27: Mackenzie Burnett - Accounting for the American Dream

28:03It'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? 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.

28:39So I thought I've thought about that a lot. And so I think when it comes to staying independent, there is 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. 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 specifically such a quintessential example of the American dream? And why set out to serve them first with a brook? I think farmers are the first and maybe not the last, but I think definitely the first entrepreneurs in the first American entrepreneurs.

29:29There were farmers and fishers and trappers and folks who were turning natural resources into, you know, into their own sense of 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 Homestead Act of 1862, you know, made it possible for 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 maybe the way that the land was parceled out but the folks who did have it 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 secure loans on property and ended up building their own domains and businesses and empires, et cetera, from that act of basically the U.S.

30:49giving away a ton of property. It was an early way to really invest time into something that could be truly durable. Yeah, totally. beyond just the traditional labor you were coming to new york or wherever else did and the homes do you 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 you 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 and so um and so because the u.s was it had an interest of like settling right um imagine what that would look like today if the U.S.

31:32government had some ability to give away like that sense of 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 and the foundation shifted I think from raw acreage to this 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 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 my mom and her siblings to go to college right and I think that was a sense of 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 is this super tangible it's like the it's like the perfect kind of like metaphorical and very tangible version of that idea yeah in this way that'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 these macroeconomic cycles are like optimism or mass optimism or mass pessimism.

32:57I also think that, you know, the biggest reason why I think Elon should take us to Mars is because we need a new frontier. Yeah. Yeah. There's a sense of expansion and like and net new opportunity in space. And just think about what's happening with AI now. Right. It's it's not just like, yes, there's a land grab to try to 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 sass just kind of like all the generational opportunity yes yes yeah there was a there was people in their 20s 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 waves and they take the different forms but that is i think and it's it's about you know but the the people who are poised to take advantage of the generational opportunity that is AI looks very different than the customer base that we're necessarily serving.

33:51And I think 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 Not even like not everyone's dream is to like become even a millionaire. Like, you know, it's like the ability to to to hold space for multiple different types of dreams, I think, is what it makes a more resilient to use that word again. Yes. Fabric of society. And so also on some level, the upstream of being a millionaire, that's like a specific flavor of independence. To go back to your earlier point.

34:32And 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. And other part of the question, which is just like, why, why start with farms for Amber? 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, uh, to work at a, um, at a firm that owned a lot of farms and water assets in the Central Valley in California. 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 i just fell in love with the space in my own way and now i recommend books like uh like like the land where lemons grow uh to you which is right there um but uh just really i think it also i am just so interested in like i love i love traveling with the mission that where the mission is basically go and find like this niche thing everywhere you can go or something.

35:35Right. Like 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 right and more interesting answers and it was just you kind of went down 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 all 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 some really privileged and like intimate things and and to feel like you can actually help them with it.

36:25Yeah, the texture of their daily life. Yeah. We've talked about agriculture in America. We've talked about business and the American dream and independence. We're going to talk about accounting and money in a sec, but before we do, I think it's a helpful backdrop since we're talking about farms. 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. 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?

37:02Totally. 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. And I think actually, and it's largely actually only, there's only like 16, 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 federally mom and pop shops, very small teams, usually family run. So they're enormously complex businesses. And so they, and getting more complicated. Despite being super small. Despite being super small.

37:39So they're overly complex for their size. So a good example is a dairy. A 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, it's probably like maybe a P &L or like a business line. So one enterprise is the hay. And the hay is just its own P &L. It can be 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 to figure out, okay, the end equation is like how much, you know how much does it cost to produce a pound of milk so we're gonna 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 a like a forage mix um 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.

38:38You 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 a farm store you might be turning that milk into value-added products so ice cream and um 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 and 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 okay so being able to understand your true cost of production economics what most businesses do across america not just farms is they just really file things for their taxes 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 any sense at all for us to be uh buying any hey 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 and it actually is because gelato has a um less of a it's more milk for to cream content so you can use more milk basically in gelato 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 where that is what we help yeah you need like a mckinsey person would actually be helpful and so these these like a lot of in order to figure that out these businesses if you were a startup you'd be on sage or net suite like you would have already moved off of quickbooks right You'd be on$100 ,000 a year accounting software.

40:31You'd have a full finance team. But these are usually mom and pop shops that can afford maybe$1 ,000 a year software. And so building for that level of affordability is what we're building for. On that note, you said accounting. Everything goes back to accounting. And in many ways, it seems like sort of the meta frame here is that you have a group of people who are very trapped in the day-to-day, who you are enabling to think about things on a more long-term basis. I'm curious what goes into that. Like part of this is just simply like a cost thing and resources thing. But like, yeah, what is the leverage that comes about?

41:11You started talking about it a little bit. But what kinds of leverage emerge by giving people that ability to think long-term? And why is accounting specifically like the right tool for that? Yeah, 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 takes a while to build it right. But 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, which was not organized, you know, so just like it kept on coming back to accounting.

41:53Yeah, all roads lead to accounting. But I think there's two things that enables. There's the very tactical. So like 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 FP &A person on your team, this is what they do 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 we help folks who don't have financial backgrounds do that level of analysis. And but I think the thing that there's the tactical side, but I think actually the thing that also enables long term decision making is like anxiety reduction.

42:33Like it's the emotional side of the software that I have been. It's been so unexpected. Yes. I think a lot of systems do this. Yeah. Or tools do this. So in many ways, like a great tools job is not always like it can definitely be leverage or agency or whatever. But I think in many ways, like I just can hold a system and like in my head more or less and then actually do the real work. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think I think actually great tools should great tools shouldn't actually. And this is going a little bit into the thesis I've been we've been kind of developing an Amberger kind of thinking about around building with AI.

43:11But 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 engage the intellectual side of the brain in the business. They can move into the complexity in a way that feels accessible and that feels stimulating. And they're feeling good about the loop of making good business decisions and those things. And yeah, so that has been a big part of thinking about how we build. And even it shows up in small ways.

43:53We've done a lot of work to build workflows around what would otherwise just be core journal entries, which are... 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.

44:30another part of what you guys do beyond accounting is money movement um there was a note you had sent after you'd returned 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 i'm curious 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 number network specifically gets big enough like what could happen but yeah i'd be curious for like why that's and maybe specifically why money flow as like a signal around narratives and what's happening the world is so interesting yeah totally i this is 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.

45:31But 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, it was clearly big, not to like discount, clearly I've 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.

45:51Like that seems like it's going to be taken care of. 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 is optional, but most of our customers use it. And it's a, you know, a checking, it's under the hood, a checking account. We partner with Stripe and Fifth Third for the banking services. but a Ambrick wallet to an Ambrick 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?

46:25PayPal did it. Wow. PayPal's early days was built on Wells Fargo book transfers. Funny. Yeah. So what was not possible was like PayPal 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, in theory, spin up embedded bank accounts really easily. That's mainly thanks to Stripe. Stripe is a big part of that with their BAS program. There's lots of BAS players that are doing that. Got it. Cool. Shoulders of giants, though. Timing is important. Yeah, totally. Yeah, shoulder of giants.

47:02And so that to me felt like it was going to be a standard. And we're already seeing within Ambrook when there are two Ambrook customers that transact with each other we notice it because we know you see the payment flows and we'll turn on ambrook pay for them which is the wallet wallet transactions and that default becomes their becomes their immediately becomes their default payment method right because it's so much better than writing a check and so much and it's reconciled in both systems right like my invoice is your bill and it just you know one to three percent of um of payments get tagged basically of like revenue basically gets lost to administer trivia right like through just like the arap shuffle rod that kind of stuff.

47:41That 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 context. So metadata documentation about these payments that are happening in our system. And in theory, you should be able to see 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.

48:20And so growing via vendor networks is something that we're going to start to, you know, invest in and do in the coming months. And so there's just a lot of pieces of that that are about first you have to basically build like step one, like replace 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, like enterprise resource planner. Yeah, so it's ERP kind of is any it's usually has the GL. So the accounting software at the core, but also people kind of use it to broadly apply to a lot of different business processes that you might do.

49:05So 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? 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 make it just far. You can imagine we just make it far easier to tag these transactions with the metadata you need about the business that isn't just for taxes.

49:34And 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. There's other reasons and incentives for folks to do it because if you want to see 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.

50:03And so our goal, again, on the theme of resilience is there is too much money lost to administrivia and middleman fees. And actually 90 % of payments 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 3%. Like they will use the tools as needed. But like, what if we could at least 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 of other businesses, right?

50:45And so that's something that 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 or Venmo, but it'd be really hard to have like that much network concentration that you could actually get some of those things. That's really cool. Yeah, we have it on consumer, but we don't have it on B2B. Right. I want to zoom out a little and talk more about kind of Ambrook from a holistic standpoint.

51:18you have talked about 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 what about that is something you could conceivably spend decades on i think it goes back to that memory that you shared at the very beginning i think there's just something about i had 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 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 uh i think there's just a joy that I get from from our customers but also from yeah the the the doors that they very genuine like very kindly open for me you know like that like and I'm not saying like doors for networking I'm saying like an actual door to someone's home like that is incredible how many people I mean we we did this thing where we sent uh disposable film cameras to wow 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 with personal lives and like the family itself and the family finances.

53:11And it just feels like, I mean, obviously with the story of my grandfather, but it feels like I'm building for an extension of the family or like 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 just it's been something that has been super rewarding. The mission is definitely, definitely super important from a resilience, not just from an environmental perspective but also the economic perspective on that note maybe that's beautiful you're also a really ambitious person and like there are plenty of businesses that i think might satisfy some of the answer you just gave that also wouldn't be like you know people talk about like the infinite game um that we were talking about stripe earlier like increase the gdp of the internet can run for a while um what is it about the market you've chosen and the structure of Ambrook, 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.

54:20Yeah. 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? You know? 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, 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 thing, 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.

54:59And 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, the 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 the heart and kind of the solid foundation and then building a sustainable business with good margins. Right.

55:34And 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 that the really interesting thing about that I've been thinking about with just the macro environment today is that I think that you'll see a lot more experimentation 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, and what does that distribute, maybe you can actually think about the distribution 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 cashflow positive side of the business or a publication, which we also have.

56:18And like, I think that there are all these ways in which you're going to start to see these, you know, it's, you know, my, my, one of my teammates jokes that like every time 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'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 brand feels very distinct and for me it's actually that i feel as though we've built we've built a vehicle or like uh like a brand or an ethos kind of that happens to be shaped like a venture-backed software company right now but it's 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, OK, what do we need to achieve?

57:20The mission is the first piece. And then it just happens to continuously be shaped like this venture-backed software company. Going maybe earlier in the journey, we talked about government a little bit. It seems that understanding policy and subsidies, particularly around farming early on, was really core to kind of like some of the early work you guys did and broadly the economics of American agriculture and maybe like openings for the business. Can you talk about that a little bit? Or at least why like subsidies are so important to farming? Yeah. I think agriculture is, you know, I can't really think of a nation state where agriculture isn't both naturally and nationally strategic strategic.

58:04And so I think thoughts on subsidies aside, which is, you know, lots of takes on either side of that. I think the most important piece around it is what do you want to incentivize as part of domestic capacity? and this is actually where i'm super pro um uh super pro the any incentives or subsidies that or you know subsidies kind of a loaded word but like incentives or grants or these financial vehicles that further stand up domestic manufacturing and production so like uh 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 it's basically just everyone's obsessed with like this very specific type of chocolate that is like stuffed with this with like pistachio like cream and like some other um bits you should probably know it better i was bringing up but actually i'm more interested in the fact that the implication on american pistachio growing 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 overblown like sort of overwhelmed by the sudden demand for this pistachio, actually a pistachio byproduct.

59:20And 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 was not enough domestic processing facilities for these pistachio growers. And so they were not able to meet demand. And they're buying in Dubai? 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 in 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.

59:57Like 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 like value. It's sort of like it's called value added, but it's basically the layer of you take raw materials off a farm 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, it's interesting to think about. obviously there are other industries where this is true but agriculture in particular is sort of like deeply embedded into not just anybody's individual business incentives but like a national identity security health gdp like all so many things um which is oh yeah i'm sure we could talk a lot about um one thread i want to talk about in the context of anbrook um and i'm curious how you think about it now, but it actually, you once, we were talking about dialectic, my podcast, and you observed that in your words, it's a legible right now, and that's a feature, that's a benefit.

1:01:07And eventually, maybe I'll have to become legible. And we were talking about like, I don't know, the different guests and so on. And I've referenced that so many times in so many different contexts. I've been thinking about it 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, I'm sure you're going to continue to do more. You've also done Offrange, which is your internal media company. But yeah, I'm curious how you thought about that sequencing.

1:01:41Another phrase I saw somewhere, which is almost like this anti-YC methodology a little bit. But yeah, what is your framed in 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. 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 so many YC founders about the way to build this very MVP scope.

1:02:30And 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. Not just shipping at iterate. And so we kind of did something a little bit in between, which was we we spend about three. So the first year and a half we were building kind of we're kind of figuring out what to build. We were building this working capital solution and then ended up starting to build the accounting software.

1:03:08And then we basically just worked with a core set of like a couple dozen producers. So and these are small ACVs or 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 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 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 accounting software and also ERPs, there's such a high future floor of expectation.

1:03:46Right. 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 it's really hard to just do the do the thing that might fit exactly fit for them 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 uh 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 need.

1:04:18But so 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 get over the switching costs. Because that's the nice thing about building account software. It's very sticky, right? 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 a bit. Farming and agriculture, as we talked about, is the beachhead market.

1:04:51You have wider ambitions. 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 yeah can you talk a little bit about what the potential scope is what expanding adjacently looks like 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 what does ambrook roughly look like on a 10-year time horizon assuming things go well yeah i'm just running 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, you have a product that's serving, as I understand, thousands of farms now.

1:05:43How do you think about going wider? How do you think about deepening that relationship? And how do you think about what 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 um often the same owners often the same owners or it's like sort of uh we had like a book publisher recently who signed up for a free trial and like waited their way all the way through our access of accounting software and they're like well this worked 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 um because really what they're trying to get at is the multi-PNL part like like got it got it actually our second customer tugged us into multiple industries which was uh they were a cattle feeder operation in Arizona we had just we had we'd actually that was actually the 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 yeah we have like a trucking business we have you know like we're getting into we do custom hay like um sure yeah exactly some services and so you basically realize that uh 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, it is just so it has the big diversity in the industries that it's in.

1:07:34And so we get good testing for all these other adjacent industries. 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 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, you are well-serving your core, your existing core ICP, but you are kind of see like a Venn diagram of all the different types of industries you can do.

1:08:15And again, fortunately, accounting software is pretty applicable to a lot of folks need invoicing, bill pay accountings over 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 farm. It wants to be able to see like a custom chart of accounts, right, which is behind the hood, like sort of a database sync. And so there are things that we're doing 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, 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're from two to many then you 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 brain to like deal with multiple people 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 you could sell something that was mobile first and you could distribute it through ads and then that largely became saturated and most 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 brand like there are things that you can do like that we're getting toward that will be hyper personalized in a way that everyone should touch software that feels kind of customized to them it doesn't mean that all the workflows need to be like vibe coded, you know, because you don't really want to like do that for accounting.

1:10:12You want the engine to actually be really bulletproof. Exactly. A couple of thoughts or questions on leadership. You're the CEO and founder of Ambrook. You 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 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 simple simply describe what that process of making intractable tractable sort of means on a day-to-day basis yeah totally um for me it's about it's about making sure that i'm in the information flow so my team makes fun of me but i like i I love, like, I'll just pop up in random Slack threads they don't want me in.

1:11:10I'm sure you do. Like the Kool-Aid man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I love information. I love it. Give me that raw, like, drip into my veins. By the way, most really successful leaders, 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, but 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? Cause I think I'm fine. Like I, I feel like I can handle it, but my team actually asked me, you know, Mackenzie, how do you come up?

1:11:49You know, like one of my team members was like, love coaching around how you turn all this raw information flow into make the intractable, attractable. Like how do you actually do that? And I was talking to my executive coach and 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 big brother for our company yeah exactly like and then i'm just like it 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 and you can start to break down the problem and you know you can apply frameworks and some of these other things and it does end up making it smaller chunks or retractable or you could put your finger on on it but it has to come with from that information flow and my executive coach said something that i really appreciated which was which was no he told me a story about a headmaster in i think baltimore who um he had read a book about who had 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 kind of pass and so he would notice the change in emotion for for one kid like over the course of a week or whatever and and that was just how he kept a pulse like on the students and i was like oh got it i will continue continue bursting into these slack threads it's funny it there's so many the thing that comes immediately immediately to mind which i talked about with tammy recently on 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 consume the worst and i i almost wonder if just like so many things around judgment are just like yeah consume more get closer to get closer to the data and the signal and which maybe isn't uh like um sound by device but is oh actually i really like i think it's it doesn't feel hard if it's something that you're genuinely interested in and it feels like it's like scrolling on instagram you know it's like i like it feels and i i ava actually had a uh piece recently that i really liked uh on affinity yeah yeah and i when you were saying that it reminded me of that which was she had a um 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 almost playful obsessed way possible yes exactly um and i think it'd be really hard to build a business that i didn't have affinity toward because the way that i like to consume information and it's the way that i like to like live my life yes yeah it's the it's the novak jokovic thing again it's like he likes hitting the tennis ball you're gonna compete with that like you better find the thing where it's fun for you to scroll.

1:14:41Yeah. 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. What have you learned about de-risking?

1:15:07I've learned that what have I learned about de-risking it it it feels way easier to do after you have a bunch of reps on it so there's actually can feel it could 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 confrontation becoming friends with the anxiety and be like where are you pointing you know um and i think that has been yeah i think that's something i've really really learned is i am always rewarded when i face it and de-risk it and like diffuse the bomb you know and i think there's also something start with even just like look at the bomb yeah like really sit with the and i 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 that has done two things one 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 whatever or if it's internal i i kind of have a buzz at the end of it the stakes are really clear the stakes are clear there's so much clarity yeah and suddenly the 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 it suddenly most of my job in the attract talking the intractable part most part my job is sifting through the intractable yeah and so suddenly when something becomes quite tractable super super clear i'm like i know what i'm gonna do today um and so that 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 they're fine like it the company still exists you know like hopefully it exists for a while longer yeah that's a great answer uh you are the founder and ceo but amrook is also a lot more than just you.

1:17:30We 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. You had also sent me just like a bunch of the notes your team had sent upon that announcement. um and my observation and we may have talked about this a little bit my observation is like this really interesting thing where like 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 um what is it yeah what is that experience started to feel like?

1:18:28Such a good question. This, I think, goes back to the answer around eligibility versus legibility, which it's super, after being illegible for such a long time, it's really uncomfortable sometimes to be legible. Yeah. Yeah. You know? And to be perceived and interpreted, I think, in these ways. And it, I think when it comes to Ambrook's culture there are lots of it there's absolutely tons of it that um that is me but it's also my co-founders it's also um like a huge part of our aesthetic is our uh 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 something that is real and so there's so much There's so much about the externalization and legibility of Ambrook that has to do with everyone else outside of me.

1:19:32And I absolutely could not do it alone. And I don't create it alone either. And I think that that is the really interesting thing, kind of the out-of-body experience to watch. which 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, that has just been really kind of this wild out of body experience and seeing that. Yeah. It's really cool. Unfair question.

1:20:08I'm going to ask it anyway. I want three words that define the culture and the people at Ambrook.

1:20:20Curious is one. Very, very deeply curious.

1:20:27I want to use the word empathetic, but it isn't actually quite, it's not as nuanced. It's a sense of meeting people where they are, 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 is 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 do you think those were would you have said the same three words three years ago Oh, good question.

1:21:05I think so, actually. That's amazing. I think we've been extremely consistent in culture and who we've hired and the values that Jeff, Jan and I, my co-founders, wrote when it was just us have largely, I think, stayed the same. That is pretty amazing. One last thing, I guess, on the broader 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. It has something like 150 ,000 subscribers, which is amazing. It's been running for two or three years.

1:21:49Yeah. you're building financial tools basically um why does narrative financial tools for now yes yes to be fair it's a big container um why does narrative and stories and research and in these types of things broadly even just brand both on the ambric side and on the offering side matter from a business standpoint 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 i think it i want to be able to point people where we can go but not have that be exclusively like what we talk about and so So Offrange, which used to be called Amberg Research, now is called, we recently rebranded to Offrange because to represent that it's becoming more of an independent publication.

1:22:56It was originally a way to build something that would be of value and interest to the audience that we wanted to work with. 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. And he the reference check I did on Jesse. I always remember this. She said, Jesse is a capital J journalist.

1:23:43Whoa. And what she meant by that was. What were they doing before? He was the managing editor of a food and ag focused publication called The Counter, which was a nonprofit 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 that she was like, yeah, Jesse's a capital day journalist. 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, he's talking about the flavor of like.

1:24:20How did you get someone like that to join a, like, yes, independent fund it, but like ultimately join a startup? a commercial start like totally was that hard or were they yeah i had to i had to convince him i well i yeah we i remember i first reached out to his editor uh um editor-in-chief and she recommended that i chat with jesse okay and um i sent her a long email 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 um jesse is something I make fun of him for.

1:24:57He's a face called, like, it's like Stonewall Jackson, but Stonewall Jesse, like just this, like, like wall, you know, face, like, and so that was like 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 that was editorially independent it as much as it could be within Ambrook. And it hasn't always been easy.

1:25:26I mean, there's been, you know, moments where like something that the publication wants to publish is not necessarily what the Ambrook, 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, 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, OK, 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?

1:26:08I have a bunch of miscellaneous things before we wrap up. OK, perfect. I don't know if you publish this publicly, but you said it somewhere. MIT economist David Autor calls AI an inversion technology. This is in a Noem, I forget the name. Yes, Noemma publication. One that can democratize knowledge and bring decision-making power back to the middle class. That's exactly how we think about it, too. 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 in a lot of the headlines.

1:26:43His argument was that computerization was this concentrating technology because it turned people, you know, calculators used to be, you know, a role, you know, and it turned people into these algorithms or these roles into these algorithms. 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 – basically what would end up happening is 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, right?

1:27:25And so like you put a lot of pressure basically on like downward wage pressure, right? Because you had a lot more like sort of supply basically 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 ability for a lot of folks 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 a little, you know, it basically is looking at a different slice.

1:28:02It's enabling a different slice versus computerization kind of his argument was that it took out this like lower middle class slice of skill set and kind of push all the. the wage demand down and then uh versus ai what it's doing is it's accessing these like skill sets all along like this sort of thing giving everyone access to it maybe like a yeah exactly so it's basically you kind of re you know you can you can enable folks to be able to access higher skilled work or or be able to do higher skilled quote-unquote skilled things because you are able to like access this knowledge database which feels much more like a assistant or a junior employee than it does a replacement.

1:28:41Huh. Do you have you thought much about how that specifically applies to Ambra? Yeah. So there's I mean, there's I think a lot and I was I was actually talking with Linus about this about what is going to be table stakes in the future for what we need to build and And what will separate the average teams from the 99th percentile teams in 6, 12 months or, you know, years from now. And I think the thing that we are talking about that I have been kind of noodling on and thinking about and seeing at Ambrick 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 LLMs at like BigQuery and like 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?

1:29:30You'll be able to build like leaner teams. But I think there's also, 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, okay, how do we build in a way that we can accelerate over time? And how do we build in a way that honors and draws the super talented people who want to engage in their critical thinking, who want to apply discipline and taste to their work, and not just replace that?

1:30:08Because I think that's also what you're going to see. 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 and that is woof like that is like such a powerful powerful statement and i don't think it necessarily i think we can build we are we then took that statement are 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 exactly it's just like enable that level of critical thinking at the system level right or these other types of hard problems um it's about access to to more in the acceleration not 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 A quote from a book, I believe.

1:31:02It's from the biography. Now at age 76, he had no reason to break the tradition of secrecy that began with his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel J.G. 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 and illegibility. Who was J.G. Boswell? Yeah, it's one of my favorite quotes. That quote, honestly, is what convinced me to get into ag.

1:31:38Wow. So the Boswell family still is, but started in the 1800s in California, which just kind of had built an agricultural empire over time. and there was this book written the king of california uh where that quote is from and it's this like this uh anthology i think is the right word of of this not just this family but like this 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 and we talked about the environment like some sometimes it's like you know the the legacy that are that we have left and transforming and like terraforming our own land is like really intense right like and we can almost like something never you know probably never get some of that back like i don't know if you know that like just north of la used to be um the largest freshwater lake in north america um 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 um during the wet season sometimes it actually rained so much and flooded so much that it would connect to the Pacific.

1:33:15Oh, my God. When did it dry? The last of the lake, I think, was drained in the early 20th century. But when you have really these wet-dry cycles, which is natural in California but is exasperated by climate change, you actually, the lake returns to the lake bed, sort of, and you have these extreme flooding, which is mostly agricultural. How far north of L.A.? Do you know? How far north? Not that far north. Oh, my God. I'm going to have to go a rabbit hole about this. Crazy. Anyway, so I think there's a sense. But, yeah, it's a family that basically the book outlines this legacy of a family over multiple generations.

1:33:57But it 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 about the history of a place. 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 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.

1:34:31I 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. They're inclined towards like a very high level generalist, 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 about that niche approach is interesting to you for understanding?

1:35:07I think I'm I don't retain information in these like broad swaths I have to be like highly interested basically in something very like niche or it's like very focused and so I've never been able to like read and memorize a bunch of facts or something that feel kind of random or generalized. And so for me, I think there's that. And I think it makes it more fun and focused to kind of feel like you have this augmented reality, like, filter on the world where you're going around, you're going to Florence 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.

1:35:49Yeah. Like, it was I had something to look for. Yes, 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 gonna 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 but like i that trip in italy the first half of it i was alone and i was having an amazing time just going around trying to find all the places and i'm 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 i just happened to be looking by and my brain knew what it was because i'd read the book and those types of moments are so rewarding i was like such a dopamine hit you know yes um so yeah i love i love that kind of stuff why are you inspired by the disney magic band oh my god um okay my whole family is a disney family okay i was a little surprised by this i do yeah yeah super into disney this is a disney world thing or do they have it at both they have it at both okay um the so but i think i 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 yeah this is culture important culture important important sort of like history arc and uh and my mom actually um when she was a teenager she worked at Disney, I think in Frontierland in Magic Kingdom.

1:37:25So she was like in one of the shops. 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, 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're young he's he's not just into he's not really interested in the characters he loves like he'll tell you all about the air trans history you gotta be an imagineer exactly yeah and so i think that there is a sense of that but but the magic bands are super interesting because essentially what what they are is they're they're Disney's like spend management tool.

1:38:19And Magic Bands basically, so Magic Bands are for folks in the audience who aren't as big into Disney as I am. They're basically like little wristbands that you connect to your credit card and they become your money source. And so, 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 like tap it to pay. You tap it to pay. tapping it in etc but also turns disney into a giant supercomputer and so there's just constantly collecting we're talking we're talking about context of money movement like they're constantly collecting context yes on the move like the physical network mapping live exactly their network mapping live and so they have information on like where they need to like store where inventory is going to get low or they have 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.

1:39:15Another old tweet. 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. 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. In parallel. how do you how does one begin to learn this this sort of ability to hold multiple things in concert hmm i don't know happiness and sadness you something prompted that experience i think oh sorry i guess i 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 me out so i think i'd learn i've taken a leadership course called Leaders in Tech, and they talk about this idea of strange math, which is what you explained.

1:40:13And 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 was sort of the leadership of course was on interpersonal dynamics but i also found it to be really helpful for myself and understanding how to sit with my feelings more i think that's the thing that i have to learn how to do better is like very good 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 oop 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 sit with them.

1:40:55And so I think that that tweet was about me thinking about, yeah, how sadness is sadness just is sadness. It's not a counterweight to happiness. 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 what I was kind of thinking about then. We're filming in your apartment, which I'm very grateful for.

1:41:36You also have an amazing office, the Ember office, if people are lucky to go there. 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 literal aesthetic beauty design. I'm an owner of a similar dining table to the one we're sitting at, thanks to you. And that applies 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.

1:42:13This 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. Also, in Tokyo, the third dimension going upwards. The real loss seems to be the abstraction of rural communities to absentee landlords and generic strip malls. 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.

1:42:47The 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. They evoke some feeling that you can only experience by being in the space. It's hard to fully describe with words, but people get it get us when they are in it i think of our new york office as a manifestation of our physical design system wow um yeah can you talk about you you just did a little bit in what i read but can you talk about the creation process of these sort of aesthetic systems and how you iterate to them or even maybe like feel your way into them i think the first thing so I think when 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 you know 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 it just 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 it's feminine but it's also a bit like 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 and then I think the office was the first time that I had to think about 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.

1:44:31It's a fractal basically of me. And it's a fractal that is like that organism we talked about earlier that is Ambrook. So how do you build an aesthetic that is that, that feels quite, and that's where I think leaning on like my opinions, Ali, our creative director's opinions, we worked with a really talented interior sort of designer who helps like source and stage a lot of those pieces, but they worked 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.

1:45:10Like 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. But 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, I really only want to get objects that are made out of natural materials, not those metals or wood.

1:45:45And if you are going to use plastic, it has to kind of feel like this. And then 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 Ambergoth 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 we have a big cabinet we call the cabinet of curiosities. And we have like a chest that like has it's called the chest of secrets with all of our swag in it.

1:46:15And like, I think there's like, there's a playfulness, I think, with it 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. 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 good. 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 it's like um coral starters like you have to like create the structure underneath and then you you create the conditions such that the people the environment etc such that the organic the coral structures grow organically the books kind of grow organ you know kind of it's also jane jacobs yeah yeah exactly yeah jacobs yeah exactly and so i think that's also like a good space enables you to move freely through it like you're not worried about like messing up the thing on the couch 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 a final quote um or maybe a pair of them.

1:47:35I firmly believe that, quote, are we the right people to do this is just a matter of sheer will. 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. 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.

1:48:18I think it's the ultimate manifestation of agency. There's just a creating something from nothing and the creative act so the same way that artists I think really like that or um as I've been getting more into photography realizing that like that's also 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 and so I think there's something around like the creative act in starting companies and building them and and building software or building products that that people use that is this like feedback loop that is just very intoxicating that's all I got thanks Jackson thank you