Wiswell Advisors LLC

02/14/2023

What next? This is sometimes the easiest question and sometimes the hardest.
It seems superfluous to ask when all the major currents are running in the same direction. That has been the story since 2008. What you could count on was increasing debt driving increasing spending driving increasing advertising, especially through tech media. These rapidly growing revenues got discounted at near zero, with valuation results that naturally followed. And this was a global story, and a story about globalization.
2022 felt like the end of that story. So what's next? There is a clamor of competing narratives, but how it will all sort itself out is anything but obvious.
Maybe that's the story. Time to start asking "What If?" again.

04/18/2018

This year's AgTech Nexus conference in Boston (June 6-7) looks even better than last year's, and that is saying something. The agenda is packed with the latest on AI, robotics, blockchain and ag finance. Plus a Red Sox game at Fenway. I am looking forward to seeing Greg Mellinger and his gang.

http://www.globalaginvesting.com/events/boston18/

3rd Annual Event Moves to Boston

04/08/2018

El Faro sank in 2015 with the loss of all hands.

The master lost time he could never make up when no one recognized they were taking on water. He was disoriented with respect to the position of the storm. Decision-making did not keep up with conditions.

Invalid assumptions and confusion are often a deadly combination.

A recording salvaged from three miles deep tells the story of the doomed “El Faro,” a cargo ship engulfed by a hurricane.

02/05/2018

A fifteen year study supports the 1992 findings of the McKinsey Global Institute that management practices are a critical link between national economic policy and innovations that increase productivity. McKinsey argued at the time that an enlightened government policy would make sure that innovators have incentives and that incumbent firms are not protected from competition. Easy to say, hard to do.

A 15-year survey of 12,000 firms across 34 countries shows that management practices explain a large share of productivity gaps

12/13/2017

A Happy New Year comes early at Farmers Business Network. At the end of November, FBN closed a $110 million Series D round that brings their 2017 total raised to $150 million. New investors T. Rowe Price and Temasek have long term perspectives on value, but they must believe that FBN’s valuation has a lot of upside from its current $660 million. FBN will now get busy putting all this cash to work in digital crop marketing, its analytics platform, and expansion into Canada. It is harder than you think to do that well.

Farmers Business Network has raised $110 million in new venture funding to support a business that may sound boring to some Silicon Valley technologists but..

11/28/2017

Welcome to Lean Agriculture. This is a foretaste of things to come. Running a farm more like a factory requires turning the growing space into a controlled space—in other words, greenhouses. At the macro level, this means adding capital to the farm, and a lot of it. Luckily, there is a lot of capital available. The unexpected implication is that this will create a steady (as opposed to seasonal) demand for skilled and better paying farm labor. We already see this happening in the better run enterprise-scale farms.

What is the potential impact of lean thinking on agriculture? Jim Womack's field mission to explore the opportunities in a new industry.

10/23/2017

Farmers Business Network raised $40 million in a March C-series led by DBL Partners and Google Ventures. The attraction of agriculture for Big Data and AI/machine learning is clear to those of us who have worked in the industry: farmer and market information is fragmented, overwhelming, and growing exponentially.

FBN claims what looks like about $20 million per year in revenues for its analytical and data services. They have been on a hiring tear, more than doubling the number of employees.

Their next move is to try to disintermediate ag chem distribution. There may be an opportunity there, but the competitive reaction is likely to be fierce, and FBN may find any volume they pick up brings less margin than they had projected. I wouldn't be surprised to see another financing round next summer.

The farming collective is using big data to empower independent growers and fight Big Ag.

09/22/2017

Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Softbank put $200 million into a start-up that is growing leafy greens under LED. That is the starter's pistol for investments in specialty agricultural ventures.

Plenty is not the only game in town. It will face product competition from a variety of formats, and questions remain about how often urban agriculture will be a good use of space, despite the potential for very high productivity per square foot. The ultimate economics will revolve around the productivity of dollars of margin per dollar of capital employed, and vertical farming takes a lot of capital.

For now, hydroponic leafy greens are expensive and profitable. That will not go unnoticed. So what happens when competition heats up? For one thing, the siting of these warehouse farms will be less urban than early proponents have claimed. Plenty's South San Francisco site will be more the exception than the rule.

The winners will have established outstanding consumer brand visibility and loyalty and superior supermarket relationships, so that becomes mostly a marketing story despite the cool tech dimension. I like Plenty's chances, given the Whole Foods angle, but there will be lots of room for others.

After a $13.7 billion deal to acquire Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos is stepping farther into the fresh foods market by investing in a vertical farming startup called Plenty.

06/22/2017

Ben Thompson provides an intriguing angle on the Amazon/Whole Foods deal. Pay attention to the idea of "Amazon Grocery Services" as a platform for pricing, purchasing, scheduling, and billing. The wholesale grocery market could become more transparent, rich in information, and easy to navigate. The result is that Amazon gets in the middle of a flood of transactions and develops new information products for the industry.

The key to understanding Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods is to understand that Amazon didn’t buy a retailer: the company bought a customer.

04/02/2017

The second great under-explored dimension of strategy is "Time." Stan McChrystal says "there is never enough time," and he should know.

In this series, professionals share their secrets to being more productive. Read the posts here, then write your own (use in the

04/02/2017

Who hasn't met at least one "energy vampire?" James Allen at Bain raises the topic under the tag "Leadership." But taking a broader view, "Energy" is one of the most under-explored dimensions of strategy.

Fight the tendency to make problems bigger, not smaller.

03/23/2017

This piece demonstrates Ray Dalio and his team at Bridgewater Associates doing what they do. They have a habit of mind that says, something important is going on, but we must not assume that we already understand it. Let’s look broadly and analytically across time and around the world in multiple cases. What they find looks more like a complex adaptive system, though they would probably talk about it in terms of creating a “machine.” That thought machine will lead to unexpected insights about what will happen next. I see it as analysis, not advocacy.

Ray Dalio Steven Kryger Jason Rogers Gardner Davis Populism is not well understood because, over the past several decades, it has been infrequent in