![[27-Mackenzie_Burnett.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 27: Mackenzie Burnett - Accounting for America - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4X1PMRDwbAvaJtBL565uoh?si=dLpfSo3eR3676sHIacOwrw), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/27-mackenzie-burnett-accounting-for-america/id1780282402?i=1000723850169), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/Ors1qyfB85s?si=d1Ve0b51PMnJTOVy), and all podcast platforms.* <iframe data-testid="embed-iframe" style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/4X1PMRDwbAvaJtBL565uoh/video?utm_source=generator" width="624" height="351" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ors1qyfB85s?si=dLjUUDiGywBKhaXu" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/27-mackenzie-burnett-accounting-for-america/id1780282402?i=1000723850169"></iframe> # Description Mackenzie Burnett ([Website](https://mackenzieburnett.com/), [X](https://x.com/ciaomack)) is the co-founder and CEO of [Ambrook](https://ambrook.com/), financial tools for independent businesses starting with farms and ranches. We trace her arc from a policy-first upbringing (USDA household, Congressional internships, climate-security research at Stanford) to building software for rural America. We talk about why Mackenzie loves America and cares about agriculture, the challenges of aligning sustainability with business and government, and pragmatically building resilience. Mackenzie talks about the American Dream and why independent small businesses are the foundation of it in many ways. Then we get into Ambrook’s product philosophy: why “all roads lead to accounting,” how multi-P&Ls and biological inventories make farms deceptively complex, and why understanding bookkeeping and money movement enables better decision making and understanding over the long run for big and small businesses. We also talk through Mackenzie's broad ambition for Ambrook; her growth as a leader; brand, aesthetics, and environment; Ambrook's editorially independent research division, [Offrange](https://ambrook.com/offrange), and more. Mackenzie is one of the most quietly ambitious and focused people I've met, and yet under her impressive and serious exterior is a life and love for America and its people that is all heart. Special thanks to [Josh Kale](https://x.com/Josh_Kale) for his help producing this episode. # Timestamps - 00:01:11 Intro - 00:02:51: The American Heartland - 00:05:21: Agriculture, Policy, and Government - 00:12:29: The Challenges with Prioritizing Climate Risk: "Long Term and Abstract" - 00:18:04: Pragmatic Environmentalism and Resilience that Drives Business - 00:21:49: The American Dream - 00:25:52: The Importance of Independent Small Businesses - 00:28:58: Entrepreneurship on the Frontier: America's First Entrepreneurs and Ambrook's First Customers -- Farmers - 00:36:28: Biological Factories: Why Farms are Complex Businesses - 00:40:41: Why Everything Goes Back to Accounting - 00:44:30: Why Money Movement Matters - 00:51:13: Ambrook as a Twenty-Year Container - 00:57:27: The National Importance of Agriculture - 01:00:49: The Features of Illegibility - 01:04:49: Ambrook's Long Term Vision - 01:10:17: Making the Intractable Tractable (And Doomscrolling Your Company's Slack) - 01:14:42: De-Risking and Becoming Friends with Anxiety - 01:17:26: Building Something That Takes on a Life of its Own - 01:20:07: Ambrook's Culture in Three Words - 01:21:26: Brand and Storytelling - 01:26:11: AI Enabling the Middle Class - 01:30:57: California History and J.G. Boswell - 01:34:05: Niche Subjects and History and "The Land Where Lemons Grow" - 01:36:46: Disney's Magic Band - 01:39:15: Strange Math and Happiness and Sadness in Parallel - 01:41:31: Aesthetics, Beauty, and Physical Design Systems - 01:47:31: The Draw to Start Things # Links & References - [America, the Beautiful - Mackenzie Burnett](https://ambrook.com/blog/company/america-the-beautiful) - [The Founder's Letter: Mackenzie Burnett, Ambrook](https://www.notboring.co/p/the-founders-letter-mackenzie-burnett) - [Disposable Cameras](https://x.com/ciaomack/status/1932042223840866791) - [A “precariously unprepared” Pentagon? Climate security beliefs and decision-making in the U.S. military (Mackenzie's Thesis)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378021001242) - [The Land Where Lemons Grow - Helena Attlee](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20509618-the-land-where-lemons-grow) - [Dubai Chocolate Made Pistachios Viral, But Are Small Farmers Winning? - Offrange](https://ambrook.com/offrange/supply-chain/pity-the-pistachio-farmer) - [sam altman: “honestly, i feel so bad about the advice i gave while running YC i’ve been thinking about deleting my entire blog”](https://x.com/morqon/status/1667717155234758657) - [affinity - Ava](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/affinity) - [Lunch with the FT: Novak Djokovic](https://www.ft.com/content/efaeed40-725c-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc) - [Ambrook Series A Announcement](https://x.com/ciaomack/status/1940109363496251420) - [Offrange (Fka Ambrook Research)](https://ambrook.com/offrange) - [AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class - David Autor](https://www.noemamag.com/how-ai-could-help-rebuild-the-middle-class/) - [The King of California - Mark Arax \| Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/705170.The_King_of_California) - [Tulare Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake) - [Tweet on The Land Where Lemons Grow](https://x.com/ciaomack/status/1883310893024309511) - [MagicBand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicBand) - [Leaders in Tech](https://leadersintech.org/) - [Interact](https://joininteract.com/) - [Jane Jacobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs) - [From plows to platforms: how Stripe is powering modern agriculture](https://stripe.com/newsroom/stories/from-plows-to-platforms) # Transcript ## [00:02:51] The American Heartland **Jackson:** Mackenzie Burnett, we are here. **Mackenzie:** We're here. **Jackson:** I'm really excited for this. **Mackenzie:** I'm so excited, too. **Jackson:** I'm going to start with a quote from something you wrote: "No one spoke. Tired but happy. It was the three of us : me, Micah, and Atticus. We had just signed our second customer, now driving the two hours back to the airport motel, The thunderstorm boomed in silence across the Arizona plains, lighting up the dust dark. The Strokes played on the radio. The long car rides, driving past amber waves of grain, have emotionally contextualized my work in unexpected ways—America the Beautiful." Can you talk about why America's heartland is so meaningful to you? **Mackenzie:** Over the past five years of working on my company and building for rural communities, I have learned so many things. The heartland is one part of that, but many different parts of rural America have upended my conception of what America is, who we are building for, and who the people in tech are building for. It's upended their conceptions of what people want and what motivates them. That language was written to evoke the memory of a happy place I'm in during these road trips to our customers, who are mostly farms and ranches across the U.S. I feel like you couldn't pay me more to do what I'm already doing. I'm getting access to a world or to parallel lives that I've always wanted to live. That memory evokes the patriotism and other elements that I've always felt gravitated toward but haven't been able to live until doing this work for the past five years. **Jackson:** When I read "Amber Waves of Grain," I got chills the first time. It was very special. ## [00:05:21] Agriculture, Policy, and Government **Jackson:** We're going to talk about all the aspects of you, Ambrook, and the work you do. In my mind, you're synthesizing a handful of different ideas and categories. The first is agriculture, but you come at it from a unique or surprising place for people who might think you're either an agriculture person or a technology person. Government and policy is actually a huge root, both personally and for your family. You've said, is mostly dictated by government-incentivized market activity." Both of your parents in government and civil service. You've interned in Congress, in Parliament, and in the Foreign Service Institute. This is a huge government policy background, which is a little surprising. Obviously, there's a lot of technology too. I'm curious how that swirl of things has broadly influenced you. More specifically, what have you learned from your work or from your parents about government service and the implications for U.S. agriculture that laid the groundwork for Ambrook? **Mackenzie:** I've always been interested in figuring out what path I could take or what tool I had access to at the time to have the biggest impact possible. Government and policy plays a huge role in people's lives and is a really great tool in some aspects and is not a great tool in other aspects. I realized in college, after a couple of these internships, that it wasn't for me. I went into my freshman summer internship at the U.S. Senate in D.C. very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and left that summer thinking, I don't know if I want to be the version of myself that I saw in those young staffers. **Jackson:** Whoa. **Mackenzie:** It was a real big wake-up call. I was really fortunate to get introduced to the tech community on campus at the University of Maryland. I did not have a tech background; I was a government and policy kid and realized that I needed to do whatever I could to break into the tech industry my junior year. I got involved in a lot of student groups there, started a hackathon at Maryland, and met one of my co-founders now in that group. I ended up starting a company and moving out to the Bay Area a week after I graduated. No lease. I turned down this... **Jackson:** It's surprising you graduated. Honestly, most of those stories don't involve graduating. **Mackenzie:** It's because I was a government and policy kid, so I had to get a degree. I couldn't fall back on the CS degree, even without graduating. I had accepted a master's program at Columbia and turned that down. My parents were like, "We trust you, but are you sure?" I ended up moving out to the Bay Area to work on a company with a friend of mine from college who had dropped out. **Jackson:** 50% with degree. **Mackenzie:** It was off to the races from there. We ended up getting into YC, and it opened up this huge world of impact that I was searching for when I was initially trying to break into government. Then I found my way back into government policy. I ended up going to grad school for that at Stanford. I was able to come to it on my own terms, having an understanding of what impact I could have in the tech sector, and then figuring out what impact I can have now that I understand what the tools are. **Jackson:** Yes. **Mackenzie:** Building that portfolio is something I've always been really interested in. **Jackson:** How did growing up in a house with two parents in civil service frame how you think about government and policy and that kind of work? **Mackenzie:** It normalized it in a way that I think a lot of kids in the DMV feel. I grew up right outside of D.C. in Maryland, and so it normalized it. It also instilled the sense of public service and public duty, especially from my mom, who approaches her work in a very principled way. I never questioned a deep patriotism I had when I was young, and I still have. It was from when I was little, growing up with parents who talked about their day-to-day work in a way that felt very normal. They were doing interesting things in ag policy and diseases in plants, so plant health protection—but it was always grounded in conversations at the dinner table. It was just what everyone else was talking about. I didn't realize it wasn't just citrus canker. **Jackson:** What do you think that most entrepreneurs or technology-type people could stand to know about how government works? It's a very open-ended question. **Mackenzie:** I've always been struck by how black box most people think government is. There's either a full faith that it's very incompetent or a full faith that they trust it. But it's a collection of millions of individual people. It's an organism just like anything else, and it's a really hard ship to steer. It responds to incentives like anything else. It is a thing at the organization level, if you subscribe to those theories, but it is also just a bunch of individuals who are trying their nine-to-five. The majority of the government is the true civil service, and then you have the political appointees who are at this top layer. Those tend to be the folks who are the highest profile. They change with administration. They might have a big impact. But the takeaway that I had for my parents—and my older sister still works at the USDA—is that it's just a very slow ship to move. Most people are trying to do their best to do whatever job. I've always been struck that people put either too little faith or too much faith in it. ## [00:12:29] The Challenges with Prioritizing Climate Risk: "Long Term and Abstract" **Jackson:** You mentioned it briefly: you went to work on an open-source startup, then you went to Stanford to think about climate, particularly with regard to the US military and climate security. One core or at least adjacent part of agriculture is the environment, and I know it's something you care a lot about. I was reading your thesis from Stanford about talking to people at the DoD about climate. One of the observations you had was that they see it as a strategic importance, or at least they claim that it is. Yet, maybe unsurprisingly, there's a lot of mixed beliefs on the sense of urgency there. This is again a really open-ended question, but I'm curious if you have a point of view and hindsight on what makes the broader climate conversation so intractable, political, and hard for people to wrap their minds around its urgency. It's this boogeyman that clearly a lot of people care a ton about. But I think a lot of people's relation to it is that it's so big and overwhelming they don't know how to make sense of it. **Mackenzie:** The literature suggests... there's a whole body of work around climate change communication studying this exact problem, which is: despite the science, why is there so much debate on the realities or implications of climate change? The literature says that the folks who change their mind are the ones who see the physical impacts of climate change. You're living at the edges of the Arctic, and you're seeing that. You saw that mirrored in the US Military as well. When I was doing research, speaking with folks all up and down the ranks, it was the US Navy or the Coast Guard who have been and still are at the forefront of pushing for adaptation around climate activities because a melting Arctic. The ice is gone. There's an ocean there that wasn't there before. **Jackson:** A little harder to ignore. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. Security vulnerabilities from China and Russia, just tons of things there. You're also seeing it a little bit with the Air Force because of rising sea levels threatening coastal air force bases or other low-lying air force bases being severely damaged by severe weather. Climate change is hard to communicate. It's in the worst box of human activity because it's long-term and abstract. **Jackson:** [Laughs] That's a great way of putting it. **Mackenzie:** It's very hard to prioritize action against, and it can feel very overwhelming. There are lots of normal responses to overwhelm: paralysis, denial, depression—all those pieces. But bringing it back to tangible impacts that people are seeing... a core part of the research was trying to understand if the way the US military communicates about climate change at that political layer maps to the strategic, operational, and tactical layers. Largely, we found that yes, it does. But the timeline of the urgency is different. An interesting thing I've taken away from that is if climate action is seen as overtly political, it's counterproductive, especially with the US military, which prides itself on being a non-political organization. If activities are seen as being done for political reasons, it can create a backlash, especially when climate action doesn't make sense from a budgetary or mission aspect. There were multiple instances. For example, under the Obama administration, there was an initiative called the Great Green Fleet within the U.S. Navy. The Great Green Fleet was trying to push and show the benefits of using biofuel. The US military is a huge fossil fuel consumer and emitter, but it's also the largest logistics organization in the world, so it maps to their activities. But in my research, I heard criticism of the Great Green Fleet because what ended up happening was that these ships in the Pacific would have to reroute on very expensive, long routes to pick up very expensive biofuel. This was coming out of their operational budget, which created these loops of resentment that made no sense. one of the largest sources of casualties in the Gulf and Middle Eastern wars was? It was fuel convoy runs. **Jackson:** Oh my gosh. **Mackenzie:** Because they're very predictable runs. **Jackson:** Oh. **Mackenzie:** So it was really easy to shoot them down. I heard another story from someone I interviewed who said the biggest proponent of flexible, lightweight solar research and installation for these remote bases in the Middle East was the US Air Force. So, stuff like that, where it aligns, it makes sense. You can find these win-win scenarios, and it doesn't have to be ideological. ## [00:18:04] Pragmatic Environmentalism and Resilience that Drives Business **Jackson:** On that note, you've talked about how Ambrook is built on this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. In something you sent me, you have a quote about building "great tools that move towards sustainability regardless of someone's political feelings about climate change." You've talked about this in Ambrook Research, where it's exactly along the lines of what you were saying : people seem to be pro-sustainability, but when it becomes this political climate change conversation, farmers in particular start to shy away from it. I'm curious how you've seen, or at least how you expect, sustainability to move the needle from a business standpoint for the Ambrook customers or farmers you work with. **Mackenzie:** We've seen a lot of instances where people are starting to use the word resilience. Sustainability is so loaded now. This is what I mean by learning new things about the work I do from the people we get to interact with every day. We have folks at one end of the spectrum—on the coast, Regen Ag, everything—and they don't like the word sustainability because it's used for greenwashing. It doesn't actually speak to the work that they're doing. Then we have folks on the other end of the spectrum who don't like the word sustainability because it's code for government regulation. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Mackenzie:** And veiled incentives. It makes sense because the reality is both are true. **Jackson:** Right. **Mackenzie:** Those efforts over the past 10 years have been co-opted in many ways. The work that we're trying to do is meet people where they are and find the win-wins, the double bottom line. It doesn't make sense for a business to invest in anything related to resilience or sustainability or the environment if they're going to go out of business because they did it. That is the biggest lesson I took from my research with the US Military. You cannot force people to go against their— **Jackson:** A very clear hierarchy of priorities. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. There is a strong hierarchy of needs. You can't afford to literally bet the farm on something that you don't know if it's going to work. These aren't businesses that can afford to buy carbon credits when the market is hot and they want to recruit engineers. These are businesses that if they make the wrong move, they will go out of business. They're very thin-margin, tight cash-flow businesses. There are a lot of instances in agriculture and other natural resource-intensive industries—all along the industrial supply chain—where value can be created, either through premiums from consumer preferences or by using less water and fewer inputs. This results in a higher profit margin for what you're producing. There are so many ways folks can build more profitability through building resilience. In the short term, they can be more resilient to things like drought cycles, the actual impacts of climate change. So it's not just the work on the mitigation side, but also being resilient on the adaptation side. We're really interested in both the climate mitigation and climate adaptation parts of the business equation. **Jackson:** It's fascinating how language can really matter in terms of what people are willing to tolerate, believe in, or experiment with. ## [00:21:49] The American Dream **Jackson:** Another component of Ambrook beyond agriculture is the sense that you are serving parts of society that have been left behind. This is a quote from something you sent me: "What we're building is about enabling the original idea of American freedom and resilience. What kind of future America do you want to live in?" Some bullet points: "[1] keep businesses independent, [2] empower individual choices rather than corporate interests in how to steward land, and [3] reward sustainable, long-term focused investments." And then another excerpt: "I think of our work at Ambrook as American dynamism meets the American dream. Instead of top-down technological advancement, we're working from the ground up to enable family-run businesses to become more profitable and resilient." How do you personally and in the business sense relate to and define the American dream? **Mackenzie:** I I think of the American dream as the ability for the individual to believe that their children's future will be better than their own. It's not necessarily that they're starting in a bad place, but there's a sense of optimism that is really important for societies. I have a long-standing theory that you can see economic swings in the United States or in any nation, and the leading indicator is the general sense of optimism or pessimism before it shows up in real life. **Jackson:** A generational sense, specifically? **Mackenzie:** It relates to the generational sense. Optimism is about the future. On top of that, the American dream is about generational resilience. My mom is an immigrant. She came to the US from India when she was eight. **Jackson:** My grandfather came to the US from India. **Mackenzie:** My grandfather had been on one of these immigrant engineer visas in the 60s. He came over for his master's degree and then decided that he wanted to immigrate his whole family to the US. He gave up his inheritance in India to do that because he believed that the US would be such a better life for his children. **Jackson:** A lot of versions of that story, too. **Mackenzie:** She told me many years later, a couple of years ago, that the reason she was in public service was to give back to a country that she felt had given so much to her. I got chills when I heard that because it mapped to a lot of the reasons I was realizing for myself what was so interesting and important about the work we were doing at Ambrook. It was when I was just starting the company. At Ambrook, we build financial management software for farms, ranches, and increasingly, other rural businesses. A lot of these businesses are industrial mom-and-pop shops that are too complex for existing tools but can't afford to move on to the hundred-thousand-dollar ERPs. They don't have the team or resources to do that. It's all about helping folks understand their bottom line, be able to open up a second business line without completely overwhelming their books, and understand their cash flows. For me, what I've been thinking about and doing is about enabling the American dream in that way. It has gotten harder and harder to do that at the individual business level, given all the market pressures that exist today. ## [00:25:52] The Importance of Independent Small Businesses **Jackson:** There's a thread that ties into what you just said that I noticed running through some of the language you guys use. There's an excerpt where you observed that for the first time in generations, many Americans are not believing that their children will be better off than them. You said: "Starting a small business used to be the way to build a better future for your family. Owning your time, owning your labor, owning that identity and tradition over generations. Staying independent." And in another excerpt about your Series A, you said: "Most of all, this investment helps us stay focused on our mission to give independent businesses the tools they need to stay independent." There's this thread of independence running through. I can't help but notice that there's a connection there to a very foundational, if not the foundational, American myth, which is freedom—freedom from all kinds of things. Why are independent small businesses so essential for optimism in the economy and more broadly in the U.S.? **Mackenzie:** I think there are two parts. Freedom comes from a lot of different areas. But for me, when I think about independent business or why I'm a business owner, it's about this sense of intellectual ownership over your time, over what you decide to do, over creating something in the world. There is a sense of high agency in that work. So there's a freedom in that sense. Then there's also a freedom in the sense not every independent business is necessarily attached to a property. You don't have to have real assets to have an independent business. But for farms and ranches, oftentimes it is attached to real assets. **Jackson:** Or even a place. **Mackenzie:** Definitely a place. I think that sense of place is something I have come to realize over the past couple of years is just as important for many people. I don't think most people who grow up in suburbs or live most of their lives in cities really have a sense of true freedom when you're on an ecosystem of your own property. If something breaks, you fix it. Maybe fiefdom is the wrong word, but there is a sense of that. **Jackson:** Almost self-reliance, too. **Mackenzie:** Self-reliance is huge. That sense of freedom is not just about the access to it; it's the feedback loop that you can figure things out on your own. What does it mean to feel free? There's a sense of serendipity, self-reliance, high agency, intellectual interest, and ownership—all those different pieces. It's that swelling of the chest feeling. I've thought about that a lot. When it comes to staying independent, there is a piece of that that is really important. You can get financial freedom in some ways, but it doesn't come with all the other parts of freedom. **Jackson:** They're very intertwined in a way. ## [00:28:58] Entrepreneurship on the Frontier: America's First Entrepreneurs and Ambrook's First Customers -- Farmers **Jackson:** To drill down a bit, why is farming specifically such a quintessential example of the American dream? And why set out to serve them first with Ambrook? **Mackenzie:** I think farmers are the first entrepreneurs, and definitely the first American entrepreneurs. They were farmers and fishers and trappers—folks who were turning natural resources into their own sense of freedom. **Jackson:** Entrepreneurship on the frontier. **Mackenzie:** Entrepreneurship on the frontier. Even the Homestead Act of 1862 made it possible for individuals to become citizens or get access to 160 acres. A lot of the farms of today were the stacking of all those over time. The folks who ended up having a lot of that land—and there are a lot of issues with the way that land was parceled out—were then able to leverage that land over generations. You can take out mortgages on it. You can secure loans on property. They ended up building their own domains, businesses, and empires from that act of the U.S. giving away a ton of property. **Jackson:** It was an early way to invest time into something that could be truly durable, beyond just the traditional labor you were coming to New York or wherever else for. How did the Homestead Act work? As long as you staked some claim to land and you were willing to farm it, the government gave it to you? **Mackenzie:** Yes. You had to make it productive. Because the US had an interest in settling, imagine what that would look like today if the US government had some ability to give away that sense of foundation. The American dream is built on some semblance of that. The foundation shifted from raw acreage to the myth, the laws, and the ability for economic and class movement. There were a lot of things about America that enabled individuals, like my immigrant grandfather, to come and start his own business. He built up his own engineering practice when he was here, and that paved the way for my mom and her siblings to go to college. I think there was a sense that you could do that. People can still do that today, but what's slightly different is the sense of optimism around it. **Jackson:** Going west for land is the perfect metaphorical and very tangible version of that idea. I'm sure young people today would ask: What am I going to do on the internet? Stake a claim to a domain? **Mackenzie:** This is part of a thesis I have. The leading indicator of these macroeconomic cycles is mass optimism or mass pessimism. The biggest reason I think Elon should take us to Mars is because we need a new frontier. There's a sense of expansion and net new opportunity in space. Think about what's happening with AI now. It's not just that there's a land grab to stake a claim with new workflows. I also think it's a bit of a relief. There's a sense of… **Jackson:** Generational opportunity. People in their 20s for the last decade got the short end of the stick, and now there's something new. **Mackenzie:** Generational opportunities come in waves and take different forms. The people who are poised to take advantage of the generational opportunity that is AI look very different than the customer base that we're necessarily serving. Going back to why the American Dream is so important, to me, it's also about plurality. You don't just want one type of person accruing all the wealth. Not everyone's dream is to become a millionaire. The ability to hold space for multiple different types of dreams is what makes a more resilient fabric of society. **Jackson:** Upstream of being a millionaire, that's a specific flavor of independence, to go back to your earlier point. Independence can come in a lot of different ways, including having a farm that you're able to sustain and is productive. Another part of the question is: Why start with farms for **Mackenzie:** I fell in love with the space in grad school. I had an opportunity to work at a firm that owned a lot of farms and water assets in the Central Valley in California. I spent some of that summer driving around the Central Valley talking to farmers about water rights and everything else, and I just fell in love with the space. Now I recommend books like The Land Where Lemons Grow to you. I am just so interested in traveling with a mission to go and find this niche thing everywhere you can go. I love the rabbit-holing that can exist with industries that we don't see. It almost feels like a secret mission or a treasure hunt. When I was getting to know folks that summer, it felt like a treasure hunt. Every question that I asked and every answer I got begat more questions and more interesting answers. I wondered, "What if I could just make this my whole life, talking to people about their most intimate questions and answers?" When you rabbit-hole the way down, that gets you to build accounting software. But it is a true joy to be able to sit down and talk to someone at the kitchen table about some really privileged and intimate things and to feel like you can actually help them with it. **Jackson:** The texture of their daily life. ## [00:36:28] Biological Factories: Why Farms are Complex Businesses **Jackson:** We've talked about agriculture in America, business, the American dream, and independence. We're going to talk about accounting and money in a second. But before we do, it's a helpful backdrop since we're talking about farms. In theory, people might assume that farms are simple, at least from a business and accounting standpoint. Can you talk about why the combination of multiple P&Ls, being balance-sheet heavy, and a range of other things make farms way more complex than people might assume? **Mackenzie:** Farms are biological factories. They're one of the only businesses where your inventory gets born, it grows, it dies. It's very complicated. There are only 15,000 or 16,000 farms in America that make more than $5 million a year in annual sales. The vast majority of these operations are run by mom-and-pop shops—very small, usually family-run teams. They're enormously complex businesses, and getting more so. **Jackson:** Despite being super small. **Mackenzie:** Despite being super small. They're overly complex for their size. A good example is a dairy. Most of the acreage in a dairy is actually growing feed for the cows. You have that enterprise. When we talk about enterprises, we mean a P&L or a business line. So one enterprise is the hay. **Jackson:** And the hay is its own. **Mackenzie:** Its own P&L. You might just be growing your own hay and feeding it to the cows, but even then you have to accrue the costs. If you're trying to figure out how much it costs to produce a pound of milk, you have to work backwards from there. You're growing your feed, maybe a forage mix. But then you might want to buy some hay, or you might want to sell your hay if you have excess. You're storing it, so there's another multi-year cycle of storing. That's one enterprise. You feed some of that hay to the cows. The reason cows produce milk is because they're pregnant and birthing babies. You keep the females and sell off the males. The old cows get turned into dairy beef, so you're buying and selling and accruing the inventory there. Then those cows are producing milk, which you might sell wholesale or direct retail. You might have a farm store. You might be turning that milk into value-added products like ice cream and cheese. For flowing the cost all the way through the business, we have seen dairies hire ex-bankers to figure it out. **Jackson:** Wow. Isn't there a specific, cow-related GAAP accounting thing that's super complex? **Mackenzie:** No, it's just GAAP, but it's what we call managerial accounting. **Jackson:** Okay. **Mackenzie:** It's being able to understand your true cost of production and unit economics. What most businesses do across America, not just farms, is file things for their taxes. At the end of the year, they can figure out if they made or lost money overall. But they might not know that it didn't make sense to be buying any hay, and that they should only grow extra and sell it because they were able to get such a premium. Or that gelato is a higher margin than ice cream. It actually is because gelato has a higher milk-to-cream content, so you can use more milk in gelato versus ice cream. That is what we help with. **Jackson:** A McKinsey person would actually be helpful. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. In order to figure that out, if these businesses were a startup, they'd be on Sage or NetSuite. They would have already moved off of QuickBooks. They'd be on $100,000-a-year accounting software and have a full finance team. But these are usually mom-and-pop shops that can afford maybe $1,000-a-year software. Building for that level of affordability is what we're building **Mackenzie:** for. ## [00:40:41] Why Everything Goes Back to Accounting **Jackson:** On that note, you've said everything goes back to accounting. In many ways,, it seems the meta-frame here is that you have a group of people who are very trapped in the day-to-day, and you are enabling them to think on a more long-term basis. I'm curious what goes into that. Part of this is simply a cost and resources thing, but what is the leverage that comes about? You 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 the right tool for that? **Mackenzie:** We actually did not try to start building accounting software. We tried to do everything but build accounting software because it's so hard. It takes a while to build it. We tried starting by solving more symptom-level problems, like getting folks access to working capital faster. We could do some programs for the simple ones, but when we tried to help them with more complex ones, we needed to go into their accounting software, which was not well organized. It kept coming back. All roads lead to accounting. This enables two things. The first is very tactical: you can save time, save money, and you can figure out where you can make more money. There's that view. 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 breaking down all your marketing costs, all of your R&D, etcetera. You're getting to your gross margins; you're understanding. We help folks who don't have financial backgrounds do that level of analysis. But beyond the tactical side, the other thing that enables long-term decision-making is anxiety reduction. The emotional side of the software has been so unexpected. **Jackson:** A lot of great systems or tools do this. In many ways, a great tool's job isn't always leverage or agency. It's so I can hold a system in my head more or less and then actually do the real work. **Mackenzie:** Totally. Great tools shouldn't actually reduce complexity or critical thinking all the time. This goes into a thesis we've been developing at Amber around building with AI. You want to get to convenience and time savings, and maybe for people who don't want to access that, you can. But what we're trying to do is make it so that people can engage the intellectual side of the complexity. They can move into the complexity in a way that feels accessible and stimulating, and they feel good about the loop of making good business decisions. That has been a big part of thinking about how we build. It even shows up in small ways. We've done a lot of work to build workflows around what would otherwise just be core journal entries, which are the base level of double-entry accounting. We've done it in a way that really emphasizes that we know most of our customers are going to have loan payments, so we make it really easy to split out the principal and the interest in those types of workflows. We are continuously looking for ways in which we don't dumb down what's happening. Instead, 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. ## [00:44:30] Why Money Movement Matters **Jackson:** Another part of what you do beyond accounting is money movement. There was a note you had sent after you'd returned from Stripe Sessions, and I thought it was really fascinating. You say your 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. This obviously ties broadly to fintech and crypto. I'm curious how you think about the opportunity with money movement. You've speculated a little bit on the implications if Ambrook gets big enough or if your payment network specifically gets big enough. Why is money flow so interesting as a signal around narratives and what's happening in the world? **Mackenzie:** 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 become true. My takeaway, when I was sitting there watching all the sessions and had some conversations with people from Stripe afterwards, was that instant money movement is going to be a big deal. It's not quite here yet, but my takeaway was that it seems like it's going to be taken care of. We're seeing it now in Ambrook. At the core of Ambrook is something called the Ambrook Wallet, which is optional, but most of our customers use it. Under the hood, it's a checking account. We partner with Stripe and Fifth Third for the banking services. An Ambrook Wallet to an Ambrook Wallet transaction is instant and free because it's a book transfer. It's the same deposit network. **Jackson:** How long has that been possible? If you were doing this five years ago, could you have done that? **Mackenzie:** PayPal did it. **Jackson:** Wow. **Mackenzie:** PayPal's early days was built on Wells Fargo book transfers. **Jackson:** Cool. Funny. **Mackenzie:** What was not possible was that PayPal had to do a ton of work to enable that, and they were doing a lot of instrumentation. What is now possible is embedding it in any sort of SaaS product. You can, in theory, spin up embedded bank accounts really easily. **Jackson:** That's mainly thanks to Stripe. **Mackenzie:** Stripe is a big part of that with their bass program. There are lots of bass players that are doing that. **Jackson:** Got it. Shoulders of giants. Timing is important. **Mackenzie:** Shoulders of giants. That, to me, felt like it was going to be standard. We're already seeing within Ambrook that when there are two Ambrook customers that transact with each other, we notice it because we see the payment flows, and we'll turn on Ambrook Pay for them, which is the wallet-to-wallet transactions. That immediately becomes their default payment method. It's so much better than writing a check, and it's reconciled in both systems. My invoice is your bill. One to three percent of revenue gets lost to administrativeia through the ARAP shuffle and fraud. The thing that I am really interested in now is the context of money movement. As an ERP, we are able to have a lot of context, metadata, and documentation about these payments that are happening in our system. In theory, you should be able to see the supply chain disruptions come down for whoever has access to that sort of information and be able to better serve our customers if you're saturated enough. At least in agriculture, if you're saturated enough. That's why we think about business communities, so growing via vendor networks is something that we're going to start to invest in and do in the coming months. There are a lot of pieces to that. First, you have to replace QuickBooks, and then you build a payments network. You have to become this well-loved, accessible ERP that can enable complex businesses. **Jackson:** ERP is just accounting? Enterprise Resource Planning? **Mackenzie:** ERP usually has the general ledger, the accounting software, at its core, but people also use it broadly to apply to a lot of different business processes you might do, like accounts receivable/accounts you are in the payments flow, you can have that context. Because really, what is accounting software but data entry? It's making data entry as easy as possible to tag a bunch of financial transactions with arbitrary metadata. With Ambrook, we make it far easier for our customers to tag these transactions with the business metadata they need, not just for taxes. **Jackson:** It's so easy that even if the value isn't immediately obvious, you're going to do it anyway and get the long-term value. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. We use a lot of AI to pull that out, there are other reasons and incentives for folks to do it. If you want to see your enterprise profitability, you might do that on a more often basis. We're building an inventory that automatically tags things, so there are lots of reasons why you would do it. That context is also what builds the payments network that should benefit the whole business community. Our goal, on the theme of resilience, is that there is too much money lost to administration and middlemen fees. 90% of payments in U.S. agriculture through paper checks. It's not because they're left behind or backwards; it's because digital payments are really expensive. Cards are 3%, they will use the tools as needed, but what if we could provide some relief and also reduce all this other trivia? We could do that by having a really strong, deposit-backed payments network that has the context of your business and other businesses. That's something that we've been thinking about a lot. **Jackson:** It's cool to see the emergent benefits of building for a vertical slice of the economy across so many different parts of that answer. Theoretically, it would be really hard for a traditional, wide-cut horizontal fintech to have that. Maybe it works for a consumer thing like Cash App or Venmo, but it'd be really hard to have that much network concentration to actually get some of those things. That's really cool. **Mackenzie:** We have it on consumer, but we don't have it on B2B. ## [00:51:13] Ambrook as a Twenty-Year Container **Jackson:** I want to zoom out a little and talk more about Ambrook from a holistic standpoint. You have talked about the theory of this being a long-term project. Could this be something you could work on for 20 years? What is it about the setup—the vision, the container of the company, the category, the mission—that is something you could conceivably spend decades on? **Mackenzie:** It goes back to that memory that you shared at the very beginning. Before I started Ambrook, one of the criteria I had written down for myself was that I want to be able to take as many road trips as I want to as many weird places in America as I want. **Jackson:** Sometimes it's that simple. **Mackenzie:** There's a joy that I get from our customers and from the doors that they very kindly open for me. I'm not saying doors for networking; I'm saying an actual door to someone's home. That is incredible. We sent disposable film cameras to some of our customers and said, "Take whatever photos you want and send them back." We have just started getting some of them back. What kind of business can you build where your customers are just this pen pal for you, sending snapshots of their lives? That is what's so rewarding about building for independent small businesses across America. They typically are family-owned and so intertwined with personal lives, the family itself, and family finances. It feels like I'm building for an extension of the family or the type of life that I want to enable more of in the US—the life that I'm trying to build for myself. The mission is super important from a resilience perspective—not just from an environmental perspective, but also the economic perspective. **Jackson:** That's beautiful. You're also a really ambitious person. There are plenty of businesses that might satisfy some of the answer you just gave but wouldn't be an infinite game. We were talking about Stripe earlier: "increase the GDP of the Internet" can run for a while. What is it about the market you've chosen and the structure of Ambrook? Your previous answer is clearly the motivating engine, but you've also built a really good vehicle. It seems like it's blue ocean. **Mackenzie:** The idea of pragmatic environmentalism also speaks to another way you can think about it: pragmatic idealism. **Jackson:** You embody that very well. **Mackenzie:** Thank you. For me, it's something that is very horseshoe-like; it makes total sense in my head. In order to last very long, you have to build this very solid vehicle that can get you there. The nice thing about accounting is that it scales. It's all GAAP. Everyone needs the GL. It doesn't matter how big you are. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Mackenzie:** There's something about choosing to be at the very heart of these businesses and something that's very simple under the hood. At its heart, the general ledger is just a double-entry ledger, and all the stuff we build around it are these workflows. It's trying to make it easier. There are these rules that we should comply with, but at the heart of it, it's a ledger. I really love that being the heart and the solid foundation and then building a sustainable business with good margins. But I also don't see myself or Ambrook as whatever vehicle we're in now. The really interesting thing I've been thinking about with the macro environment today is that you'll see a lot more experimentation with hybrid entity structures. You might have a venture-backed software company, but you also might have a holdings company. Maybe you can think about the proprietary distribution you might try to access as the company is actually part of the sister fund, or maybe you have a cash-flow-positive side of the business or a publication, which we also have. I think there are all these ways in which you're going to start to see these things. One of my teammates jokes that every time someone comes up with an idea, I'm like, "That sounds great. We can just do it under Ambrook." Ambrook processing—great. **Jackson:** That's what I mean about the question, though. In many ways, this is an ever-expanding aperture for you. It's like a vacuum for everything. You've somehow designed a thing that can hold a lot, which is cool. **Mackenzie:** I was talking to my friend Joe about this in the park this weekend, and we were talking about how Ambrook's brand feels very distinct. me, it's that I feel as though we've built a vehicle or a brand or an ethos that happens to be shaped like a venture-backed software company right now but is super extendable to a lot of these other things. What we're trying to do is achieve the mission. So it's: "Okay, what do we need to achieve the mission?" as the first piece. Then it just happens to continuously be shaped like this venture-backed software company. ## [00:57:27] The National Importance of Agriculture **Jackson:** Going earlier in the journey--we talked about government a bit--it seems that understanding policy and subsidies, particularly around farming, was really core to some of the early work you guys did in the economics of American agriculture and the openings for the business. Can you talk about that, or at least why subsidies are so important to farming? **Mackenzie:** I can't really think of a nation-state where agriculture isn't both naturally and nationally strategic. Thoughts on subsidies aside—and there are lots of takes on either side of that—the most important piece is what you want to incentivize as part of domestic capacity. This is where I'm super pro any incentives or grants or financial vehicles that further stand up domestic manufacturing and production. Subsidies is a loaded word, but I mean incentives. We recently did an article on the Dubai pistachio chocolate craze. **Jackson:** I've been hearing little things about this. I don't really know what it is. **Mackenzie:** Everyone's obsessed with a very specific type of chocolate that is stuffed with pistachio cream and some other bits. I'm more interested in the implication on American pistachio growing, and that's what Offrange was covering. The article talks about how American pistachio growers were overwhelmed by the sudden demand for this pistachio—actually, a pistachio byproduct. It's not the pistachio nut; you have to take all the byproduct pistachios and then process it. There were not enough domestic processing facilities for these pistachio growers, so they were not able to make it. **Jackson:** Are they buying it in Dubai, or is it a product that's made here? **Mackenzie:** You can make the product here. America was caught flat-footed in trying to respond to this demand. It did not have the domestic processing facilities, which you never think about. You always think about other countries exporting raw materials that get processed elsewhere and then they re-import. That is happening to the US as well. **Jackson:** Fascinating. **Mackenzie:** I've been thinking about that a lot recently in terms of building back up the domestic value. It's called value-added. It's the layer where you take raw materials off a farm or a ranch, and then you do value-added processing. You process it in a way that increases its value. It turns it into cuts of beef or whatever for more consumer consumption. **Jackson:** It's interesting to think about. Obviously, there are other industries where this is true, but agriculture in particular is deeply embedded into not just individual business incentives, but a national identity, security, health, GDP—so many things. ## [01:00:49] The Features of Illegibility **Jackson:** One thread I want to talk about in the context of Ambrook, and I'm curious how you think about it now. We were once talking about Dialectic, my podcast, and you observed that, in your words, "It's illegible right now, and that's a feature. That's a benefit. And eventually, maybe I'll have to become legible." I've referenced that so many times in so many different contexts. I've been thinking about it a lot, and my sense is that you have thought about Ambrook in a somewhat similar way. You actually spent several years building technology, not doing a ton of public talking to the market. More recently, I'm sure you're going to continue to do more. You've also done Offrange, which is your internal media company. I'm curious how you thought about that sequencing. Another phrase I saw somewhere described it as almost like this anti-YC methodology. What has your frame been on the arc of Ambrook when it comes to how exposed it is to your customers and the world? **Mackenzie:** I've been thinking about this a lot. My formal entrance to Silicon Valley was YC when I was 21. **Jackson:** This was your first company? **Mackenzie:** At my first company, I had this sense of what building a company should look like. YC has produced so many wonderful companies and has a methodology. But Sam Altman talked about how with OpenAI, he regretted the advice that he had given to so many YC founders about the way to build this very MVP scope. There's not a one-size-fits-all, especially now that a lot of the low-hanging fruit around SaaS companies has been picked. Now you actually need to return to what venture capital was originally about, which is making bets on these very moonshotty ideas. **Jackson:** Not just ship and iterate. **Mackenzie:** Not just ship and iterate. We did something a little bit in between. For the first year and a half, we were figuring out what to build. We were building this working capital solution and then started to build the accounting software. We worked with a core set of a couple dozen producers. These are small ACVs; this is SMB accounting software, so it's not like we were making a ton of money during that time either. I was fortunate to be backed by investors who really believed in the long-haul vision to build the valuable thing that will be the moat in the future. **Jackson:** And an accounting software is not super easy to build. **Mackenzie:** It's not super easy to build. I talked about how it's simple at its core, but for accounting software and ERPs, there's such a high feature floor of expectation. These giants have been in the market for so long, and there are so many different types of users that can use it in different ways. It's really hard to do the thing that might fit the MVP, because no one wants MVP accounting software. We convinced a couple dozen farmers to use the MVP accounting software and to build it with us over time. But it's not just accounting software. It's also bill pay and invoicing. That is the expectation now for a one-stop shop for everything that you need. 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, their staff member—to really start to get over the switching costs. Because that's the nice thing about building accounting software : it's very sticky. It has a lot of historical records, so it's very hard to switch. To convince people to move over to us, you had to eclipse that a bit. ## [01:04:49] Ambrook's Long Term Vision **Jackson:** Farming and agriculture is the beachhead market. You have wider ambitions. You've talked about serving this broad base of complicated, natural resource-oriented businesses. Can you talk about the potential scope, what expanding adjacently looks like, and trading off focus and scale, especially now that you have a product that can really serve some large chunk of the market really well? What does Ambrook roughly look like on a ten-year time horizon, assuming things go well? There are a bunch of aspects to that question. The broad scope is this : You have a product that's serving thousands of farms. How do you think about going wider? How do you think about deepening that relationship? And what does broad expansion look like for Ambrook? **Mackenzie:** We work with several thousand operations today. About 80% of them are farms or ranches, and about 20% are not. They are either the side businesses or other types of businesses that farms might also be doing. **Jackson:** Often the same owners. **Mackenzie:** Often the same owners. We had a book publisher recently who signed up for a free trial and waded their way through our ag-specific accounting software. They asked : "Will this work for me?" And we said : "Actually, yes it will." I'm glad they saw through our farm-specific marketing because what they were trying to get at was the multi-P&L part. **Jackson:** Got it. **Mackenzie:** Our second customer tugged us into multiple industries. They were a cattle feeder operation in Arizona—the customer we were driving back from during that "amber waves of grain" moment. They onboarded one entity and then said : "Can we onboard our other four businesses now?" We were shocked. They had a trucking business and did custom goods and services. We very fortunately realized that the software we had built was horizontally applicable. Since then, we've remained focused on agriculture, partly because agriculture is so industry-rich. It has such a diversity of industries within it that we get good testing for other adjacent verticals like equipment, construction, and contracting. We get these for free because we are working with agribusinesses. That was unexpected. When we think about expanding, it's now about what I call the " infinite vertical go-to-market motion." You need to serve your existing core ICP well, but you also see a Venn diagram of all the different industries you can serve. Fortunately, accounting software is applicable to a lot of folks who need invoicing, bill pay, and payments. But a farm needs to be able to export to the Schedule F, a very specific tax form. It wants to see a custom chart of accounts, which is a database sync behind the scenes. The things we're doing there are really helpful and have given us focus. Now we're starting to get tugged into other areas. There are two inflection points coming up for the business when it comes to multi-industry. The first is going from one to two verticals. The second is going from two to many. Once you go from two to many, you've built the capability. **Jackson:** You bolt on one extra thing. **Mackenzie:** You've built an engine of a team that knows how to deal with multiple people. It doesn't break the team's brain. In the early 2000s, folks were moving online from desktop to the cloud. The Internet was here. The 2010s was the rise of smartphones and social media. You had marketing and distribution. You could sell something that was mobile-first and you could distribute it through ads. That largely became saturated and, for most business types, very expensive. For example, it is very expensive now to sell SaaS to other SaaS companies. It's not as expensive to sell SaaS to farmers because that market wasn't as saturated. There are a lot of techniques from marketing in the 2010s. The 2020s will be about hyper-personalization. As soon as someone sees an ad, they are able to see a landing page that... **Jackson:** ...should be spun up with their brand. **Mackenzie:** There are things we're getting toward that will be hyper-personalized, where everyone should touch software that feels customized to them. That doesn't mean that all the workflows need to be vibe-coded, because you don't really want to do that for accounting. **Jackson:** You want the engine to actually be bulletproof. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. ## [01:10:17] Making the Intractable Tractable (And Doomscrolling Your Company's Slack) **Jackson:** I have a couple of questions on leadership. You're the CEO and founder of Ambrook. I found some interesting tweets. In the first set, you say, "I have increasingly conceptualized the gentleman job of a CEO as: 'make intractable problems tractable' for a team, about a market, for investors, et cetera." In a follow-up tweet, you said, "Framing it this way feels more actionable to me than the idea of 'having unique insights' [vision], or connecting the dots for others [communicating vision]." Can you describe what that process of making the intractable tractable means on a day-to-day basis? **Mackenzie:** For me, it's about making sure that I'm in the information flow. My team makes fun of me, but I'll pop up in random Slack threads they don't want me in, like the Kool-Aid Man. I love information. Give me that raw drip. **Jackson:** Most successful leaders, at least in technology, seem to have that trait. It's like air traffic control. **Mackenzie:** I remember talking to my executive coach about this. I asked, "Is it a problem that I need to read every Slack message? I feel like I can handle it." My team has asked for coaching around how I turn all this raw information flow into making the intractable tractable. They ask, "How do you actually do that?" I was talking to my executive coach, and I asked, "Is it okay to just recommend that I actually just read every support message, every Slack message, and every PRD that I can? I'm just constantly sitting in all this information." **Jackson:** Big Brother for our company. **Mackenzie:** I end up seeing enough information and seeing the patterns across things. You realize this over here and this over here makes sense. You can start to break down the problem, apply frameworks, and some of these other things, and it ends up making it smaller chunks, or tractable, or you can put your finger on it. But it has to come from that information flow. My executive coach told me a story about a headmaster in Baltimore who he had read a book about. One day, this headmaster decided to move his desk into the main hallway. Every day, while doing his work, he would see students' faces pass. He would notice the change in emotion for one kid over the course of a week. That was just how he kept a pulse on the students. I realized, "Got it. I will continue bursting into these Slack threads." **Jackson:** The thing that comes immediately to mind with taste is that it's the same. The people with the best taste have consumed the most music. I almost wonder if so many things around judgment are just: consume more. Get closer to the data and the signal. It maybe isn't sound bite advice, but it is. **Mackenzie:** It doesn't feel hard if it's something that you're genuinely interested in. It feels like scrolling on Instagram. Ava actually had a piece recently that I really liked on affinity. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Mackenzie:** When you were saying that, it reminded me of her piece. She had a line in there about figuring out what you like and then doing it in the most irrepressible, original, playful, obsessed way possible. I think it would be really hard to build a business that I didn't have affinity toward because of the way that I like to consume information and live my life. **Jackson:** It's the Novak Djokovic thing again. He likes hitting the tennis ball. Are you going to compete with that? You better find the thing where it's fun for you to scroll. ## [01:14:42] De-Risking and Becoming Friends with Anxiety **Jackson:** 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 / 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? **Mackenzie:** It feels way easier to do after you have a bunch of reps on it. It can feel risky to go into the steps of de-risking because it requires you to slow down or face the problem more. There's a sense of anxiety. When you have anxiety, a common response to it is avoidance. De-risking is all about seeking it out, becoming friends with the anxiety and asking: where are you pointing? That's something I've really learned. I am always rewarded when I face it, de-risk it, and diffuse the bomb. **Jackson:** Start with even just looking at the bomb. **Mackenzie:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Really sit with the bomb. **Mackenzie:** The important lesson about de-risking is that it's also okay when the bomb goes off. You'll be fine. Most things are not actually existential. That has done two things. One, I get into a flow state when there are crises. At the end of a crisis that we handle—whether we do the comms out or it's internal—I have a buzz. **Jackson:** The stakes are really clear. **Mackenzie:** The stakes are so clear. There's so much clarity. **Jackson:** Priorities are clear. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. That anxiety that you were ignoring, you realize it was right. Most of my job is sifting through the intractable. When something becomes quite tractable and super clear, I know what I'm going to do today. It's a sense that I can get into a flow state and solve these things. But even when they do happen, they're fine. The company still exists. Hopefully it'll exist for a while longer. ## [01:17:26] Building Something That Takes on a Life of its Own **Jackson:** You are the founder and CEO, but Ambrook is a lot more than just you. You put a big announcement out about your series A, and there was an excerpt where you were talking about Haley on your team. Haley, a mother of two from a Montana ranching family, said this on why she joined your operations team: "I watched your Stripe video. I felt as though we both wanted the same thing for different reasons." You had also sent me a bunch of the notes your team had sent upon that announcement. My observation is that Ambrook, for a long time, has been deeply, authentically you and yours. But in real time, it is becoming more than just you. Your customers and other people relate to the brand. What has that experience started to feel like? **Mackenzie:** This goes back to the answer around illegibility versus legibility. After being illegible for such a long time, it's really uncomfortable sometimes to be legible and to be perceived and interpreted in these ways. When it comes to Ambrook's culture, a ton of it is me, but it's also my co-founders. A huge part of our aesthetic is our creative director, Ali, who's just so talented. I talk about this with Ali, where it feels as though she can interpret gestures of my brain and make it something that is real. There's so much about the externalization and legibility of Ambrook that has to do with everyone else outside of me. I absolutely could not do it alone, and I don't create it alone either. The really interesting, out-of-body experience to watch is this thing that gets co-created outside of me. It also has a relationship to me, and Ambrook also affects me. I interact with it. **Jackson:** It's like a being. It's like a creature. **Mackenzie:** It's a creature. That has just been this wild, out-of-body experience in seeing that. ## [01:20:07] Ambrook's Culture in Three Words **Jackson:** An unfair question, but I'm asking it anyway. I want three words that define the culture and the people in Ambrook. **Mackenzie:** Curious is one. Very, very deeply curious. I want to use the word empathetic, but it doesn't quite fit. It's not as nuanced. It's a sense of meeting people where they are. The version of empathy that we have is literally driving to someone's home, sitting with them, and deeply trying to understand their day-to-day in context. So is that maybe a lived empathy or something? **Jackson:** There's an intimacy there too. **Mackenzie:** Yes, intimacy. There's intimacy there. And pragmatic. **Jackson:** Would you have said the same three words three years ago? **Mackenzie:** I think so. **Jackson:** That's amazing. **Mackenzie:** I think we've been extremely consistent in culture and who we've hired. The values that my co-founders, Jeff and Dan, and I wrote when it was just us have largely stayed the same. **Jackson:** That is pretty amazing. ## [01:21:26] Brand and Storytelling **Jackson:** One last thing on the broader Ambrook brand. You have Ambrook and you have Ambrook Research, now which is an independent media company that you fund. It has something like 150,000 subscribers, which is amazing, and it's been running for two or three years. **Mackenzie:** Yeah. **Jackson:** You're building financial tools. **Mackenzie:** Building financial tools for now. **Jackson:** Yes. To be fair, it's a big container. Why do narrative, stories, research, and brand—both on the Ambrook side and on the Offrange side—matter from a business standpoint? **Mackenzie:** For a long time, because we were building something that we couldn't show people, the only thing we had was narrative and storytelling. **Jackson:** Pointing at where you were going to go. **Mackenzie:** Pointing at where we wanted to go. But I don't like the version of storytelling where you're always talking about the future. I want to be able to point people where we can go but not have that be exclusively what we talk about. Offrange, which used to be called Ambrook Research, we recently rebranded to represent that it's becoming more of an independent publication. It was originally a way to build something that would be of value and interest to the audience that we wanted to work with. We started by co-writing and had one of these papers published with academics, using some of the early, anonymized data that we had from the pandemic relief grants we were helping people get. Then we found Jesse, who is our editor for Offrange. He's wonderful. I always remember the reference check I did on Jesse. She said Jesse is a Capital J journalist. **Jackson:** Whoa. **Mackenzie:** 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. I saw that and was sad about The Counter, but I was trying to build something here at Ambrook. What she meant by that was someone who had such a level of integrity and craft in his work. He had been an editor, which is what I wanted. So I brought him on, and he shaped the publication. **Jackson:** You get someone like that to join? Yes, independently fund it, but ultimately join a commercial startup? Was that hard? **Mackenzie:** I had to convince him. I remember I first reached out to his editor in chief, and she recommended that I chat with Jesse. I sent her a long email on LinkedIn : I know we're a tech company. This is the vision of what we're trying to do. **Jackson:** Just meet with me. **Mackenzie:** She did. And she told me, "I think you should meet Jesse." Jesse has something I make fun of him for. He has a face called Stonewall Jesse, like Stonewall Jackson. A wall of a face. That was what I was greeted with. By the end, we were talking about something that we could build together that would be really interesting. He was ultimately game. We started out with a contract to see if we liked it and were game to build a publication that was as editorially independent as it could be within Ambrook. It hasn't always been easy. There have been moments where something the publication wants to publish is not necessarily what Ambrook the company wants it to publish. But for the vast majority of the time, it's been a wonderful partnership. The thing that works with me and Jesse is that I can put on my publisher hat for this publication and work with him, and then also put on my CEO hat. We're never on opposite ends of the table. We're always on the same side of the table looking at it together, asking: Okay, how do we build this experimental publication in a way that feels like high integrity and respects the capital J journalism part of it? **Jackson:** I have a bunch of miscellaneous things before we wrap up. **Mackenzie:** Perfect. ## [01:26:11] AI Enabling the Middle Class **Jackson:** You said, "MIT economist David Autor calls AI an inversion technology." This was in Noema Magazine: "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 the case for this? Many people feel like AI is very much a concentrating technology. **Mackenzie:** His point was interesting because it was a different take than I had seen in a lot of the headlines. His argument was that computerization was a concentrating technology because it turned roles into algorithms. Calculators, for example, used to be a role. The argument he was making, which I thought was really interesting, was that there is actually a democratization of knowledge and skill. Computerization hollowed out the middle class because you had a lot of lower-middle-class jobs that got pushed down. It put a lot of downward wage pressure because there was more supply for these lower-skill roles. it provided leverage for much higher-skill, higher-paid roles. Now, you're seeing the ability for a lot of folks who don't necessarily have multiple degrees or certifications for these much higher-paid jobs to access what those jobs can do. It's enabling a different slice versus computerization. His argument was that computerization took out this lower-middle-class slice of the skill set and pushed all the wage demand down. In contrast, AI is accessing skill sets all along the spectrum. **Jackson:** Giving everyone access to them. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. You can enable folks to access higher-skilled work or do higher-skilled, quote-unquote "skilled" things because you can access this knowledge database. It feels much more like an assistant or a junior employee than it does a replacement. **Jackson:** Have you thought much about how that specifically applies to Ambrook? **Mackenzie:** Yes, a lot. I was talking with about what will be table stakes in the future for what we need to build and what will separate the average teams from the 99th percentile teams in 6 to 12 months or years from now. The thing that we were talking about, that I have been noodling on and seeing at Ambrook as well, is that a lot of things will become table stakes—like pointing LLMs at BigQuery, Intercom, and other tools we use to do data analyst work. You'll be able to build leaner teams. But I think average teams will end up building things that get to V1 very quickly but end up decelerating the team over time. In contrast, 99th percentile teams will build in a way that compounds, so you'll see the acceleration over time. So I think about how we build in a way that we can accelerate over time. And how do we build in a way that honors, enables, and draws the super-talented people who want to engage their critical thinking and apply discipline and taste to their work, not just replace them—even if they lack a specific tactical skill. This applies to the folks who have the skills, like the software engineers on our team. One person on my team said, "I'm mourning what my job used to be." That is a powerful, powerful statement. We took that statement and are building the version of the company that we want to see—one that will give everyone superpowers. It's about enabling that level of critical thinking at the system level or for other types of hard problems. It's about access and acceleration, not replacement. It's not about doing something that's quite brittle, hard to maintain, and sucks to work on. ## [01:30:57] California History and J.G. Boswell **Jackson:** I have a quote from a biography: "Now, at age 76, he had no reason to break the tradition of secrecy that began with his uncle, Lt. Col. 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 is J.G. Boswell? **Mackenzie:** That's one of my favorite quotes. That quote is what convinced me to get into ag. **Jackson:** Wow. **Mackenzie:** The Boswell family started in the 1800s in California and built an agricultural empire over time. There was this book written, The King of California, where that quote is from. It's an anthology of not just this family, but the time and place : the Homestead Act. The land grab in California involved San Francisco capitalists who found out that as long as they put different names under each one of these parcels, they could stack them all together. The Wild West. It was this discussion about the transformation of the California landscape via agriculture. When we talk about the environment, the legacy that we have left in transforming and terraforming our own land is really intense. We can probably never get some of that back. Just north of LA used to be the largest freshwater lake in North America. **Jackson:** It's totally gone. **Mackenzie:** It's totally gone. 800 square miles. During the super cycles of the California wet, dry seasons, it sometimes rained and flooded so much during the wet season that it would connect to the Pacific. **Jackson:** Did it dry? **Mackenzie:** The last of the lake was drained in the early 20th century. But when you have these wet-dry cycles, which are natural in California but are exasperated by climate change, the lake returns to the lake bed and you have extreme flooding. **Jackson:** How far north of LA? **Mackenzie:** Not that far north. **Jackson:** I'm going to have to go down a rabbit hole. Crazy. **Mackenzie:** The book outlines the legacy of a family over multiple generations. I love those types of books—history of X books. It's such an interesting slice or way to think about the history of a place. ## [01:34:05] Niche Subjects and History and "The Land Where Lemons Grow" **Jackson:** Speaking of, on the table we have The Land Where Lemons Grow. **Mackenzie:** The Land Where Lemons Grow. **Jackson:** The first thing you ever recommended to me. I think this was from a tweet. You said "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." I was on my way to Italy, and I was very grateful. I would highly recommend it to anyone going to Italy or interested in Italy. My broader question is what you just started to talk about. Most people, especially if they're trying to learn about something they don't know anything about, are inclined towards a very high-level, generalist, "give me the basics" approach to learning. What is it about that niche, highly targeted approach that is interesting to you for building an understanding? **Mackenzie:** I don't retain information in broad swaths. I have to be highly interested in something very niche or focused. I've never been able to read and memorize a bunch of facts that feel random or generalized. It makes it more fun and focused to feel like you have this augmented reality filter on the world. You're going to Florence, and as you're walking by, you realize, "Oh, actually, that's the Medici lemon grove. I would have never known." **Jackson:** Something to hold on to. I had something to look for. **Mackenzie:** Yes, you have something to look for. It feels like a treasure hunt. It's not something where you're going to see a bunch of tourists. It's the corner that no one's paying attention to, with the plaque that only you know. It feels special. **Jackson:** It's a secret. **Mackenzie:** It's a secret, and it's a secret that you can keep with yourself or share with a friend. The first half of that trip to Italy, I was alone and having an amazing time just going around trying to find all the places. Sometimes I wasn't even purposely looking. I would just happen to notice the Medici courtyard that had all the lemon trees in these big pots. I just happened to be looking by, and my brain knew what it was because I'd read the book. Those types of moments are so rewarding. It's such a dopamine hit. **Jackson:** Yes. **Mackenzie:** I love that kind of stuff. ## [01:36:46] Disney's Magic Band **Jackson:** Why are you inspired by the Disney MagicBand? **Mackenzie:** My whole family is a Disney family. **Jackson:** I was a little surprised by this. **Mackenzie:** Super into Disney. **Jackson:** Is this a Disney World thing, or do they have it at both? **Mackenzie:** They have it at both. But I have a little bit more claim to it because I was born in Orlando. **Jackson:** Okay. **Mackenzie:** And the largest employer in Orlando is Disney. **Jackson:** This is culture-important. **Mackenzie:** It's an important culture, an important history arc. My mom worked at Disney in Frontierland in Magic Kingdom when she was a teenager. She was in one of the shops. My brother and my sister are just as nerdy as I am in different ways. My brother is a software developer, but he also loves anything mechanical. Since he was a kid, he became obsessed with things like trains. So going to Disney when he was young, he wasn't really interested in the characters. He loves to tell you all about the air trams and the history. **Jackson:** He's got to be an Imagineer. **Mackenzie:** Exactly. The MagicBands are super interesting because they are essentially Disney's spend management tool. For folks in the audience who aren't as big into Disney as I am, they are little wristbands that you connect to your credit card. They become your money source and your access to the park. It just feels like you're spending play money. But what it also does is it... **Jackson:** You tap it to pay. **Mackenzie:** You tap it to pay, tap to get in, et cetera. But it also turns Disney into a giant supercomputer. They're constantly collecting context. When we're talking about the context of money movement, they're constantly collecting context on the physical movement. **Jackson:** Yes. **Mackenzie:** On the physical movement. **Jackson:** They're network mapping live. **Mackenzie:** They're network mapping live. They have information on where they need to store inventory that's getting low. They understand the supply chain of their own parks and the people in the parks. **Jackson:** The most you-Disney overlap possible. It's amazing. **Mackenzie:** I think that's why they're really cool. ## [01:39:15] Strange Math and Happiness and Sadness in Parallel **Jackson:** Another old tweet. This is you: "One of the most important concepts I learned in the past year was that of 'strange math,' where multiple conflicting things—feelings, phenomena, et cetera—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 parallel." How does one begin to learn this ability to hold multiple things in concert? **Mackenzie:** I don't know. **Jackson:** Something prompted that experience. **Mackenzie:** 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 it. I'd taken a leadership course called Leaders in Tech, and they talk about this idea of strange math, which is what you explained. They call it strange math, and it's useful to put a word to it because when people have what they think are conflicting feelings, they often won't say anything. They think the feelings cancel each other out, so maybe they don't give as much feedback. The leadership course was on interpersonal dynamics, but I also found it really helpful for myself in understanding how to sit with my feelings more. That's the thing I have to learn how to do better. I'm very good at identifying emotions—I can identify six different, complex emotions I'm feeling at the same time. But as soon as I categorize them, I put them in a box and don't have to think about them anymore. **Jackson:** How do we sit with them? **Mackenzie:** How do you sit with them? That tweet was about me thinking about how sadness just is sadness. It's not a counterweight to happiness, and you can feel these things at the same time. We want to counterweight them. We want to think about things on a linear spectrum from positive to negative. But the blue side of that spectrum is just as important to sit with and understand. Those feelings teach us things, just like the sunshine portion of that spectrum. That's what I was thinking about then. ## [01:41:31] Aesthetics, Beauty, and Physical Design Systems **Jackson:** We're filming in your apartment, which I'm very grateful for. You also have an amazing office, the Ambrook office, if people are lucky to go there. You have a deep care for space and place—specifically the aesthetics of space and place and how they feel, but also literal aesthetic, beauty, and 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. "This 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 restrictive zoning that separates out where one lives and where one works." Also Tokyo has the three-dimensionality of retail. "The real loss seems to be the abstraction of rural communities to absentee landlords and generic strip malls." 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. The 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 ok 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 us when they are in it. I think of our New York office as a manifestation of our physical design system." Can you talk about the creation process of these aesthetic systems and how you iterate to them or feel your way into them? **Mackenzie:** From a personal aesthetic, that's something that can be built up and is curated over time. Even this apartment is me deliberately trying to shift slightly from that. For years and years, I just built up and accrued a set of furniture and clothes. If you look at that in the organic sense, step one for me was: What is my personal aesthetic? What do I want it to feel like? It's feminine, but it's also hard to place in time. It's not really modern, but there might be more modern elements to it. The office was the first time that I had to think about applying an aesthetic from a space perspective that was very deliberately not just me. It is me, but… **Jackson:** Through a lens, **Mackenzie:** Exactly. It's a fractal of me, and it's a fractal of that organism we talked about earlier, which is Ambrook. How do you build an aesthetic that feels like that? That's where leaning on my opinions and Ali, our creative director's opinions, comes in. We worked with a really talented interior designer who helped source and stage a lot of those pieces, and they worked in concert with that aesthetic. What I meant by the objects rhyming is that it doesn't really matter where I put this coaster or this glass on this table; it all rhymes together. You start to get a feeling of what that can look like. There's a sense of that, and there are some rules. Some of the rules for that, like in a digital design system, are colors—you have a certain color scheme. Your buttons are shaped the same way. You have your fonts. What does it look like in a physical space? You have color schemes, but you also might have rules. For example, I only want to get objects made out of natural materials, like metals or wood. If you are going to use plastic, it has to feel a certain way. You build that over time, and that's where you can start. The Ambrook office is also a bit relaxed and playful in that it's not all perfect. There's a nook that we have that looks like a grandma's basement nook—that's what we call it. Everything in the space has a name. We have a big cabinet we call the Cabinet of Curiosities, and we have a chest called the Chest of Secrets with all of our swag in it. There's a playfulness to it. When you have an affection toward the space, it also makes people treat it better. **Jackson:** Yes. **Mackenzie:** That's been really fun to think about. **Jackson:** It's interesting how freedom can come out of a set of constraints. I've always admired in great spaces when they can feel messy, but good. If you tried to set up the books in this way deliberately, you could never get there. It has to happen organically. **Mackenzie:** You have to create the structure underneath. I think about this with community building, with Interact. It's like coral starters. You create the conditions—the people, the environment—such that the coral structures grow organically. The books grow organically. Jane Jacobs, exactly. A good space enables you to move freely through it. You're not worried about messing up the thing on the couch. Everything in our office is meant to be used. There's no preciousness about it, and I think that adds to it as well. ## [01:47:31] The Draw to Start Things **Jackson:** A final quote, or maybe a pair of them. I firmly believe that: '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. 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: Why is starting things—willing things into existence—so core to who you are? **Mackenzie:** It's a great question. I think it's the ultimate manifestation of agency: creating something from nothing, the creative act. The same way that artists really like that, as I've been getting more into photography, I'm realizing that the frame or the perspective you have can be frozen in time. That makes it easier to see the thing you were seeing and showing it to other people. There's something around the creative act in starting companies and building them—building software or building products that people use—that is this feedback loop that is just very intoxicating. **Jackson:** That's all I got. **Mackenzie:** Thanks, Jackson. **Jackson:** Thank you.