a lot of work to build workflows around what would otherwise just be core journal entries, um, which are, um, [44:00] kind of the base level of 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 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.

[44:30] Another part of what you guys do beyond accounting is money movement. [44:33] there was a note you had sent [44:35] after you return 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. Um, [44:55] I'm curious... [44:57] Maybe specifically like how you think about the opportunity with money movement. You've speculated a little bit on the implications of like if Amber gets big enough or if your payment network specifically gets big enough, like what could happen? But yeah, I'd be curious for 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. Yeah, totally. I this is. [45:20] This is the long-term game plan of Ambrook, and I am constantly impatient for us to get to enough nodes in the network such that this can start to really become true, but [45:32] The takeaway that I had when I was sitting there and watching all these in sessions and had some conversations with some stripes afterwards was just. [45:40] It was clearly big, not to like discount, clearly it's been working hard. It's going to be a big deal. Instant money movement. It's not quite here yet. But my takeaway was like, check.

[45:51] Like, that seems like it's going to be taken care of. [45:56] And we didn't see it now in Ambrook. Like we, you know, so at the core of Ambrook is something called the Ambrook wallet, which [46:03] It's optional, but most of our customers use it. And it's a checking, it's under the hood, a checking account. We partner with Stripe and Fifth Third for the banking services, but a [46:16] Amberg wallet to an Amberg wallet transaction is instant and free because it's a book transfer, right? It's the same deposit network. How long has that been possible? Like if you were doing this five years ago, could you have done that? PayPal did it. [46:26] Wow. PayPal's early days was built on Wells Fargo book transfers. Cool. Funny. Yeah. So what was not possible was like people 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. [46:44] in theory, spin up embedded bank accounts really easily. [46:47] That's mainly thanks to Stripe. Stripe is a big part of that with their Bass program. There's lots of Bass players that are getting that. Got it. Cool. Shoulders of Giants, though. Timing is important. Yeah, totally. Yeah, Shoulder of Giants. And so that, to me, felt like it was going to be standard. And we're already seeing within Ambrook, when there are two Ambrook customers that transact with each other,

[47:17] for them, which is the wallet-to-wallet transactions. And that default becomes their, immediately becomes their default payment method, right? Because it's so much better than writing a check. And it's reconciled in both systems, right? And like, my invoice is near bill, and it just, you know, one to 3% of payments get, basically of like revenue basically gets lost to administrivia, right? Like through just like the ARAP shuffle, that kind of stuff. [47:41] 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 [47:53] context, so metadata documentation about these payments that are happening in our system. And in theory, you should be able to see it. [48:04] 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. If you're saturated enough, at least in agriculture. 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, you know, invest in and do in the coming months. [48:34] Place QuickBooks. Step two, you know, build a payments network. But I know, but I think that there is there is a sense of like you have to become this this really well-loved, really accessible ERP that can enable complex businesses to. ERP is just like accounting stuff, like enterprise resource planner. Yeah. So it's ERP kind of is is any it's usually has the GL.

[49:04] you might do. So that's sort of, 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 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 [49:34] And it's so easy 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. Yeah. So we use a lot of we try to use a lot of AI to pull that out. We there's other reasons, 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 us. 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. [50:04] again, on the theme of resilience is there is too much money lost to administrative and middleman fees. And actually, 90 percent of payments in in U.S. agriculture is still flowing through paper checks. And 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 three percent. Like they will use the tools as needed.

[50:34] provide some relief and also reduce all this other administrative, right, by like having a really strong deposit backed payments network that has all the contacts in your business, has the contacts other businesses. Right. And so that's something we've been thinking about a lot. 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. Both on the like and theoretically the traditional like wide cut horizontal fintech would be really hard to have that. Maybe for a consumer thing like Cash App [51:04] really hard to have like that much network concentration that you can actually get some of those things. That's, that's really cool. Yeah. We have it on consumer, but we don't, we don't have it on B2B. Right. [51:12] I want to zoom out a little and talk more about Ambrook from a holistic standpoint. [51:18] You... [51:19] have talked about... [51:21] 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, [51:35] What about that is something that you could conceivably spend... [51:38] Decades on. [51:40] Mmm. [51:41] I think it goes back to that memory that you shared at the very beginning. Hmm. [51:47] I think there's just something about [51:50] 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... [52:00] take as many road trips as I want to as many weird places. That's amazing. In America as I want. Sometimes it's that simple, huh? Yeah. And I think there's just a joy that I get from...

[52:15] from our customers, but also from [52:19] the doors that [52:22] they very kindly open for me. And I'm not saying doors for networking. I'm saying an actual door to someone's home. That is... [52:34] Incredible. How many people? I mean, we did this thing where we sent disposable film cameras to. Wow. [52:41] some of our customers and we said just take whatever goes you want and send them back and 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 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 [53:11] and it just feels like, [53:15] I mean, obviously with the story of my grandfather, but it feels like I'm building for an extension of the family or the type of life that I want to enable more of in the U.S. that I'm trying to build for myself. And so, yeah, it's been something that has been super rewarding. The mission is definitely super important from a perspective. [53:35] from a resilience, not just from an environmental perspective, but also the economic perspective. [53:40] On that note, maybe... [53:42] That's beautiful. [53:43] You're also a really ambitious person. [53:45] I like.

[53:46] There are plenty of businesses that I think might satisfy some of the [53:50] answer you just gave that also wouldn't be like, you know, people talk about like the infinite game. We were talking about Stripe earlier, like increase the GDP of the Internet can run for a while. What is it about the market you've chosen and the structure of Ambrook? [54:06] And I'm not meaning to, I think 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. [54:20] Yeah, I... [54:22] 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? Yeah, I think that you embody that very well. Yeah, thank you. I think it's something that for me is just this very horseshoe, like makes total sense in my head. [54:41] 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 nice thing about accounting is that it scales. It's like everyone it's like it's all gap. You know, everyone needs the GL. You know, it doesn't matter how big you are. And so there is something about choosing to be at the very heart of these businesses and something that's very simple under the hood, which is, you know, at its heart. [55:11] 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

[55:29] being the heart and kind of the solid foundation and then building a sustainable like business with good margins. Right. And, and, [55:35] But also not seeing, I don't see myself or Ambrook even as like trapped in the whatever vehicle we're in now. It's kind of like, and I actually think the really interesting thing about, [55:47] that I've been thinking about with just the macro environment today is that I think that you'll see a lot more [55:52] experimentation and [55:54] with hybrid entity structures where you might have a venture-backed software company, but also you might have a holdings company and maybe you'll have, you know, it's sort of in, what is that? Maybe you can actually think about the distribution of, [56:06] 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 things. [56:22] you know, it's, [56:23] you know, my my one of my teammates jokes that like every time [56:27] 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 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 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 [56:57] feels very distinct. And for me, it's actually that I feel as though we've built a

[57:03] We've built a... [57:05] a vehicle or like a brand or an ethos kind of that happens to be shaped like a venture-backed software company right now, but is 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. Mm-hmm. [57:27] going maybe earlier in the journey, we talked about government a little bit. It seems that [57:33] Understanding policy and subsidies, particularly around farming early on, was really core to some of the early work you guys did in broadly the economics of American agriculture and maybe openings for the business. Can you talk about that a little bit? [57:46] or at least why like subsidies are so important to farming. Yeah. Um, yeah, [57:53] Agriculture is, you know, I can't really think of a nation state where agriculture isn't both naturally and nationally strategic. And so... [58:06] I think... [58:06] Thoughts on subsidies aside, which is, you know, [58:09] 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? [58:19] And this is actually where I'm super pro any incentives or subsidies that or, you know, subsidies 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 off range, we recently just did an article on the Dubai pistachio chocolate craze. I've been hearing little things about this. I don't really know what it is.

[58:49] specific type of chocolate that is like stuffed with this, with like pistachio, like cream and like some other 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. [59:02] 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 over like sort of overwhelmed by the sudden like demand for this pistachio. [59:18] actually a pistachio byproduct. And so it's not even like pistachio nut. It's like you have to take all the byproduct pistachios and then process it. But there were no, there was not enough like domestic products. [59:29] processing facilities for these pistachio growers. And so they were like, they were not able to meet the bank. And it's just, they're buying in Dubai? [59:36] Or it's a product that's made here. You can make the product here, basically. But it's like basically America was like caught flat footed and trying to respond to this demand. We did not have the domestic processing facility, which you never think about. You always think about like other countries like export raw materials and then they get processed elsewhere and then they reimport. Like that is happening to the U.S. as well. Fascinating. So, yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot actually recently just in terms of building back up the domestic demand. [1:00:06] like value is sort of like it's called value added, but it's basically the layer of you take raw materials off a farm or or a ranch or something, and then you process it and you do value added processing. So it basically you process in a way that increases its value. Right. Turns into something else or turns into cuts of beef or whatever for like more consumer consumption. Yeah.

[1:00:28] Yeah, it's interesting to think about. [1:00:30] Obviously, there are other industries that are... [1:00:32] where this is true, but agriculture in particular is sort of like deeply embedded into the, [1:00:36] not just anybody's individual business. [1:00:38] incentives but like a national identity security health gdp like all so many things um [1:00:46] which is, yeah, I'm sure we could talk a lot about, um, [1:00:49] One thread I want to talk about in the context of Danbrook, [1:00:53] Um, and I'm curious. [1:00:55] how you think about it now, but, uh, [1:00:57] it actually you once we were talking about dialectic, my podcast, and you observed that in your words, uh, [1:01:04] It's illegible right now, and that's a feature. That's a benefit. And eventually, maybe... [1:01:09] 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 a lot. And 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, you know, [1:01:32] I'm sure you're going to continue to be... [1:01:34] 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 like this, like anti YC methodology a little bit. Um, [1:01:47] Yeah, what is your frame been on the arc of Ambrook when it comes to how exposed it is to your customers in the world? Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot. [1:01:57] You know, I, I trained, you know, my formal entrance to Silicon Valley was YC when I was like 21. This is your first company. Oh, my first company. And so I had this sense 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 he regretted the advice that he had given to so many YC founders.

[1:02:27] about the way to build this very MVP scope. And I think 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 moonshoty. Yes, not just shipping and iterate. Yeah, not just shipping and iterate. And so... [1:02:52] Uh, we kind of did something a little bit in between, um, which was, uh, we, we spend about three. 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, um, and then ended up starting to build the accounting software. And then we basically just worked with a core set of, um, [1:03:13] 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. And so. And accounting software is not super easy to build. It's not super easy to build. And actually the reason why is because I talked about how it's like simple at its core, but it's, [1:03:41] 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 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,

[1:04:07] 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. [1:04:37] 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 bit. Huh. [1:04:47] Hmm. [1:04:49] Farming and agriculture, as we talked about, is the beachhead market. You have wider ambitions. [1:04:55] 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. Um, [1:05:05] Yeah, can you talk a little bit about [1:05:07] what the potential scope is, what expanding adjacently looks like. [1:05:11] 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, like, [1:05:20] What does Ambrook... [1:05:22] roughly look like on a 10 year time horizon, assuming things go well. I am just writing this down. 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, [1:05:36] You have a product that's serving, as I understand...

[1:05:40] thousands of farms now um [1:05:43] how do you think about going wider? How do you think about deepening that relationship? And how do you think about what [1:05:48] broad expansion looks like for Amber. Yeah. So we work with several thousand operations today. About 80% of them are farms or ranches. About 20% are actually not. They are either the side businesses or the other types of businesses that farms might also be doing. Often the same owners. Often the same owners. Or it's like sort of, we had like a book publisher recently who signed up for a free trial and like waited their way all the way through our ag-specific accounting software. [1:06:18] 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. Cause really what they're trying to get at is the multi P and L part. Like, like, got it, got it. Actually our second customer tugged us into multiple industries, which was, they were a cattle feeder operation in Arizona. Yeah. [1:06:36] we had just, we had, we'd actually, that was actually 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 four businesses now? And we're like, what? And like, yeah, we have like a trucking business. We have, [1:07:06] Like, sure. Yeah, exactly. And services. And so you basically realize that 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 for a number of reasons, but also because agriculture is so industry rich, like in sense of it is so it has the big diversity in the industries that it's in.

[1:07:36] adjacent industry. So like equipment, you have some like processing, 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 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, [1:08:06] 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 accounts ever 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 [1:08:33] 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 that, but now we're starting to tug. And I think you basically want to, you want to, basically there's two inflection points to 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 to many. I think once you go from two to many, then you, then you've built, yeah, you bolt on one extra thing. Exactly. You've built an engine of a team that knows how to like, it doesn't break the team's [1:09:03] 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 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 approach.

[1:09:23] You could sell something that was mobile first and you could distribute it through ads. [1:09:27] And then that largely became saturated and most... [1:09:30] for most business types um very expensive now to like sell sass to other sass companies for example not as expensive to sell sass 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 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 [1:10:00] Yeah, you want the engine to actually be really bulletproof. Exactly. [1:10:17] A couple thoughts or questions on leadership. [1:10:21] You're the CEO and founder of Ambrook. 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 decisions. [1:10:33] 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, like, simply describe what... [1:10:50] that process of making intractable tractable sort of means on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, totally.

[1:10:57] For me, it's about [1:11:00] It's about [1:11:01] making sure that I'm in the information flow. [1:11:04] So my team makes fun of me, but I like I love like I'll just pop up in random slack threads. They don't want me in. I'm sure you do. Like the Kool-Aid man. [1:11:13] Oh, yeah. Exactly. I love information. I love it. Give me that raw like I think most, by the way, most really successful leaders. [1:11:27] 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. Yeah, totally. And so I think that 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? Because I think I'm fine. Like, I feel like I can handle it. But my team actually asked me, you know, Mackenzie, how do you come up? You know, like one of my team members was like, I love coaching on how you turn all this raw information flow into make the intractable tractable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [1:11:57] 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 sock message, every, you know, every PRD that I can, like every whatever. I'm just constantly just like sitting in all this information. Yeah, exactly. Like, and then I'm just like, I end up seeing enough information and seeing the patterns across things. And you're like, okay, like this over here and this over here, like makes sense. And, [1:12:20] 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 attractable, 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,

[1:12:36] Which is no, he told me a story about a headmaster in, I think, Baltimore, who he had read a book about, who said that like 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 pass. And so he would notice the change in emotion for one kid, like over the course of a week or whatever. Yeah. [1:13:00] And that was just how he kept a pulse, like on the students. And I was like, oh, got it. [1:13:07] I will continue to burst it into these Slack threads. It's funny. There's so many, the thing that comes immediately to mind, which I talked about with Tammy recently 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 most. [1:13:37] like sound by device, but it's helpful. Oh, actually, I really like, I think it doesn't feel hard if it's something that you're genuinely interested in. That's a secret. And it feels like, it's like scrolling on Instagram. You know, it's like, it feels, and Ava actually had a piece recently that I really liked on Affinity. Yeah, yeah. And when you were saying that, it reminded me of that, which was, she had a... [1:14:05] 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, just obsessed way possible. Yeah, loose, like... Yes, exactly. And I think...

[1:14:22] It'd 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 live my life. Yes. Yeah. It's the it's the Novak Djokovic thing again. It's like he likes hitting the tennis ball. You're going to compete with that. Like you better find the thing where it's fun for you to scroll. Yeah. [1:14:42] 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 slash 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. [1:15:01] What have you learned about de-risking? [1:15:04] Mmm. [1:15:07] I've learned that [1:15:11] What have I learned about de-risking? [1:15:13] It feels... [1:15:16] way [1:15:17] easier, [1:15:19] to do after you have a bunch of reps on it. So there's actually, it can feel, 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, becoming friends with the anxiety and be like, where are [1:15:49] really learned is I am always rewarded when I face it and de-risk it and like defuse the bomb you know

[1:15:57] And I think there's also something. And start with even just like, look at the bomb. [1:16:01] Like, really sit with the bomb. [1:16:04] And 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... [1:16:16] that has done two things. One, that, [1:16:18] 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. 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. [1:16:34] I kind of have a buzz at the end of it. The stakes are really clear. The stakes are so clear. There's so much clarity. Yeah. And suddenly that thing. Priorities are clear. Exactly. That anxiety that was like pointing and pointing, pointing, you're 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 intractable part, most of my job is sifting through the intractable. Yeah. And so suddenly when something becomes quite tractable. It's clarifying. [1:17:04] 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, I can de-risk. I can, I can solve these things. But even when they do happen, like, you know, [1:17:16] they're fine. Like the company still exists, you know, like hopefully it'll exist for a while longer. Yeah. That's a great answer. Uh, [1:17:25] You are the founder and CEO, but Ambrook is also a lot more than just you. We were talking about this fairly recently. You put a big announcement out about your Series A. There was an excerpt. You had said something where you're talking about Haley on your team. Haley, a mother of two 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.

[1:17:55] that announcement. And my observation, we may have talked about this a little bit, my observation is this really interesting thing where like [1:18:04] Ambrook for a long time and obviously still now to some degree is like deeply authentically you and yours, but also in real time 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. [1:18:24] What is it? Yeah. What is that experience started to feel like? [1:18:28] Such a good question. [1:18:30] This, I think, goes back to the answer around eligibility versus legibility. [1:18:35] Which is. [1:18:36] It's super after being illegible for such a long time, it's really uncomfortable sometimes to be legible, you know, and. [1:18:47] and to be perceived and interpreted, I think, in these ways. And it [1:18:52] I think when it comes to Ambrook's [1:18:57] Culture, there are lots of it. There's absolutely tons of it that that is me, but it's also my co-founders. It's also like a huge part of our aesthetic is our creative director, Ali, who's just so talented. And I talk about this with Ali, where it feels as though she can kind of interpret gestures of my brain and make it. Whoa, that's amazing.

[1:19:27] Thank you. [1:19:27] Ambrook that has to do with everyone else right outside of me and I absolutely could not do it alone um [1:19:36] 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 thing that gets co-created outside of me. And it's like part and it's also has a relationship to me in that and that Ambrook also affects me. Right. So it's like I interact with Ambrook. But it's like a being. It's like a creature. It's a creature. And so. So, yeah, that has been. [1:20:00] that has just been really kind of this wild out of body experience and seeing that. Yeah. Hmm. It's really cool. Uh, unfair question. I'm asking anyway. Uh, [1:20:09] I want three words that define... [1:20:12] the culture and the people at AMROC. [1:20:15] Mm. [1:20:18] Thank you. [1:20:19] Curious... [1:20:21] is one very, very deeply curious. [1:20:23] Thank you. [1:20:24] Mmm. [1:20:27] I want to use the word empathetic, but it isn't actually quite, it's not as nuanced. It's a sense of [1:20:34] 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 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 um

[1:21:00] Do you think those were, would you have said the same three words three years ago? [1:21:04] Oh, good question. I think so. Actually, that's amazing. I think we've been extremely consistent in culture and who we've hired and, um, [1:21:13] the values that [1:21:15] Jeff, Jane and I, my co-founders wrote when we, it was just us have largely stayed the same. [1:21:24] That is pretty amazing. One last thing, I guess, on the broader... [1:21:29] Ambrook brand, let's say. And I guess I should include, you have Ambrook and you have Ambrook Research now off range, which is, as far as I understand, basically an independent media company that you guys fund [1:21:42] It has something like 150,000 subscribers, which is amazing. It's been running for two or three years. Yeah. [1:21:50] your [1:21:51] Building financial tools, basically. [1:21:55] 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 in these types of things broadly even just brand both on the Ambrook side and on the offering side matter from a business standpoint? [1:22:13] Totally. I honestly, for a long time, because we were building something that we couldn't show people, the only thing we had was narrative and storytelling. And you were pointing where you were going to go, pointing where we wanted to go. But also, I don't like the version of storytelling where you're always talking just about the future.

[1:22:43] like what we talk about. And so off range, [1:22:46] which used to be called Amberg Research, now it's called, we recently rebranded to Offrange because to represent that it's becoming more of an independent publication. [1:22:56] It was originally a way to... [1:23:01] to build something that would be of value and interest to the audience that we wanted to work with. [1:23:08] And so we started actually, it was called Ambrook Research because we started by co-writing and actually had one of these papers published with academics. Cool. Wow. With just some of the early data, like anonymized data that we had from the pandemic relief grants that we're helping people get. And so and then and then we found Jesse, who is our editor for Offrange, and he's wonderful. [1:23:38] she said jesse is a capital j journalist whoa and what were they even for uh she he was um the managing editor of of a food and ag focused publication called the counter which was non-profit that shut down after seven 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 [1:24:08] 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 the kind of is talking about the flavor of how did you get someone like that to join it?

[1:24:22] like, yes, independent funded, but like ultimately joined a startup, a commercial startup. Totally. Was that hard or were they... Yeah, I had to convince him. I... [1:24:33] Yeah, I remember I first reached out to his editor-in-chief, and she recommended that I chat with Jesse. Okay. And I sent her a long LinkedIn. I was like, I know we're a tech company. Like, this is the vision of what we're trying to do. Just meet with me. Yeah, just meet with me. And so she did, and she was like, okay, like, I think she'd meet Jesse. And Jesse has something I make fun of him for. He's a face called, like, it's like Stonewall Jackson, but Stonewall Jesse. Like, just this, like... [1:25:02] like wall, you know, of a face. And so that was 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 together. [1:25:21] that was editorially independent as much as it could be within Ambrook. And it hasn't always been easy. I mean, there's been, you know, [1:25:27] moments where like something that the publication wants to publish is not necessarily what the Ambrick, 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 hat, right. Of this publication and, you know, [1:25:49] 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, I'm going to be like, okay,

[1:25:59] 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? [1:26:08] I have a bunch of miscellaneous things before we wrap up. Okay, perfect. 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. Noemma. Yes, Noemma publication. [1:26:23] One that can democratize knowledge and bring decision-making power back to the middle class. That's exactly how we think about it, too. [1:26:30] Can you make a case for this? I think many people feel like AI is very much a concentrating technology. Totally. I think his point that I just thought was interesting was because it was this different take than I had seen a lot of the headlines. His argument was that computerization was this concentrating technology because it turned digital. [1:26:50] people, you know, [1:26:52] Calculators used to be a role, and it turned people into these algorithms, these roles into these algorithms, and... [1:27:02] And so the argument that he was making, which I thought was really interesting, was that there is actually a democratization of knowledge and skill set almost that where you have you have basically what ended up happening is that that that sort of computerization kind of hollowed out of 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.

[1:27:32] for these like lower skill roles, basically provided leverage for much, much, much like higher skill, higher paid roles as well. And now what you're kind of seeing is the, [1:27:43] 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. [1:28:13] versus AI, what it's doing is it's accessing these skill sets all along. Giving everyone access to it. Exactly. So it's basically you can enable... [1:28:28] 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 access this knowledge database, which feels much more like a assistant or a junior employee than it does a replacement. [1:28:40] Uh, huh. Have you thought much about how that specifically... [1:28:44] applies to Ambra? Yeah, so there's, I mean, there's, [1:28:48] you [1:28:49] I think a lot, and I was actually talking with Linus about this, um, [1:28:53] 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 six 12 months or you know years from now and i think the thing that we are talking about that that i have been kind of noodling on and thinking about and seeing an amber 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 um pointing

[1:29:23] 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, right? You'll be able to build like leaner teams. But I think there's also... [1:29:34] I think average teams will end up building things 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 you'll see the acceleration over time. And so I think about that in terms of, OK, how do we build in a way that we can accelerate over time? And how do we build in a way that... [1:29:57] Got it. [1:29:58] honors and enables like the and draws the super talented people who want to engage their critical thinking who want to apply discipline and taste to their work and not just replace that because i think that's also when what you may lack the specific tactical skill or whatever but like yeah exactly like this 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 [1:30:28] 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 see that will basically turn everyone into super, you know, all the superpowers. With their Iron Man suit. Exactly. It's just like enable that level of critical thinking at the system level, right? Or at these other types of hard problems. It's about access to more in the acceleration, 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.

[1:30:58] A quote from a... [1:31:00] uh book i believe it's from from the biography now at age 76 he had no reason to break the tradition of secrecy that began with his uncle lieutenant colonel jg 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 [1:31:30] Yeah, it's one of my favorite quotes. [1:31:33] That quote, honestly, is what convinced me to get into ag. Wow. So the Boswell family still is, but started in the 1800s in California, which is kind of 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... [1:32:00] This. [1:32:01] uh [1:32:03] anthology i think is the right word of of this not just this family but like this [1:32:09] the 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 like parcels we could stack them all together wild west you know the wild west and so um no it was it was this uh discussion about the transformation of california landscape via agriculture and so you know all sorts of things

[1:32:39] So... [1:32:39] the legacy that we have left in transforming and terraforming our own land is really intense. And we can almost probably never get some of that back. I don't know if you know that just north of [1:32:54] LA used to be the largest freshwater lake in North America. [1:32:59] It's totally gone. Yeah, it's totally gone. 800 square miles. It actually used to, like, when, during the, like, super cycles of, like, the California wet-dry seasons, during the wet season, sometimes it actually rained so much and flooded so much that it would connect to the Pacific. Oh, my God. Totally. When did it dry? Yeah. [1:33:20] The last of the lake, I think, was drained in the early 20th century, but... [1:33:27] when you have really these wet-dry cycles, which is natural in California, but is exasperated by climate change. [1:33:34] you, um, you actually, the lake returns to the lake bed sort of, and you have these like extreme flooding, which is, um, which is how far from, how far north of LA, you know, uh, how far not, not that far north. Oh my God. I would have to go rabbit hole. Yeah. Anyway. So it just, I think there's a sense, but yeah, it's a, it's a family that basically the book outlines, um, this legacy of a family over, um, multiple generations, but uses it. I love those types of books, history of X books. Yeah. It's like such an interesting slicer way to kind of think [1:34:05] Speaking of, on the table, we have the land where lemons grow. The land where lemons grow. The first thing you ever recommended me. 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 read...

[1:34:20] the history of Italian citrus before hiking through the Amalfi coast and actually could 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. [1:34:50] Give me the basics. Give 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 country, whatever, like what? Yeah. What about that niche approach is interesting to you for understanding? [1:35:08] I think I'm... [1:35:11] I don't... [1:35:13] retain information in these like broad swaths i have to be like highly interested basically in something 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 [1:35:43] and you're walking by, oh, actually, that's the Medici Lemon Grove. I would have never known. I had something to hold on to. Yeah. Like it was it was I had something to look for. Yes. Yeah. Totally. You have something to look for. I think that that is it feels like I'm going back to the treasure hunt. It's not something where you're going and you're going to 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.

[1:36:13] that trip in Italy, the first half of it, I was alone and I was having an amazing time just going around and trying to find all the places. And I honestly, not even sometimes purposely looking, it was just like, I would happen to notice like that, that the Medici, um, courtyard that had all the, the lemon, the lemon trees in these big pots. Um, [1:36:33] I just happened to be looking by and my brain knew what it was because I'd read the book. And those hits and moments are so rewarding. I was like such a dopamine hit, you know? Yes. So, yeah, I love that kind of stuff. [1:36:46] Why are you inspired by the Disney magic band? Oh my God. Um, [1:36:51] Okay. My whole family is a Disney family. Okay. I was a little surprised by this. Yeah. Super into Disney. This is a Disney World thing or do they have it at both? They have it at both. [1:37:03] But I think 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. Yes. This culture, important culture. Important sort of like history arc. [1:37:21] She worked at Disney, I think in Frontierland in Magic Kingdom. So she was like in one of the shops. [1:37:29] And so we have this sense of, and 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 were young.

[1:37:59] He's not really interested in the characters. He loves, like, he'll tell you all about the air trans and, like, the history. He's got to be an Imagineer. Exactly, yeah. And so I think that there is a sense of that. But the Magic Bands are super interesting because essentially what they are is they're Disney's, like, spend management tool. [1:38:19] And Magic Bands basically, so Magic Bands are for folks in the audience who aren't as big into Disney as I am. [1:38:29] that you connect to your credit card and they become your money source. And so, and they, and they're all your 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 to you. You like tap it to pay. You tap it to pay, tap it in, et cetera. But it also turns Disney into a giant supercomputer. And so there's just constantly collecting. We were talking about context of money movement. Like they're constantly collecting context. Yes. On the move, like the physical movement. Yeah, they're network mapping live. Exactly, they're network mapping live. [1:38:59] Thank you. [1:38:59] where inventory is going to get low, or they understand the supply chain of their own parks, you know, and the people in the parks. The most you Disney overlap possible. That's amazing. But yeah, I think that's why they're really cool. Another old tweet. [1:39:17] One of the most important concepts I learned in the past year was that of, quote, strange math, where multiple conflicting things, feelings, phenomena, etc., could coexist without canceling each other out.

[1:39:29] 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 parallelism. [1:39:38] In parallel. [1:39:39] How do you, how does one begin to learn this, this sort of ability to hold multiple things in concert? Hmm. [1:39:48] I don't know. [1:39:49] Happiness and sadness. Something prompted that experience. I think... Oh, sorry. I guess 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... So I think I'd learn... I'm taking a leadership course called Leaders in Tech, and they... [1:40:08] 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 sort of the leadership courses on interpersonal dynamics. But I also found it to be really helpful for myself in understanding how to sit with my feelings more. I think [1:40:38] the thing that I have to learn how to do better is like very good at identifying. So I'm like, ah, six different like complex emotions I'm feeling at the same time. But like, as soon as I categorize it, I'm like, you're going to box, you're going to box, you're going to box. Like, don't have to think about that anymore. How do we sit with them? Yeah. How do you sit with them? And so I think that, [1:40:56] That tweet was about me thinking about...

[1:41:00] Yeah, how sadness... [1:41:02] is sadness just is sadness. It's not a counterweight to happiness. [1:41:07] And you can feel these things at the same time. And we want to counterweight them. We want to think about things on this like 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. Hmm. [1:41:31] we're filming in your apartment, um, which I'm very grateful for. Uh, you also have an amazing office, the Ember office. If people are lucky to go there. Um, [1:41:40] 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, um, [1:41:52] I'm an owner of a similar dining table to the one we're sitting at, thanks to you. And that applies to... [1:42:00] 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.

[1:42:30] The real loss seems to be the abstraction of rural communities to absentee landlords and generic strip malls. [1:42:36] And then 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. [1:43:06] being in the space. It's hard to fully describe with words, but people get it, get us when they're in it. I think of our New York office as a manifestation of our physical design system. Wow. [1:43:17] Yeah. Can you talk about [1:43:20] You just did a little bit in what I read, but can you talk about, [1:43:25] the creation process of these sort of aesthetic systems and, and, [1:43:30] how you iterate to them or even maybe like feel your way into them. [1:43:34] I think the first thing... [1:43:38] So I think 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... [1:43:47] Actually, even this apartment 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 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 do I want it to feel like? It's feminine, but it's also a bit like...

[1:44:07] 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, [1:44:17] And I think the office was the first time that I had to think about [1:44:21] um from a space perspective applying an aesthetic that was very deliberately not it is me like there is a sense of i do i do think that like people through a lens or a frame in fact 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 ali or creative director's opinions [1:44:51] a sort of designer who helps like source and 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 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, which I think is what, what, [1:45:20] Yeah, so I think that there's a sense of that. And I think there's some rules. So some of the rules for that, like a design system, a digital design system is like you have colors, certain color scheme, right? You have certain buttons are shaped the same way, your fonts. What does it look like in a physical space? Okay, you have color schemes, but you also might have rules like... [1:45:36] I really only want to get objects that are made out of natural materials.

[1:45:42] that there's metals or wood or 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 Ambergoff is 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 is 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 [1:46:12] has it's called the chest of secrets with 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 [1:46:27] Yeah, it's interesting how freedom can come out of a set of constraints, too. I also think 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. [1:46:38] Good. [1:46:39] 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. 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. [1:46:53] It's like coral starters. You have to create the structure underneath it. [1:46:58] And then you you create the conditions such that the people, the environment, et cetera, such that the organic, the coral structures grow organically. The books kind of grow organically, kind of. It's also Jane Jacobs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that's also like a good space.

[1:47:15] 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 a there's no preciousness about it um and i think that adds to that as well [1:47:30] Thank you. [1:47:31] a final quote, um, or maybe a pair of them, uh, [1:47:36] I firmly believe that [1:47:37] that [1:47:38] Quote, are we the right people to do this is just a matter of sheer will. [1:47:43] 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. [1:48:02] Thank you. [1:48:03] My final question is, why is starting things, willing things into existence so core to you, to who you are? That's a great question. [1:48:19] I think it's the ultimate... [1:48:20] manifestation of agency. There's just a... [1:48:26] creating something from nothing. [1:48:28] And the creative act. [1:48:30] So the same way that artists, I think, really like that or... [1:48:35] as I've been getting more into photography, realizing that that's also... [1:48:40] Like the, this, the frame that you have or the perspective that you have can be like frozen in time in a way that like transcend actually makes it easier to see the, the, the thing that you were seeing and showing it to other people or something. Um, yeah.

[1:48:53] 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. [1:49:11] That's all I got. [1:49:12] Thanks, Jackson. Thank you.