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Sachi Desai's avatar

HI Venky, good newsletter as always.

I felt compelled to share a couple of things as you think about your 'stack' , the non-Ag parallels, and the pace.

- Take Ag/Food as a system, in this context its really operation, execution and becomes a series supply chain activities with operational plateaus. In this context, why do know so much about a tomato or even more about a pair of sneakers than we do about our beef supply.

- The bullet on infrastructure should be split in to digital and non-digital, while the focus is agtech, it important to be connected to the physical world that enables this.

- Finally I'd argue this is the most important component to determine pace (outside of Nature) and that is a scalable business model. A scaleable business model can be a proxy for culture, like who will adopt. A scaleable business model can be a proxy for infrastructure/technology, is it ready to enable. It can obviosuly be a proxy for markets and market places. However, its not always technology that is the great limiter but the business model. A good example is execution of data rich but people intensive activities, this is a costly no-go in North America but given labor is in high supply in lets say India, this is no longer the bottleneck.

I think its worthwhile considering those as you continue to evolve your model.

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Venky Ramachandran's avatar

Fascinating comment. Yes, I will bring in more layers inside this pace layer model. Your point on culture is very interesting. "A scaleable business model can be a proxy for culture". Today, given the debates happening around meat plant-based foods, I am looking at this more as: When would business model start to morph as cultural goods? That is the question I am looking at closely. Vegan movement is standing at this intersection, if you think about it.

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Yudhvir Singh Chaudhary's avatar

We need a packaged ecosystem solution.

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Venky Ramachandran's avatar

Indeed.

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