King George vs Hamilton - what's your energy?
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In America, today is Independence Day - the day we celebrate one of the greatest experiments in history, the upstart of these United States. 4th of July is my excuse to listen to the soundtrack from Hamilton the musical...but so is any day I need edgy inspiration from some rag tag hopefuls with big ideas to prove.
As an A Ham fan since the moment I opened the Ron Chernow biography, here are 4 things I've learned from Hamilton:
Do more of the thing you do really well. Double down on it. For Alexander Hamilton, that was writing. He wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers. He punched above his weight class through the written word. Many, many written words. Which allowed him to get new opportunities, such as working for General George Washington. Which allowed him to gain influence for his ideas, like the design of the Treasury system we know today.
Big things happen when ambition meets high impact opportunity. We talk about product-market fit, but its pre-cursor is finding founder-problem fit….is this the right founding team working on the right problem? Is it a problem worthy of investing time, energy, and money?
Live life in a way that you don’t mind your worst mistakes being printed in the newspaper but for the love, don’t BE the one that prints your worst mistakes in the newspaper. If you don’t get the reference, look up Reynolds Papers.
Avoid duels.
This week I talked with founders building out the Dairy.com + Amazon for India’s 75 million smallholder dairy farms, MooFarm. I was impressed with the team, the vision, the execution to date, and the plan to get from here to there. When you see that kind of lofty ambition grounded in the constraints of reality, its energy is contagious. It rallies people and organizations around its vision because its vision stands to make such a clear impact.
Speaking of lofty ambitions, one of the best songs from the musical is “Not Throwing Away My Shot”, and the chorus sums up the sentiment well:
“I am not throwing away my shot
I am not throwing away my shot
Hey yo, I'm just like my country I'm young, scrappy and hungry
And I'm not throwing away my shot”
Founders live that energy every day as they push boulders up the Grand Canyon that is company building. So do the Actual Leaders at established companies doing similarly difficult work to change cultures, risk appetites, and product offerings.
Perhaps the opposite of Hamilton energy is, shall we say, King George energy: complacent, bureaucratic, entitled, assuming one’s continued dominant position in the world.
We recently talked about the Big Challenge of increasing relevance of animal protein. The single question that will determine the industry’s ability to meet that challenge is, will animal health, animal feed, integrators, and processors channel Hamilton energy to drive the industry forward? Or will complacent King George energy define the next decade?
The answer will determine everything.
(Pro tip: King George is hilariously brilliant in the musical. If you haven’t already, check out the song “You’ll Be Back”…you won’t regret it.)
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Chipotle launches “Virtual Farmers Market”
Leveraging the Chipotle brand for their suppliers, Chipotle has launched a "virtual farmers market" directing you to their suppliers' websites where you can order directly from Chipotle suppliers direct to your home."Virtual farmers market" sounds much better than “simple landing page", which is really what this is right now - it simply redirects you to their suppliers’ websites. But regardless, it’s an interesting move by Chipotle. Perhaps it is an initial experiment to prove demand before building something more complex to handle these orders directly. Perhaps the marketing play is to strengthen suppliers’ brands in order to strengthen the brand value of the Chipotle ecosystem. Definitively, it is a sign of the times and growing demand for the D2C sales channel and the increasing fluidity among sales channel.
We need to shift the focus of food safety innovation
Walt Duflock made some great points in this recent article. A few favorites:
Therapeutic food safety solutions should be defined as sustainability investments.
University and private research organizations should increase their focus on therapeutic solutions.
Many of the key University and private research teams could allocate focused resources on therapeutics for food safety solutions. This would not require a large change — the work done by researchers, licensing professionals in the Office of Technology Licensing, and alumni mentors and investors is already ongoing and will not change. What can change is the amount of professor, grad student, and undergrad student attention on the problem. By taking a very focused approach on a specific problem like food safety decontamination, the Universities create the opportunity to align with other Universities and move the state of the art faster with new research efforts. Having a specific professor own the problem at key ag Universities like UC Davis, Cal Poly, and Fresno State would help ensure that this becomes a meaningful part of the research agenda.
Why Marketing is Eating the World
For most software businesses in the US, the problem isn’t technical knowledge anymore. The problem is getting a wedge into distribution — also known as marketing.
Put another way, a lot of the “low hanging fruit” in the US software market is now gone. Software in the US generally works. And new opportunities get swept up with would-be competitors immediately. If the 90s was about thinking through your build, the 2020s is about thinking through marketing & distribution.