Index:
Overview
Considerations for Start-ups
What Incumbents Need To Consider
Overview
Beware ‘pilots to nowhere’: Aleph Eins Capital on avoiding corporate agtech traps is a great interview with George Bilkis, managing director at investment firm Aleph Eins Capital.
I specifically like how direct he is in several areas, including this comment:
GB: It’s critical to understand how bigger companies adopt innovation, and if you get to the point where they say, “That’s an interesting tool, we want to have access to that,” and then, “Will our competition get access to it?” you have to be very careful. Many startups are tempted to get into exclusivity deals because it’s a matter of survival sometimes, but actually, it can kill them.
AFN: So how should startups handle exclusivity requests from a corporate?
GB: You just say no. There is no such thing. Exclusivity means that they should be ready to buy you out immediately. Otherwise, you will become the servant of one master with a very limited possibility of exit and every potential investor that will come will say wait a minute, you have one customer and you are bound to him like a slave? Nobody will invest in you.
I agree with the view that it is important to understand how companies adopt innovation, and think it goes even further surrounding how they think about innovation, their roadmap, how they act in commercializing innovation, stacking it and where the incentives are within the organization to move, or not move it forward.
I pulled a few comments from the AgFunder article, used AskUpstream to pull where I have covered these things before, along with pulling some commentary from an unpublished Upstream draft titled “The Collaboration Tax in Agribusiness” (I could never get it to flow properly).
Considerations for Start-ups
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