Welcome. I try to give you a glowing start, so let's- No pressure No pressure at all. How do we make agriculture fun is a good question to start with, but I'm gonna start first with the fact that, how does a city girl from Addis ababa, move to another urban centre like New York- And then suddenly go hang on a minute. I'm going to get into the Food and Agricultural world because that fascinates me. City girls don't tend to think like farmers. What's the story that? It's real girls can think any way they want? So I'm, like you rightfully said I was born and raised in Ethiopia and in Addis Ababa. And I ended up in the US on scholarship for university. And I went to college at a women's college called Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts and then found myself in London. Where I got recruited to a Wall Street internship, as Wall Street is one of the few places that actually hires a lot of international students. So I kind of fell into that job. And that was the beginning of my career, which started as a trader in commodities. So I actually used to trade oil and gas. So the shift from oil and gas into agriculture is a little bit of a big one. But, [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Becoming a trader you make money basically Capturing arbitrage opportunities, and I had seen that the amount of efficiency that had been brought to energy markets. And as I started looking at investing in agriculture, which was around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, and 9, I just realized how much more complicated and messed up it was. And that small kind of interest led to a complete obsession. And really like a lack of interest in doing what I was doing, which was trading, so I just decided to quit and try something completely new and How old were you when you decided to do that decision? At the time I was 29 So 29 you decide to quit the fancy flashy Wall Street job. Start Grow intelligence. Tell us a little bit for those of us who might not know enough about the company, what is Grow? What does it do? And how do you think it can change the pattern of the food industry and how we look at global hunger? Yeah, well when I quit I wish I quit to start grow intelligence. My boss reminded me of what I told him when I quit. And he was like, please take a sabbatical. Like, you sound like you've lost your mind. But at the time it was, I'm obsessed with agriculture. I want to be connected to home to Ethiopia. Food security issues are, you know, huge in Africa. And I don't think we can solve it until we solve the capital structural problems. So I'm gonna start this company and it's gonna do this stuff with farmers and we're gonna do mobile apps. And he reminded me I created symbolically recently that I forgot. [ LAUGH ] But anyway, so when I quit, it was an interest in ag and I took two years off To actually figure out what this company and this product was going to be. And so it was 2014 that the company really started. And those two years I became a student of the world. I traveled across farms everywhere in the world you could imagine. I wanted to know if information was lacking, or we just didn't know where to find it. Do we need to create new data or did we need to organize it and and as soon as it became clear to me that it was an organizational problem, I said Okay, this I actually know how to do because I did this for energy markets. I saw what this can do. I can see how capital markets can be completely transformed through that and so that's what Grow Intelligence does. We harvest really large amounts of data from around the world. This could be data that comes from satellites and weather stations to Government agencies, commodity exchanges, small trade organizations No one's ever heard of, you know, there's like the Avocado Association and the International cocoa Association. And we take all of this data, we're processing north of 800 trillion data points a day now, and we created a language that normalizes. Is all of it because one of the things we realized was, hey, you know, agriculture. First of all, it's not just four a five crops, it's 10s of thousands of different crops, animals. It's this big system that's messy and very interconnected and So we developed a completely new language in a dictionary. So I was somewhere you know on point with the symbology idea just to know it was called back then that normalizes all of this information and once we stitch it together it gives us Certain amount of visibility into the world so it enables discovery. But then once you discover you then want to predict. So it gives you the clean data infrastructure that you need to now start forecasting, anything that could be driving the supply, or anything that could be demand driving the demand of really agricultural products. And that's actually one of the things that I also Started to appreciate a lot more once I started the company which was when we think agriculture we think food. Yeah. And there's this very famous quote that says eating is an agricultural act. And I realized living is an agricultural act because often times you wake up in the morning and you don't appreciate your waking up to cotton sheets, that's agriculture. You use a bar of soap. That's used some form of extracted oils from some plant that's embedded in it and so everything we do involves it. And we don't understand it. So who are the clients. Because very famously use. You've said we work with everyone in the ecosystem but the farmer. That, is that a problem or is that one of the advantages? Who are the clients and how does that data in fact the farmer even if you don't deal with them? Yeah, our clients are like you said everyone but the farmer so think of it as anyone who sells product to farmers. So, seed input crop protection money, so banks, insurance companies, Intermediary so that's your trading community that's essentially transferring risk. And then buyers CPG companies, wholesalers and retailers of fresh produce, and we think it's a great advantage. The reason we think it's a great advantage is that if our goal is. Is to drive up the productivity of farmers, if our goal is to drive down the cost of food and make it more equitable. Then we must be able to price and transfer risk way more efficiently. And that transfer of risk happens across these organisations. And by creating an efficiency in the way they all operate and being a platform that powers all of them You create a base level of knowledge that allows her certain amount of understanding and much better risk management of those businesses and our long term theory is that success for us will be when I always give the statistics 63 % of Sub Saharan Africans are involved in, in agriculture in some form and less than 1 % of outstanding bank loans have anything to do the agricultural industry. If we can move that one to 10 %, that means that you have pushed money in the right direction at the right cost because again, it's not just a question of getting money in the hands of farmers. It's a question of getting it at the right Cost so that they're essentially able to make money but also the end product is affordable for all. Getting money into the hands of the farmers is one thing but you're a female founder, getting money into your hands might have been an interesting story. You landed TPG as a backer, you also landed Data collective, DPG as we know were the early backers for Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, that's a big name to get, what was that story like as a female founder going out, selling the story where one boss has told you; take a sabbatical, think really hard, what are you doing? And then going out and pitching that and getting the money that you needed. That same boss is one of the first people that wrote my checks when I went and asked for money. [ LAUGH ] So the first pool of money for the company came from the people I worked with, people that I had traded for, eight and a half years I done really well. The one thing that Wall Street It afforded me was that opportunity at 29 to say [ SOUND ], what's the worst that can happen? But also, it lets you take tremendous amounts of risk early on, if you show promise. And so, those same people were the ones I went to and I think that [ INAUDIBLE ] Gave us the first $ 4 million that we needed. Literally came from myself and a combination of people that I worked for were my competitors or my customers. And then the next batch was when we went for institutional money. And there it was about telling a global story. And I think initially it was Complicated because we're actually not a company or a product that's trying to mimic something that someone has done before. And so I couldn't give analogies of what we're trying to do. Yeah. And so learning to communicate Cartier vision has, frankly continues to be a big part of our journey and my journey as an entrepreneur, but we've now raised 40 million and actually one of our backers is in the room, which is GGV. Well, good to know, let's open that. And on that note to some questions from the room. If anyone has a question, please raise your hand, our mic handlers will come to you [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Hi, I'm Robin Colver. I'm with Canadian Tire but I'm asking this question on behalf of my daughter and maybe, some of the other young women in the room. Your story is fascinating in terms of how you got into doing what you're doing, and I think it's hard for kids to figure out How to pursue their passion. So you go to university and I think a lot of the guidance counselors are still pushing kind of traditional jobs. No one would have imagined your story. I don't think that any guidance counselor's office. And your question because we are running out of time. Okay, so on behalf of the kids that are in science and looking for. A way to move forward in a very innovative way. These sorts of opportunities are hard to find. What's your advice for kids that want to do something different? It's a tough one. I think I was lucky in a sense that I was raised in a home that gave me I guess, boundless freedom to explore. It's maybe not as traditional. And so, in some ways, I was raised to be a little bit fearless. And it also had to do with the fact that my grandmother was- So Ethiopia was the only African country that was never colonized. It was occupied by the Italians, but it was never colonized. And my grandfather orchestrated the plot to kill General Graciani and ultimately got assassinated. My grandmother was pregnant with my father when she got taken as a prisoner of war, and my father was born in an Italian prison, and so growing up I had her, I was named after her, he was very close to her but I think I had that as kind of my Northern Star. So nothing seemed impossible. So I think in some ways, and this is something I'm learning, which is I've been relatively quiet and private, which is, maybe the more stories we see, the more fearless we become. And some of us have it at home, which I think I was lucky to have. And others find it through stories that they hear elsewhere. So maybe it's the power of telling stories. What's got the expression like that ?. Hi, my name is Kumi- sama Scanlon anecdotally. I've been to Mount Holyoke because they do bring a lot of international students probably like 25 years ago because I have a couple of public cousins, who went there. I assume that was a very big part of how you got to Wall Street, but the question I have for you is. How did you sort of know where to sell your product? Like I get the idea? It's very cool, but how did you how make the first start on selling your product? I mean, like I said, it took me two years to even figure out what product to build. So you know, when we're trying to map and understand a system that's been around since the Neolithic Revolution It just takes time. And you just have to try things. And so the first iteration of our business model was do we go to everybody in anybody so do we go to small and medium businesses do we because that's ultimately our goal. Our goal is not just to be a provider of data and data infrastructure for large companies. Our goal is How do we democratize access and when we first went to the market, we went and said let's go small bits at a time. And that was really difficult to do and the reason that was difficult to do is no one had budget cuz they never heard of a product like ours. And so we took a different approach and said why don't we go to the [ INAUDIBLE ] Which again sounded crazy at the time because no one's heard of us. So how do I get meetings with CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, but go in and convince them that this is something that they need to do if they're going to be ahead and get ahead of the markets and be ready and brace for, you know, climate change. And that started to work. It requires a lot of buy in from every organization so every time we do a sale we're really doing a top down and bottom up sale at the same time. But you know I think it's it's a bit of a process it's experimentation. It's lots of failure. It's no different than inventing a product I guess which is you build it and you're like hope they want it. I think this is right. [ LAUGH ] Well, I think we're pretty much running out of time. So on that note of that particular statement, here's a last question for you. You are a disruptor. Even though the technology is new, you are still dealing with the USDA and others who have been putting this data out, and you're not their favorite Person, politely but how do you deal with the incumbents and the thought processes that are still stuck? maybe perhaps, in another generation, how do you change minds and mindsets? You engage and there's really no other way around it because As you've said, they're incumbents. It's a relatively old industry. If you look at the ag census, I mean, you don't have, and that really goes from farmers all the way to industry and to corporates. I am not a typical agricultural executive. But you have to engage. And you have the hard conversations. You Become very open and transparent. So we've taken a very different approach to our models and our predictive AI, which is openness. So we essentially, open up the methodology. We publish the methodology when we're right, we're right publicly when we're wrong. We're wrong publicly. And eventually the idea is that you build trust. Because none of these models are perfect. So what we're saying is we're not a perfect solution, but we are a way to getting to a place that's much better than where we are today. Trust seems to be a word that we've used a lot. In the past two days on that note Sarah thank you so very much for joining us. Give her a round of applause for doing what she's doing. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Using A.I. to Feed the World

Leadership

Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker explains her company’s mission.
