Below are the slides from our examination of the opportunities around food & agriculture, from the perspective of embedded finance. It’s an area where there are timely opportunities at all levels and for different reasons. A full PDF is here.

There are 6 different areas of opportunity in the sector:

1. Investment — expanding Dutch model, and ecosystem
2. Outcome based models — early adoption of embedded finance
3. Farm machinery — Shift to small scale robotics
4. Gene Editing — CRISPR opportunities for much more targeted products
5. Cooking — Ability to leverage machine learning in kitchen gadgets
6. Wellness — Expanding edge of consumer opportunities

This is part of Anthemis’ R&D where we go beyond analyst research to look at things from a product & business design perspective to identify opportunities.

The Inertial Arms Race in Car Design

Issigonis’ original design for the Mini was a masterpiece of clever use of space and defined a new type of car that was impressive and sexy precisely because it was small and therefore urban.

There is an instinctive mental model of the earth as a finite planet, a closed system with limited resources.

This fits with the view of our destruction of the environment and is true to the extent that we are confined to one planet and there isn’t another, but it isn’t strictly correct in terms of how our environment works. The environment itself is much more like a living thing with inputs and outputs.

In order to fix things we should view it as an open system, where preserving the environment necessarily involves energy consumption and waste, so that we can…

A new way to invest in modern businesses

Debt Investment

Before the advent of Venture Capital a new business would likely take a loan in order to be able to bootstrap and grow to profitability. Since 20% of new businesses in the US fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, 65% during the first 10 years, and 75% during the first 15, a loan can only be made to relatively non risky businesses, which are either predictable and not particularly innovative or given at a later stage once a business is somewhat established and…

The above diagram outlines how the various systems on Earth interact to harness energy to create complex systems and deliberate output (living things, civilization, culture and knowledge) and waste.

It is designed to highlight that the Earth is a self regulating open system far from equilibrium, to show where our actions are destabilizing it, what needs to change at the most fundamental level and how existing views of it as a closed system with finite resources are misleading our attempts to fix it.

How Our System Works

An increase in the amount of life, civilization and knowledge necessarily results in an increase the overall…

This is reverse pitch, an idea for a go-to-market opportunity that we think is timely and could grow into a bigger company. We are putting it out there to stimulate discussion, see if anyone is building something related or thinks they can figure out what longer term business this becomes. If you are starting a company that builds on some of these business design ideas, please feel free to contact us at Anthemis: dave@anthemis.com or yann@anthemis.com

The story of the internet has largely been about democratizing content creation (e.g. …

This is an idea for a go-to-market opportunity that we think is timely and could grow into a bigger proptech company. We are putting it out there to stimulate discussion, see if anyone is building something related or thinks they can figure out what longer term recurring revenue business this becomes. If you are starting a company that builds on some of these business design ideas, please feel free to contact me at Anthemis: dave@anthemis.com

Bureaucracy exacerbates the asymmetry between the more and less powerful. It creates a form of inequality where there is often a threshold where more disadvantaged…

Many people use Powerpoint for two scenarios:

1. For a deck that is designed to be taken away and read.
2. As part of a talk, video or in person pitch.

The format of these should be completely different, but rarely is. You should prepare a different deck for each.

This lecture by Patrick Winston’s at MIT on ‘how to speak’ explains the difference, perfectly. It is about talks that convey ideas and a vision and steps of execution. I have summarized the key points he makes in how to do a talk because it has helped me better differentiate between a…