My next steps - Launching my Advisory business.
I love to build companies and technology. I’ve been doing this since I quit university at 21 to start my first business, detailing cars and boats.
23 year old me on a clients nicely detailed boat.
This career path led me from being a startup founder, to project manager, management consultant and most recently the world of Silicon Valley, accelerators and venture capital.
This unconventional career path hasn’t been easy, but it has provided a unique set of experiences that have forged the skills and network needed to build companies and technology.
Back in 2017, I was at a career crossroad, I was burnt out from 15 years as a founder and wanted to find an industry with interesting problems to solve, where I could make an impact.
My friend Oli Madgett invited me to an Agricultural field day to see some AgriTech and meet a few farmers over beers. I felt very out of place, but connected with Farmers like Alistair Just and Emma Leonard who opened my eyes to the challenges and opportunities in Agriculture.
My first Agricultural field day, with my WRX looking very out of place.
That was seven years ago, and I’ve been down this AgriTech rabbit hole ever since.
My time as Director of AgriFood Tech at BDO and Managing Director at SVG Ventures Thrive have enabled me to get deep into into the Agricultural industry, whilst also being an active participant during the rapid growth of the AgriTech startup eco-system. From Longreach to the Salinas Valley, It’s been an incredible agricultural learning journey.
The challenge I have is that I like to build, solve real problems and collaborate deeply with innovators. Unfortunately these aren’t activities that align well with billable hour targets and quarterly corporate objectives.
The past 7 years has shown me that our global food system has many issues, which I spoke about in my TEDx Talk, “Can you Redesign the Food System?”. The complexities of farming systems, climate, corporate incumbents and the economics of agriculture make innovation hard.
However, I believe you can recode the food system, to be more sustainable, productive and nutritious.
Through technology, systems change and community, we can over time recode the food system without the eradication of exisiting production systems or regulating farmers out of existence.
So to enable this change, I am launching my own independent advisory practice, focused on AgriFood innovation to recode the food system.
There will be two focus areas of my work, Commercialisation and Growth Advisory (working with Startups) and Eco-system Advisory (working with Government, AgriBusiness and Investors).
My work will go beyond reports and ideation workshops, by leveraging my networks to take practical steps to commercialise research, launch AgriTech into international markets and provide agribusiness, investors and government with the eco-system intelligence, technologies and strategy to take action.
Investment in AgriTech will remain an area of focus, but i'll be developing a different model with investment partners, to allocates capital to entrepreneurs building real companies, instead of chasing the mirage of AgriTech Unicorns.
To deliver this work I’ll be building a small team, but also forming partnerships to collaborate with leaders in the global AgriFood Innovation eco-system, providing me and my clients with specialist capabilities and the capacity to deliver on larger engagements. I’ll be making more announcements about these partnerships in the coming weeks.
So after 7 years of employment, i’m back where I started, in the entrepreneurial seat open for business and ready to collaboratively recode the food system.
All the details are on my website, so please check it out :)
