Ambrook CEO Mackenzie Burnett on American agriculture, rural resilience, and carrying 50lbs of fresh pork on Amtrak

Mackenzie Burnett joins John Collison to talk about American agriculture, labor and immigration challenges, building rural resilience, ERPs, and the principle of money movement. She also shares some feedback for Stripe. Show notes: Where Soil is Holy, and Climate Change Is Seldom Mentioned https://ambrook.com/offrange/sustainability/climate-change-regenerative-farming-soil-OhioFarming goes digital https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiZ-5WTUAOMThe End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-end-of-accounting-and-the-path-forward-for-investors-and-managers-feng-gu/28af7eb0edd1741e?ean=9781119191094&next=t&next=t Full transcript on Substack: https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/ambrook-ceo-mackenzie-burnett-on Timestamps: (00:00) Introducing Ambrook (05:37) Serving farmers (19:25) Building rural resilience (21:49) The economics of ag (28:03) If Mackenzie ran the USDA (30:53) Vertical SaaS (34:49) The wonders of accounting (38:41) Ambrook-as-fintech (44:00) If Mackenzie ran Stripe (50:53) Joshua Kushner and Dylan Field

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We decided actually early on not to give away free money. So that was a

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Controversial in startup land.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  And I think it actually was controversial at the time. It was a, and we grew slower in the beginning because of it. We ended up butchering the pig at the end and we took home that meat. It was like 50 pounds that we carried like on the Amtrak.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  You're the person that people love to have sitting next to them on Amtrak.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  90% of payments in US agriculture still go through paper check. And it's not because they're behind the times. It's because digital payments can be expensive for a lot of these producers.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  What are things that people should buy directly from farmers as opposed to in the supermarket?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  You can just call up a local farmer and most likely they'll figure out a way to sell you half a cow. How long did it take you to pour a perfect pint? I'm gonna

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I'm not sure we claim these are particularly perfect, but

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Better than the first couple of episodes.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Not that I want to blame the keg, but it was all the keg.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Mackenzie Burnett is the CEO and co-founder of Ambrook. Ambrook provides financial tools for farms to help them stay independent and build better businesses. Cheers.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Cheers.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  I just want to start with Ambrook.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Many people who are not in farming will not know what Ambrook is. Tell us the Ambrook product story and how you got here.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Ambrook, we build financial management software for farms, ranches, and increasingly other, I would say, industrial mom and pop shops. So these are more complex businesses, typically family run in the US. What financial management software means is it's accounting software, payments, and banking. A lot of that is built on Stripe's infrastructure and is, I think, made a lot more possible to be able to bundle a lot of that. I think you had sort of the bundling, the great unbundling, and now you have the great rebundling that has been enabled by a lot of embedded infrastructure tools. But that is what we build.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  The broad mission is how do you help American family businesses become more profitable and more resilient? And resiliency is both economically and environmentally resilient. And we had started by trying to help a lot of farms access working capital during the pandemic. And then we pretty quickly realized that while we could help them with these one-off pandemic relief programs, which are actually designed to be extremely simple to apply for and simple to get the money, even then, a lot of businesses were struggling to get that those checks. We found that trying to help them with the more routine, you know, working capital,

• 2:39Speaker 00

  whether through public or private lenders and grant givers, it was just basically people didn't have, a lot of these businesses didn't actually have the financial record keeping that you needed to. And it wasn't because they were behind on technology necessarily. It's because their businesses have a level of complexity that you would see if it was a startup, it'd have a CFO.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  That was a big unlock in realizing that a lot of, you know, when we were asking, oh, you actually do have all these tools that, you know, are, you know, built for a lot of these SMBs sort of accounting software, and they still weren't able to put together their balance, and they couldn't produce a balance sheet, what you need for a loan.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so farms are very complex businesses.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You started off helping them with COVID stimulus essentially, and then as part of that, you realize that just it's very hard to understand the farmer's finances, which got you into financial tooling.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And we spent the first year and a half just trying to access the problem. I think that's what I talked to the team about is like, your first job as a founder is to get access to the problem. And sometimes people get it right pretty quickly, and sometimes it takes a little bit to get access to the right problem. So the first thing was just get access to the problem, talking to like hundreds of farmers and the whole ecosystem around them. So we would talk to a bunch of ag lenders, and we're like, well, how do you do it? And they're like, we drive to the farm.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  And see what's like, what they're like, yep.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. They actually drive, so they drive to the farm, and they sit down in the kitchen table, and they actually put together their balance sheet with the producer.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  I see. So as an ag lender, you have to actually get in there and help them understand the finances.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So I think that, and that's, I would say that's more typical than not. There's actually a level of complexity here for farms and a lot of these types of like I would say I would say resource intensive businesses where you're dealing with like locations, inventory, right, loans, right. So you're dealing with a balance sheet heavy

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  ness of it. And it's what we call multi P and L. So you have multiple business lines, multiple pinout payment methods, right. Even like the the rise of the pandemic, for example, I think increased kind of accelerated the complexity of all these businesses because suddenly you could actually have an online shop.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, yeah. We bought a lot of Snake River Farms steak during during a pandemic. It was really good.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think and that is a nightmare to book keep for.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Because individual transactions, it's not just like one supplier.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  You have to reconcile it against like what actually hits your bank account. And so so yes, it's great. All these tools have accelerated businesses' ability to do business, but it's also increased the complexity of business. And a lot of these businesses, because they're so low margin.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  And have tons of pressures on both sides and both input suppliers and the market, the marketing side of things that are squeezing margins for a lot of these these small businesses. They have to diversify.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  In order to be able to it's smart business to diversify, but it also makes it a much more complicated business to actually figure out where are you making and losing money.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Okay, so I have so many questions. I want to ask questions about your business. And Amber, I also want to ask questions about the general direction of agriculture in the US. But maybe let's start with, what segment of the market are you addressing?

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Can you guess how many farms in the US make more than 5 million a year in annual sales? There's 2 million farms in the US. So that's 1.8 million.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  How many make more than 5 million a year in annual sales? 10,000.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's about it's about 10,000.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Which is an extreme power law.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Right. So 10,000 out of like 1.8 million.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Means that the majority of commercial farmers, right, are doing somewhere south of that. And so they have a level of complexity that might be sort of like the $15 million business, but they are at 500K.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  You know, in annual sales.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're mostly targeting farms that do Up to 5 million and

• 6:31Speaker 00

  So we started there and now we're starting to work with farms that are larger, right? But like the, you know, if you just go out and market a product to farms, you are going to get like the majority of producers that are in that range between like the, you know, 250K a year to about 5 million.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And does the product work for everyone, you know, almond farms in California? And, you know, dairy farmers and, you know, the huge crop farms in the Midwest? Is there any kind of particular?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  No, yeah, totally. We actually deliberately started pretty broad. It's unusual if you think of us as ag tech software. It's not unusual if you think of us as just financial, like management software.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. QuickBooks is not specific to anyone in this group.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Exactly. And we were pretty deliberate in the beginning to make sure that we were working with some ranchers, some row croppers, some more diversified like veggie producers, to make sure that we weren't accidentally building something for just one sort of one vertical of that. And actually, I think the thing that was a really happy accident, that was an example of the customers pulling us into a much broader TAM or part of the market, was our second customer was a cattle feeder operation in Arizona. And we drove, this is when our first 10 customers we drove, we onboarded by hand. So it was a big deal when we moved to like video onboarding. But no, it was like, and they're about two hours outside of a regional airport.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  So we drove there and we kind of got them onboarded and they were like, great. Really happy to be onboarded. Now can you help us with our other four entities? And by the way, none of them are farms. And so you had a trucking entity, you had like a custom service entity, which actually just looks like consulting, sort of consulting or invoice heavy business. And so we immediately realized that in order to well serve agriculture, we actually had to serve and think about a lot of these other industries, which now, right, is enabling us to expand to a lot of these adjacent or other just other types of industries. But in the beginning, we kind of realized that we had built something that could help. You know, a husband and wife couple will be able to handle a five entity business.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  You know, that's, as you know, pretty complicated.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, like for an ERP system, multi subsidiary support is like a pretty advanced feature for something like a NetSuite. And what you're saying is you need that even for, you know.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. Right now, we're going, I would say, our main, the main competitive software that folks are switching from towards, from us is Intuit software. Eventually, that will be something more like a NetSuite.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Right? But I think the thing that we actually realized was that there wasn't something in between.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  We are building for those businesses that have effectively outgrown QuickBooks.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  But don't have the teams or resources to onboard to like a Sage or a NetSuite.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  And the thing.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Are there farms that use NetSuite?

• 9:09Speaker 00

  There are farms that use NetSuite. Yeah, they're in the, they're in the north of the five, five million.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  That's a big farm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  It's a big farm. It's when you have teams of people who can afford to implement and then maintain.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Right, that type of stuff.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  So that's really getting into kind of agribusiness type.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so they tend to be much more vertically integrated, right? They'll have a processor component or something like that. You know, you kind of realize that actually, I think, to go against something like an ERP, because you can't go, you know, it's a huge feature for.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  You have to, if you talk to most, most of those businesses, even the really complex ones that are using something like an ERP are only using 10% of the features.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  And so the game becomes like, what is the 10%? And like, what can you pull down for a different audience type, right? Like, I think one of the key differentiators we, we decided to build toward, I think correctly, just by, in the beginning, was instead of building for the, the financial professional.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  We built for the business owner.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yes. When you think about it, it's kind of funny that ERPs became so horizontal because, yeah, for context for people, ERP is enterprise resource planning software. It doesn't really tell you anything, but my understanding, tell me if you think this characterization is correct, is it is a combination of financial software, where it's the three financial statements, and a huge amount of automation around the stuff needed to produce those financial statements. And so if you think about it, if you run a factory, to be able to produce the balance sheet, you have a bunch of inventory, but to be able to know what should be in that inventory line in the balance sheet, you actually have to know how many widgets you have. In bins in the facility in Cleveland.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And so it becomes this like all singing, all dancing, multi tentacles system with very complex implementations and everything like that. And I'd say really grew up in a manufacturing paradigm. And yet Stripe has an ERP system and lots of regular companies have ERP systems. And so it feels like it'd be much better suited for them to be vertically specific. Or there should be farming ERP and there should be manufacturing ERP, which is much more the traditional design center.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  And I think that is what, I think the modularity is what hasn't actually been brought to the SMB level. It does exist at this much larger enterprise level.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, I do think that as software becomes easier to build and that's not just from AI, but it's also from a lot of the embedded infrastructure. There's tons of reasons why it is much easier to build the version of what we're building today than it would have been 20 years ago. Even cross-platform, like a choice that we made really early on was to build on React Native, which immediately just gives you, it means that we don't like, we have not had actually a full-time mobile engineer on the team. Because everyone has just learned React Native and you immediately get across.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  And I presume you have a huge amount of mobile usage because people are.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Yes, actually, thirty, like, so about a third of our customers use exclusively mobile to do all of their bookkeeping and accounting, which is insane for the level of complexity that they're dealing with.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, yeah. And so for doing accounting, it's like, that's a laptop kind of activity.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. And so we, and so I think very early on, we built for the type of person who was not necessarily financially, didn't have a lot of financial professional training, who was spending more time in the field than in the office, right? He was dealing with a level of complexity that typically these ERPs were better suited for. And we kind of brought all that into a package that was affordable and accessible. And we also do a ton of like financial literacy training and education. And we wrap a lot of what would otherwise be. Like a custom journal entry in these types of workflows, right? It's sort of, exactly, it's like, you can really think of like an ERP where like what, you know, sort of the system is like, get the data in, do something with the data, get the data out.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  And the get the data in.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  It's kind of a thankless task.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Exactly, those are all the workflows, yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you rock up to a farm, you know, you're off in Visalia or somewhere and you are visiting a farm and they're on QuickBooks or they're on, you know, Sage or, sorry, I guess maybe not Sage, something, and you say you shouldn't be using your existing system, you should instead switch to Ambrook. What is the wow feature? What gets people to switch? What's the point in the demo where they're like, okay, I'm in?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. So there's a couple of things. There are like, you know, what's in the software and then there's the advantages we have of just being a startup that can care harder, you know, in the beginning, like you can just care hard about everything. But the, a couple of the core things that we have built just differently, the first is that when you look at the software, it just looks cleaner. It doesn't sound like that's a 10x feature, but it is, we solved a thousand tiny paper cuts so that when someone looks and interacts with Ambrook for the first time, it's a little bit of a breath of relief. The second thing is that we enable a type of like multidimensionality in the software. So QuickBooks has a concept like called classes. We enable essentially a type of multiple tagging system and splitting of every transactions

• 14:08Speaker 00

  in a way that you can slice and dice your data without having to kick that out to a spreadsheet and you can do it in your own language. And so we kind of help folks kind of set up, okay, like this is my cattle enterprise, this is my hay enterprise, it's in their own language. And it's very clean in the interface of how to do that. So again, it's the get the data in, we made it a lot simpler and cleaner, but they're actually doing quite complex analysis, actually, when they're, when they're doing that type of work. And the last thing is actually mobile. It's like. The number of conversations that we had with producers who would describe an actual shoebox receipts that they would take at the end of the year to their accountant, and that was their financial management system. We built a lot cleaner workflows around receipts, around paper, basically.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Receipts, checks, those types of things, so that you can take photos of things, categorize them immediately. We use that. That is actually one place that we're using, that folks are really using a lot of AI features to do a lot of that type of matching and categorization of those things. But those are sort of like the breath of fresh air when you first see the software, and then it's these, what it enables you to do. It's like the simple, you know, the simple but powerful workflows.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  What's an example of a kind of analysis that someone might not do on their farm but for the software?

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Understanding your cost per acre is extremely challenging to get to in something like a QuickBooks. And so, like, there's a reason why there's a whole category of startups that are funded to do FPNA on top of QuickBooks. Like, you don't have to do that with Ambro. It's built in, and it's because, and the reason why those startups exist is because QuickBooks did not actually have the underlying data architecture in a specific way that we chose to do native in the beginning. And so, we can do way more complex unit economic analysis and those types of things in Ambro, and I think essentially without requiring someone to have financial professional training.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm running a farm, and there's 100 acres for sale across the road. The decision as to whether I should buy that 100 acres really depends on what is my cost per acre right now, so I know what is the outlay until that becomes productive.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  But I can't work that out unless I know my existing cost per acre.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Which I probably don't know.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so I think, yeah, that's exactly right. And it's can you put together your balance sheet and stuff in time in a professional way so that you convince your lender?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Your banker to be able to give you the loan to buy the, you know, sort of to buy the 100 acres across the road.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay, so this better accounting is a significant reason people are coming to the product today. What are the other reasons that people come for the product, or maybe will come to the product in the future?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  I kind of think about startups as you have pre-distribution opportunities and post-distribution opportunities. And the pre-distribution opportunities are what, what can you do to convince enough nodes to join your network? And the post-distribution opportunity is what it can do when you have enough nodes.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Ambric is just now crossing over in some regions because we have enough regional density with some of these nodes to get into a post-distribution world for some of our customers. But I think in that world of you have enough nodes in the network, it should be instant and free to transact within the Ambric ecosystem. And I think a lot of what we are doing or the vision is to be able to keep more capital in local communities. And I think that has been something that I've become increasingly passionate about, which is, for example, like 90% of payments in US agriculture still go through paper check. And it's not because they're behind the times, it's because digital payments can be expensive

• 17:34Speaker 00

  for a lot of these producers. And I think actually something that we're building with because of the Stripe Treasury Network is the ability to do these instant free payments within the deposit ecosystem. And ideally, and those are when they're within the ERP system, they're also, they have the contacts in both sides of the ERP. So you don't, my invoice is your bill. You don't have to actually do the ARAP shuffle, right? Everything is reconciled in both sides, right? You have like, in the future, we could say, okay, this category in your system actually maps to this sort of chart of accounts category in this system, right? You can imagine a lot, what could you do when you actually have like really rich metadata that's going through the network?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  No, we think about this distinction a lot. I think it's very good for startups of yeah, pre-distribution versus post-distribution. How do you get people using the product and then how do you make it better when they're using the product? And when we started Stripe, we were very much building Stripe in a single-player mode where you have your Stripe account and the fact that other people use Stripe is, well, they didn't at the time, you know, we were small. Whereas now, a big part of how we can make the products better is the fact that there is so much internet commerce running on Stripe. I mean, a very simple one, but it's really started working as Stripe Radar where just it is now the case that most credit cards on the internet we've seen before.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  And so we kind of know it's suspicious if a credit card comes to us from a totally new device and totally new IP address and things like that. But that's the kind of post-distribution thing where you can't build that product initially, but when you're enough scale, it becomes very significant.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  I think one of the most rewarding things about building for small businesses is that you are able to build these real relationships with people who are entrusting you with their numbers and their future. And what can we do when we are translating, not just in the individual context of a single-player world, but the multiplayer world as communities?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  And I've just been thinking a lot about that, which is, what does rural resilience mean? What does economic resilience mean for a lot of people?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  What does rural resilience mean? Where, I think there's a general view that the economics of US agriculture are really hard, and it's challenged from a labor point of view. There's always different challenges. And so, maybe you can talk about the landscape and, yeah, that rural resilience.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  I think rural flight, you know, which is, I think, the opposite of rural resilience, which is what you're seeing in a lot of places, that you're just seeing a brain drain from a lot of rural communities around the world, does impact local communities. But I think the thing that is usually under-discussed is how it impacts national or, like, global communities as well. But when it comes to rural resilience, what I mean is, when you have, like, nodes of family businesses that can sustain, like, multiple generations of passing down the business, for example, or people want to stay in local communities, basically, and I think that is something that we're really interested in, and we have seen worked well.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  For some of our customers, they're actually able to make the succession planning work, right? They're able to build a business that can be passed down through multiple generations.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  As in, you think we need to be more serious about preserving farming as working as an important part of the US economy?

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes the free market optimizes for too small of a unit. And if we instead optimized for a community unit, for example, how would that change the way that we made decisions? And that, that community unit, I think, actually is what sustains local economies through time. If you are just optimizing for like the very short term sort of like turnaround, which makes total sense actually for like an individual to say, okay, that this is my only sort of retirement is to sell to this developer. Right? And I think that's, that's, that's, that's a world that I would love to be able to build more business resilience so that they don't have to feel like that, that that's their only option.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're saying farming produces positive externalities. Like if, you know, the cartoon villain private equity, you know, slash and burn costs and, you know, make the products worse and raise prices. If that's at the, you know, full negative externalities end of the spectrum, farming is much more the positive externalities.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of positive externalities for it that, that are like under accounted for.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  How do you make a medium sized farm work in the United States? Pick your favorite example, whether it be crops or dairy or beef or what have you. What is required to make, because again, it's a hard business. What's required to make it work?

• 21:54Speaker 00

  So I'll take a, like a, like a cattle ranch, for example. For a cattle ranch, I think to work in, in the US, you have to, a couple of things. One, it's a lot of farming are these like boom bust cycles, right? So, so they are subject to commodity markets. They're also subject to like input prices, inflation, those types of things. And so you do see this like boom bust cycle throughout the economy. So one, there has to be a resilience and ability to like, to weather that. That's one piece. I think the second piece is to get access to the inputs perspective. So you can give inputs as like access to grazing land, access to feed, right? Access to a lot of these other things.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  A lot of ranchers, a ranch on BLM land, right?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Government leases, which helps get access to the amount of land you need.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. For context, like ranching require, like sort of cattle ranch requires quite a lot of land. And there's a way to do it in a way that like is actually better for like grasslands management.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Why is it better for grasslands? Oh, it's fire management?

• 22:50Speaker 00

  It can, yeah, sorry, it can be. There is such a thing as like overgrazing, right? Like you, that is a, that, but I think a lot of what people talk about with rotational gra, it's called rotational grazing. Just a lot of labor to like move the cattle every day to be able to do that. But it actually does build back up the soil in a way where the. Cattle graze and then they poop and then the poop becomes like, you know, better soil. And like you sort of can move throughout and there's a lot of interesting virtual fencing to be able to make that easier. But there is a way in which like good, healthy like livestock management also creates healthier soils. And it is possible. It just is technically you have to be trained and understand how to do it. And it, there are some capital barriers or labor barriers to be able to do that.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  So there is access to the type of capital that would incentivize and sort of like create the incentives to be able to make that possible. And then you have like on the other side, access to markets. Historically, if you're just sort of doing wholesale, right, you're going to get wholesale prices. This is where you see the rise of D to C really help. And when you're able to have access to higher margin markets, uh, so a lot of online payments actually has helped that a ton. It just is also you need to be able to manage your books in a way that can actually make that, um, uh, easier to, to manage. What I'm talking about is diversification, right? And whenever you introduce diversification, you also introduce complexity or in risk.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Can any farm do D to C? I would have thought maybe it requires some minimum scale to make sense. Or, you know, it's just reasonably labor intensive, you know, the packing and shipping of individual shipments to individual customers.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  There's actually a whole spectrum of, of different ways in which you can make it work. You can do it all yourself, but there's also a lot of like co-ops basically in which you can kind of share infrastructure. It just requires a shift in incentive structures, infrastructure, those types of things. And so it requires, and that, that sometimes can require a lot of public investment.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  What are things that people should buy directly from farmers as opposed to in the supermarket? Like there's some things that travel pretty well. Beer travels pretty well, actually, and so you don't need to brew your own beer for quality purposes. You may want to just it's fun. I was surprised. I thought the steak in the supermarket, I assumed it would be pretty good, like we have local supermarkets. But yeah, the direct to consumer meat was really good. Veggies as well. I think the local stuff will be better than the long supply chain stuff.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  I think you'd be surprised. You can just call up a local farmer and most likely they'll figure out a way to sell you half a cow.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Well, to find an easy online payment solution.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. No, I think actually the biggest thing people don't really think about is like freezer storage or something.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, half cow is quite bigger than people expect.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  And it's like that feeds like a full family for a while. Actually, there's a lot of things you can buy direct.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  But what should you buy direct?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I think meat is a big one.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  That makes way more economic sense to buy direct if you just are willing to like.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  That's economic sense, gastronomic sense.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  No, totally. No, it's so much better too. Something I did with my team, uh, one of my teammates found and suggested it, which, uh, which is really awesome was, um, have you ever been to a traditional pig harvest?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Uh, I have helped butcher a pig once, and that was quite an experience.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Okay, yes.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think we didn't see all the steps, uh, both, yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  So yeah, we saw all the steps and so that was, that was a really interesting experience of participating in that. Then we ended up butchering the pig at the end and we took home that meat. Uh, it was like 50 pounds, pounds that we carried like on the Amtrak.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  You're the person that people love to have sitting next to them on Amtrak.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  That was awesome. It was by far the best pork I've ever had.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Annoyance level one is people playing music without headphones on their phone. Annoyance level eight.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Carrying half a cow, carrying half a pig, yeah, yeah. No, that farm I went to is a customer now. So it was, uh, yeah, you know, it worked, yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so, uh, direct to consumer is a big thing, but sorry, I'm trying to rewind to where we were. We were talking about, oh yeah, the economics of farming in this day and age. Uh, labor seems really hard.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Yes, labor is especially hard right now. Um, uh, but it's, it's, it's hard for a couple of reasons. I think there's a lot of immigration related issues that a lot of folks are kind of facing right now. Um, but the second actually.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And that is tightening of immigration meaning less labor?

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so tightening of immigration means that you have, um, uh, less labor. Um, cause a lot of, uh, a lot of farms rely on seasonal labor. Farms and processing facilities actually, which people don't think about, which is if you can't sell your product, then, you know, for, for, for a lot of livestock, for example, then, you know, and that was the issue in pandemic too, which a lot of processing facilities shut down, right? Um, but the other side is actually skilled labor. It's not just seasonal labor, but it's, it's particularly skilled labor has been. Harder and harder to get, even before the pandemic.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  As well as an example of some of these kind of.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  I think it's just, there's actually quite a lot of skill in knowing how to like, pick a crop without bruising it, for example, at the speeds that you need. Or, for example, like animal husbandry, or a lot of these other types of skills that, again, this goes back to like, how do we make it so that there isn't so much like rural brain drain in rural flight? Like, a lot of, a lot of the labor, you know, the people who might otherwise be doing that might not actually want to live or work in those areas, even if they're not, you know, sort of seasonal immigrants.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  From a policy perspective, if you were in charge, if you were running, I don't know, USDA, both your parents worked for USDA.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  What would you be waving your magic wand to?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. I think there's actually two, one of them's outside the USDA, one of them's within the USDA. I'm really interested in a lot of the stuff that's happening with open banking regulations, because I think actually the cost to a lot of what we're seeing or doing is the lack of, accounting software is just an attempt, like, all we are doing is trying to get external data sources in and like, make them all make sense, you know? And, kind of what we were talking about with the metadata and all that before, like, there's so much information that could actually be really helpful for our customers that is not being shared, or is really expensive and difficult to get.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  And so that is something that I'm super interested in, how things are developing there.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  So you're saying concretely there, like, in many countries, it is mandated that banks provide structured access to financial data for their customers, because they say, you know, it's the customer's own data.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Banks have to give it on request and, you know, in API formats and things like this.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  It's actually a very live topic in the US right now, and there's lots of debates over this, rule 1033 and things like this. But you're saying it'd be very useful for Ambrook to have some open banking mandates where you guys can reliably get data in a sensible format?

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not just useful for Ambrook, it's useful, I mean, for our customers. Like, that is ultimately who we're trying to serve.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's their data.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  It's their data, and so, and all we're trying to do is get the data from someone else.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  And give it back to them, actually, which is kind of a crazy thing that we have to fight for that, but, yeah, no, I think that would be, that is something that, if I could wave a magic wand, honestly, I think that would actually help. More than people think, and I know that you asked a question about the USDA, but I actually think that that would be.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  That's your top.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  That would be my top.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  But I think on the USDA side, there's a lot of hoops that people have to go through in order to be able to get access to like funding or programs that might be useful for the type of incentive structure alignment that I was talking through. And I think a simplification of a lot of that, which I think a lot of people want, but.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  We have our thumb in the scale, but we could at least do it in a more efficient way.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Would you tweak farm subsidies up or down?

• 30:11Speaker 00

  To be honest, like I think farm subsidies are so sticky that what I would do instead of tweaking up and down is I would just be extremely deliberate.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  About when we just use introduce a farm subsidy, like what are we doing? And, and if this was still around 100 years from now, would we be okay with it? When you are designing these incentive structures, there's whole livelihoods and politics that are built around them and they last.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And they're going to be sticky.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  And they're going to be extremely sticky. So it's, it's more like be careful what you wish for is I think actually the, the response I have to that, yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Ambrook is a window into one of the most underappreciated stories in the internal economy, vertical SaaS. As Max is explaining, the finances of a modern farm, they're complex and generic accounting software just doesn't work. So Ambrook is building the SaaS from the ground up to solve deep industry specific problems that generic tools can solve, like crop specific profitability or specialized agricultural lending. And Stripe then is the platform for these platforms. Stripe parts tens of thousands of these from Ambrook for farming to Mindbody for gyms. And collectively, those platforms par millions of small businesses. The best vertical SaaS platforms become an all around system of record for their customers. They offer payments and loans and spend management and subscriptions and invoicing and tax automation reporting, all of which you can get from Stripe.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  There's now 95 platforms on Stripe with more than a billion dollars in GMV. So if you're building that indispensable system of record for your industry, come talk to us at Stripe. Are carbon? Credits, a big revenue line for a lot of your customers?

• 31:48Speaker 00

  They're not the biggest revenue line.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Okay. No, because a relevant revenue line for a lot of your customers.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  You get into forestry stuff for a lot of land management.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  So for many of our customers, they do participate in carbon credit programs, but it's not as many as you might think. It still is a relatively small part of US agriculture, despite, I think, them being kind of really big in the public sort of consciousness. Carbon payments are on very long timeframes and they require you to maintain the same behavior over about a 10-year period. Otherwise, you get clawback provisions. And so actually, I think I-

• 32:25Speaker 01

  It locks you into a plan.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  It kind of locks you into a plan when you might actually want to be kind of adaptive or versatile in that. And I think actually, went to a sustainability and ag conference last year and something that one of the producers there said really struck me, which was, you know, it's not enough to have a 1X payback. You have to prove that these programs can have a 3 to 4X payback.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Otherwise, like, why would they do it? They should just do something else that is going to be able to better improve their bottom line. And I think that that just goes back to a lot of our thesis, which is this idea of like pragmatic environmentalism. Like, you just cannot, you are not going to see the level of change that you might want to see or need unless it makes sense for the bottom line.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Climate is a very politically charged topic in the US. You studied climate security at Stanford. Most of your customers are in red states or the red part of blue states, such as in California. But I also think that people's views on these topics tend to be pretty nuanced. Like, I think, I bet San Franciscoans couldn't effectively steelman the views of your customers on such climate topics.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  So what do your customers think on climate topics?

• 33:41Speaker 00

  It's a great question. Our customers think a bunch of different things. So I wouldn't be able to summarize with just one statement, though I will say that one of my favorite articles that Off Range, which is our editorial independent media publication, published was an article titled "Where Soil is Holy, But Climate is Seldom Mentioned." And I think that- It's kind of like talking about climate sometimes feels like talking about politics or money. And yet, these producers that this article talks about, and a lot of the producers that we work with or just around the US are actually doing the type of things that you would put under like a climate umbrella.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just not branding it as such.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  It's just not branding it as such. And I think a lot of actually what I have learned from our customers is that a lot of people want the same things. They just aren't talking about it in a way that might feel familiar to someone who grew up in, you know, around like San Francisco, for example.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  We're talking a lot here about the insights in business that Ambric allows. One of my favorite books about accounting is The End of Accounting, which talks about how GAAP is basically poorly suited to this day and age. One of the things it points out is that accounting is trying to do many jobs, right? Like if you're an equity holder, it's trying to help you figure out what the future returns on your equity might be. If you're a debt holder, it's helping you figure out, will you lose all your money or will you get paid back? If you're the IRS, it's helping you figure out how much taxes this business owes. And then there's kind of management accounting, which is helping you understand, like you're

• 35:23Speaker 01

  saying, the kind of P and L view of hay or, you know, the dairy side of the operation or something like that. And so it's kind of helping management make better decisions. But in particular, people tend to have a view that there is this God-given truth of just, you know, what the business is.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Whereas in fact, accounting is a tool for a job.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  And the job you might want to do with accounting actually really varies.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And so I'm curious how you think about that, where which are the jobs that you want to help firms do? Like, are you helping them pay their taxes? Is it all about making different decisions?

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And yeah, just that idea that accounting is a bit overloaded these days.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Actually, I think the way that we talk about it internally is there's four types of accounting. The first layer is just cash. You know, it's sort of like, if you had a snapshot, like what was, you know, what's happening? And actually, most, many businesses in the US file cash basis.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  The second layer, which I think...

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Which a lot of startups are subjected to because they meet the threshold requirement for this is filing accrual, which is we suddenly introduce the idea of time into accounting. So the idea of accounts receivable, accounts payable, A R I P, etc. The next layer is enterprise accounting, which is that idea of your entire business line, basically, so hay, cattle, etc. And then the final layer is managerial accounting, which is truly unit economics. It's like, what does my cost per acre? How much did it cost me for a dairy to produce a pound of milk? Like that type of accounting. And the way that we think about it is, we have customers who come in at every layer.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  And I think actually the beauty of building accounting software is that it can scale. Like, yes, GAAP might be overloaded, but at least it is standardized and it scales. And so we have folks who come in, who are coming off of actual pen and paper and a shoebox of receipts, who are interested in adopting software for the first time to do their accounting, to just get tax prep to be done easier, or maybe go from cash to accrual. And then we have folks who are at the accrual or the enterprise layer, who are interested in actually getting to the unit economic analysis. I mean, I've seen, so dairies are extremely complicated businesses.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  They're like a cow-calf operation, which is your typical cattle ranch, and then some. They're like a very complex cow-calf. And I've seen dairies hire ex-bankers to get to that level of the managerial analysis.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  And I think that is what we are building for Ambrook, is we have customers who are able to get to all four layers of accounting because of the way that we just architected the data structure in the beginning and the way that we are trying to wrap and... De-jargon, you know, a lot of the complexities of doing your books correctly.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Do you want to walk people up the inside curve?

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  And take wherever they're currently operating?

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  And just make it easy for them to reach the next level?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  And it's okay. We consider customers to be successful in Ambrook if they just hop one level up.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. People might think you of as a software business, but I get a sense that you identify in a significant way as a fintech business. Is that a fair characterization? And maybe you can expand on that.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I typically think of fintech businesses in two different ways. The first way is just, are you sort of facilitating payments? And so there's a sense of like, are you in the payments flow? The second way that folks typically talk about fintech businesses is like, do you hold deposits? Do you lend, you know, do you lend basically deposits and lending? Maybe also cards, I think would be part of that. And so for us, we actually, from the very beginning, saw them as inseparable. Like, we were just interested in solving our customers' problems. And in order to be able to get more accurate data into the ERP, like, being in the payments flow was just made it a lot easier to be able to do that. And I think building with a lot of the fintech optionality enables us to,

• 39:32Speaker 00

  yeah, to have a lot more of the options to solve more of the problems with capital that we were kind of talking about earlier. So, yeah, I think about that as inseparable. I think that the choice that we didn't make, though, is, and we are just now getting into credit, we decided actually early on not to give away free money. So that was a...

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Controversial in startup land.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  And I think, I think it actually was controversial at the time. It was, and we grew slower in the beginning because of it. And I think that the thought that I had was that, and we had raised, and in the very beginning, it started during Zerp. And so, and so the thought that I had was, basically what I did was I just, I did all these like financial models. And I was like, I just don't see how this makes sense, actually. If I'm trying to get to like a healthy merchant business. Like, I don't see how this-

• 40:26Speaker 01

  The free money part makes it challenging.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  I don't see how this works if interest rates change even a little bit. A piece of advice that I got that I thought was really, really helpful and kind of helped me shape this, which is I wanted to, I wanted to actually get the hard parts right first, which I think is the SaaS side of the fintech side. And I wanted people to be adopting us because they liked the software.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  And we got the workflows right, not because we were giving away free money. Because we can always give away free money. Like, we can turn that on when we, when we want and when we have like enough of the partners be able to do that. And I think because we actually did the slog of like build accounting software that has a high NPS, like, you know, that people actually like using, like, we now have way more optionality to be able to leverage the fintech side of the business.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And when you say free money, do you mean below-market loans? Do you mean, uh, uh, free payments? Do you have a specific free money you mean?

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, I mean, I mean, below-market anything. So, below-market anything, right? I think that, you know, uh, you can, you can give away free payments that actually cost you, you know, cost you money. So, it's anything that, that like, um, requires you to have, um, kind of negative.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  It isn't how a lot of founders fool themselves that they have product-market fit when they don't. Are users coming for the product or are they coming from the subsidy? And even build movie paths and, you know, movie aficionados love unlimited free movies.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  The economics make it challenging.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think maybe it would have all worked out if I was willing to do that. I just, I just-

• 41:51Speaker 01

  You're old-fashioned in that way.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  It's old-fashioned. I was like, I thought we were supposed to be building for like 70% gross margins. And so, that's sort of like what I was doing. That was what we ended up building the business around.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  You seem unusually passionate about instant money movement compared to most people I know.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  90% to all on instant money movement.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Is it a reflection of what you're hearing from your customers or?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's also a first principle. I kind of, the idea of like, uh, like, if I'm actually thinking about solving the problem for what we're trying to solve, like, it seems like actually a lot of the issue is that money movement is slow and expensive and contextless. I think that, like, there's instant money movement and high-context money movement. And-

• 42:37Speaker 00

  I think there's just a lot of dead money sitting in the economy. That's just for some reason in transit between middlemen.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  We're too accepting of that.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think it's something that people are used to.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Right, but I think if you think of a check sitting in the mail for like 10, 14 days, I guess maybe it's like it's kind of floating someone's, you know, sort of ability to get that. And so it's cash flow management. I think that's a legit thing that I think you have to solve for. If you're saying, you know, not everyone actually wants, not every business wants instant money movement. But I think, but I do think that there's also a sense of like, having to go through any set of ACH helps doesn't make sense.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  I was joking, I was joking with Jackson on our podcast that the takeaway I had from Stripe Sessions was like instant money movement. I was like, alright, that's gonna be a solved problem. What's the next problem we can, we can solve? And I was talking to some Stripes afterwards and they're like, no, it's actually still really hard. I was like, like I'm thinking five years in the future, you guys have got this.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, I think we will make a lot of progress there. It feels like many things are coming together. I'm curious, well, maybe you can explain briefly how you guys use Stripe to set up my actual question, which is if you were running Stripe, how would you do differently?

• 43:50Speaker 00

  I think you guys are doing a great job running Stripe.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  No, no, but actually.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  I read a whole document.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  I know, I read it.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  My sense is that Stripe's strategy in the long run is to figure out how to transcend the, transcend the constraints of traditional money movement. Like, how much do you participate in the traditional financial institutions that have been set up? And how much do you transcend that and build something novel? I think a lot of what actually Stripe is doing with building its own payments network, somehow building its own deposits network, which I think you still need to partner with banking institutions on to do that. So you still are kind of anchored with that. But I think that's actually where stablecoins becomes quite interesting. Because it's permissionless.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  And so it's like, who does Stripe need to? I think, I think the way that I would kind of think about it is, who does Stripe need to get permission from today in order to exist in the way that Stripe wants to exist?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the thing that we think is interesting about financial infrastructure is it's by its nature multiplayer. You know, you look at old e-commerce systems and, you know, ones that even might have been on-prem or just the software is very outdated. And Shopify came along and built an amazing product and said, here's a much better way to manage your e-commerce store and manage your inventory and build a nice storefront and everything. And they were able to really, you know, clean up a significant part of that market because you could replace your old e-commerce system with Shopify. What's interesting about what we're doing is payments

• 45:28Speaker 01

  and to a large degree, financial services are by their nature multiplayer, where every payment is with some counterparty, right?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  And even if it's not, even if it's something like, you know, where do you store your money or how do you do AP or something like that? Like, there are lots of banks out there that people have their deposits with or, you know, people wave their hands and say, oh, crypto will obviate this. But, you know, when people have money in crypto, they will store it in Coinbase or in Binance or what have you. And so our view is that for whatever job is being done, there will be a whole bunch of other counterparties that we're going to integrate with and work with. And so an interesting part of running a business like Stripe is that you're working with all these partners and you can actually pull things along and make them way more modern.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  We've done that in a bunch of areas. But it's much more of you're the captain of a sports team as opposed to you're Alex Honnold doing, you know, solo rock climbing. It's a different kind of sport.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Totally, but there are, there are. Players that Stripe is just deeply, will just be deeply competitive with, who will not want to play on your sports team. I think there's a difference between who do you partner with? And who do you generally have to like run through in order to be able to build like a better version of financial infrastructure that is like, is open, does actually like move on modern rails, right? Like is actually ultimately net better for everyone, is not incentivized by like value capture. But I think there's a lot of sense of how can you get more of the ecosystem cheering you on? Sort of it's a transcendence from like Stripe as like the upstart startup to Stripe as the champion that's pulling everyone into the future.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So maybe what you're saying is Stripe previously provided easy access to the existing financial system. And now we've gotten to a point where Stripe can actually have some voice in shaping the, and has kind of the scale, where you can have some voice in shaping the future financial system. And you're saying that we have to take that seriously, that that is now where we are, as opposed to being a passive participant in, I guess this industry exists.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah. I think, I think this is the thing that like, I mean, we're at a very different scale of Stripe than Stripe. But the thing that I have been talking about lately with my team is like, the company changes with, under our feet. It's like, when do you wake up and like, oh, it's like the rules are different, actually. Like, people are caring about different things than they did before. And like, the voice that we have in the ecosystem is different in these types of things. And I think, I do actually think that like Stripe is pretty clearly a leader on some, on a lot of these axes. But I haven't heard as much of the voice in terms of like, what is the vision in which we want to build? I see a future in which like, there is a vision of the world that I want to exist.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  And Stripe is uniquely in a position to be able to make that vision true. And I want to sign up for that vision.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think maybe also, you've probably picked up on this dispositionally.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  We're just not naturally drawn to pre-announcing products before they're anywhere close to, we like to do a thing and hopefully we get it right.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And our view is you can't meme your way to a product being good. You put out a version of it that's imperfect and then you gradually iterate on it over time. And so maybe also, we've just been a bit too leery of what we think are grandiose statements as a product development methodology.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's the piece of like, what feels missing is a sense of the, painting the picture of what the world could look like if Stripe wins.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  What is your answer to this question?

• 49:15Speaker 00

  What does it look like if we win? I just, I want more people to believe in the American dream. My grandfather believed in it when he immigrated from India to the US. And he built up his own, he was an entrepreneur, built his own engineering practice and that was sort of what put his five kids through school. My mom believed a version of it when, you know, she immigrated when she was eight here with her family and with my grandfather and went into public service because she wanted to, you know, she told me, you know, a couple of years ago, it was because she wanted to give back to a country that had served, you know, her, you know, had given so much to her.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  And I'm doing a version of it, right, that, because I think I went to a school that got me involved in tech and then I moved to San Francisco and I was, became familiar with capital markets and I have access now to a version of that. But I see so many of our customers that are trying to live a version of that and are struggling. And I want that to be, I want there to be many different types of American dreams that are possible.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  When you say making the American dream accessible, you're in particular talking about where Amber can help is making entrepreneurship and wealth building broadly accessible.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, broadly accessible, not just to folks who know how to raise venture capital.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Right, for tech businesses.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Who have you learned from as you, as you've built this business?

• 50:41Speaker 00

  I think two of the people who come to mind are, one of them is Josh.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, Josh Kushner at Thrive, who took a really early big bet on me and the vision that we were building for the team. And I think the thing that I really have always really admired about Josh is he's so precise.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  We never talked to Josh, he's thoughtful and all of his words, but he's enormously ambitious. There's a level of quiet ambition in what he does. And he has, like, he has, over the course of even the past couple of years, become much more widely recognized in terms of of his, like, ability to put his finger on the macro, I think.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he came from, you know, Trivless founded Halango, and now they're one of the leading multi-stage venture firms.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So I think the thing that I've learned from him is the sense of, like, you can be quietly ambitious. And that fits my style much better, I think. I think the second person, actually, that I've learned a lot from is Dylan Field, who just a lot of big investment in Ambrook. And Dylan is so, he's so able to, like, if you ever, you know, having a conversation with Dylan, you know, is one where he can connect the strategic to the tactical and back up in the same thread. He can go from 40,000 feet to five feet and back up to 40,000 in the same sentence in a way that, that doesn't create any whiplash. And that, I think, I've actually found that to be extremely rare in both investors and operators to be able to do that.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  People are either in the weeds or they're at the 50,000 view.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  50,000 view that it's like not very helpful. And Dylan is able to go back and forth between the two in a way that I've learned a lot from and I think I've gotten a lot better at.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Is that dispositional by him or because he is running a, you know, public SaaS scaled company?

• 52:35Speaker 00

  It's a good question. I've met a lot of founders and operators who can't do it. So I think, I think that probably, you know, Figma, his ability to build Figma has probably taught him a lot in that. But I also think that there must be something more dispositional about it.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Last question. Why are you building Off Range, your media property?

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Off Range started out as an experiment called Amberk Research. It was before we had built anything that we could really show people. And so I wanted a way, for two reasons. One, I wanted a way to kind of talk about our brand and put something valuable out there that would be useful. And so we started out by just doing some, we actually, we've published a couple of, like, very in the early days, research articles with academics using some of our early, like, anonymized data from a lot of the work we were doing. And then it turned, it turned into actually this editorial independent media publication that has become wildly popular in its own right. I've always wanted to build some sort of my own version of like a, like a researcher academic journal. Like, I, a lot of the research I did when I was in grad school on climate security,

• 53:39Speaker 00

  actually in particular was looking at the co-production. It was called the co-production of actionable science. And it's how do you build, how do you create knowledge in a way that involves all the stakeholders and gets them all on board and, and sort of the knowledge that is created. And so it's not just creating these ivory towers. And I always thought that if I could, I wanted to build something that would, would evoke that type of ethos. And Off Range was my attempt at doing that. And it now is sort of stewarded by a really wonderful editor, Jesse, and has its sort of own life in that. But in the early days, it was really this idea of like, I wanted to create actionable

• 54:20Speaker 00

  science that would be useful for people to be able to make better decisions. Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  What piece are you most proud of? If people want to check it out, why should they go at Google?

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Well, I already said, I really love the, the piece that we wrote. Eve Andrews is the, is the author. Where Soil Is Holy But Climate Is Seldom Mentioned. I love that piece. Yeah, that is like, that's an old but good one. It's one of my favorites.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, Mackenzie, thank you.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Yes, thank you.