I kicked off my New Year's resolutions a day early this time, starting a new Tonal workout program on December 31. A 3 month hiatus meant that the workout left me incredibly sore. Trying to do anything with my arms felt like a T-Rex trying to put on a hat :)
I love new year resolutions though. Even if I stick with them only for 2 months, that is 1/6th of my life spent living closer to my aspirations :).
On a serious note, this post is a quick reflection of my 2023 - a year where I took the entrepreneurial leap.
Setting up a base
2023 ended on a high for me with winning a pitching contest at Stanford as part of a continuing studies course. It was a nice way to wrap up a year that was full of learnings leaving me quietly confident and energized for the long road ahead.
I remember being asked this quirky question once, in a gathering: “If you could be a tree or a fruit or a vegetable, which one would you choose?” The Chinese Bamboo tree was the one that came to my mind. After 5 years of showing no signs of growth, it shoots up to 90 feet in 6 weeks! What looks like a remarkable overnight growth was made possible by the work done over the past 5 years building the strong root system to support the growth. Here is one of my favorite cricketers Rahul Dravid (nicknamed “The Wall” for his determination) talking about it.
My goal for the year was to set up a strong foundation and take the time to build enough conviction on the problems I wanted to solve. This was especially important since I was venturing into a new domain (Agriculture). I had written about my journey in my previous posts(here, here), but to summarize:
The first half of the year was dedicated to learning, networking, and forging connections. Terra.do’s Climate Farm School was a great jumpstart. There is no lack of information on anything these days, but learning to drink from a firehose without getting overwhelmed and filtering the signal from noise are key skills, imho. Some of the AgTech podcasts & blogs I now follow are:
Modern Acre Podcast
Future of Agriculture Podcast
Topsoil blog by Ariel Patton
SW is feeding the world by Rishi Pethe
Shane Thomas' Upstream Ag - Lots of useful info but most of it is behind a paywall.
Once I had the conviction that this was going to be my path for the coming years, I left my job in July to dedicate myself full-time. Being physically present on farms, learning from farmers, and understanding their realities required undivided attention. This gave me the time to
Visit & volunteer in farms, spot pain points, come up with hypothesis and get direct feedback from my customers.
Join SVG Venture’s Thrive Studio sprint & Stanford’s “Accelerate your Idea” course, which provided a structured approach to developing ideas, conducting customer discovery, validating concepts, defining MVPs, and grasping unit economics and storytelling.
Go to various conferences like FIRA & SVG’s Global Summit, which helped me understand the current solutions and identify remaining gaps in the sector.
There is so much more to learn, but I wanted to share my experience to anyone new who is interested in learning about this space. Hopefully, this gives you some pointers and saves some time.
I was an early stage engineer at a startup back in 2013. That experience taught me the areas I needed to work on, if I were to build my own company. In a way, while I was waiting for my green card, the jobs that I took at Google & Meta gave me the opportunity to work on those skills. I have a lot more to share there, maybe on a separate post.
It’s not a straight line
You have probably heard a lot about all the successful pivots of famous companies from YouTube to Twitter and how startups need to be agile. My ideas have also changed and evolved over the last year.
Robots: Given my background with building consumer hardware and embedded software, the first thing that caught my attention was using robots for precision agriculture. It’s fascinating to see all the innovation happening in this area - robots that use laser for weeding, UV light for pest control, precision spraying, harvesting etc. But the farms that I had exposure to were all small and midscale family farms and building a solution that was financially feasible for them didn’t seem viable. I plan to revisit it sometime later when I have more insights.
Water Management: Given the California droughts and the fact that agriculture contributes to 70% of water usage, the other area I explored was an end to end water management system that can optimize irrigation by measuring the water inflow & soil moisture, monitor weather conditions etc. But while there was acknowledgement of the problem, the feedback didn’t give much confidence on the willingness to pay aspect.
The conversations I had while exploring the above ideas, led me to the current problem that I’m exploring. I will write more about it sometime soon, but the idea is to build a digital assistant for farmers. I’d like to think of it as a farmer’s tech savvy friend who not only takes care of a farmer’s back office paper work, but is always looking out for opportunities to drive their profitability.
What excites me about this idea is, it is not just a great entry point for me, but it can also give me visibility into a farm’s operation and pain points, allowing me the opportunity to to pivot or expand as needed.
If you are interested in learning more, happy to chat - just DM me.
Founder Market Fit
When I did a 3 minute pitch at the pitching contest, I spent the first 45 seconds talking about my journey. It was a big risk given the time limit, but that’s a question that everyone, understandably, asks me and I wanted to answer that straight off the bat.
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that there is a need to refocus human ingenuity towards challenges that impact climate change. Agriculture is a key area, impacting not only the climate but also our most vital need: the food we eat.
Farmers are at the forefront of this battle against climate change, but climate smart farming, imho, should also be a profitable business.
The common theme across all of the successful products I have had the opportunity to work on, is the almost obsessive attention to the customer needs. So, even if I didn’t have the skills to help save the planet myself, I thought I could use my skills and experience help the people who can - the farmers.
Looking Ahead
After laying the groundwork in 2023, 2024 is all about velocity and discipline for me. My professor Bret Waters always talks about how MVP is all about doing the least minimum to do the maximum learning. This year will be an iterative journey of testing hypotheses and assumptions. I have a few exciting things lined up and I will share them as I go through.
Gratitude
From holding the fort on the financial front to providing feedback, my wife has been a pillar of strength and I can’t thank her enough for that. I usually maintain an even emotional keel, but it can get lonely sometimes. One of my rituals is to check in on a daily basis with my wife, while we walk our dog, on how I feel emotionally. Being conscious and explicit about it has been tremendously helpful.
Thanks for your support and encouragement! Happy 2024!