Interview with Chris Oh (Investor at GreenPoint Partners)

Overview

• Name: Chris Oh
• Background: Investor at GreenPoint Partners, formerly at TCV
• Date: 1/26

Notes

See the raw notes from the meeting here.

Agriculture

• Agriculture has a lot of diverse segments (OEM hardware manufacturers, seed and chemical, etc.). AgTech is just one of them
  • In particular, lots of growth in AgTech, Ag BioTech, and ESG
• Competition dynamics in most segments is very concentrated, with a very small set of enterprises owning the majority of market share
  • Example: John Deere and its vehicles
  • Both an opportunity and a challenge
• Note that even though there might be 80% small farms, over 80% of farmland acres are dominated by a small subset of people + companies. On the other hand, the rest of the 20% is owned by a small tailwind of folks
• There's a core reason farming is undigitized: the average age of the farmer is 60
  • When you think about GTM sales journey, even B2B plays -- selling software to AgTech companies -- will have their end customer be farmers
• Ultimately, in 10 years, there will be a generational shift towards younger farmers, which may help to increase technology adoption
• One case study: Leaf API
  • Is like "Plaid for agriculture" -- collect unstandardized data from various hardware used in farming and allow startups and farmers to tap into this data using an API
  • Workflow: Farmer receives portal, farmer uploads data, Leaf processes it, AgTech companies (think crop rotation, yield prediction startups) can then use as API
• Main issue with Leaf? Small TAM of AgTech companies that are actually serving to farmers
  • CO and firm didn't feel too comfortable yet that this generational shift is going to happen within holding period
  • As signals -- how many unicorns in AgTech? Is VC activity increasing at a good rate?
  • TAM or SAM only estimated around $400M, which is super tiny
• Another important note: a farmer only has 20-30 shots in their life to make money
  • In other words: you can't f@#k s*)t up!
• Conclusion: farmers are a tough crowd to sell software too, and B2B might be better, but we have to be cognizant of smaller TAM and dynamics (i.e., bargaining power when selling)
• Resources: S2G Partners, Agreena

Supply Chain

• Noted that there were a lot of interesting companies
  • Cybersecurity for IoT, freight document annotation, automobile repair management system, etc.
• Reality: "supply chain" is very much an umbrella term
  • Can be around transportation, brokering, warehousing, delivery, and more
  • Can also cover supply chain on the ocean, in the air, and on land
  • Potential area: tailwind around reshoring/onshoring, as well as automation and robotics more broadly

Next Steps

• Will probably not continue to explore the AgTech route... if too small TAM, might be good to stop our bets now
• Continue to diversify thinking about supply chain