Sara Menker went from commodities trading to founding a company tackling food insecurity. She argues that domain expertise matters and explains why VC funding helped her scale the solution.
You came out of Wall street as a commodities trader and you knew that you wanted to get back to solving for food insecurity and you had a number, obviously have lots of options in how you do that. How did you choose to go the route of a VC funded startup?
I didn't go down the route of a VC funded startup. I went the route of solving for a problem I was very passionate about. And that solving for that problem led me to sort of understand that what I needed to do was create a company, not a nonprofit, for example. Right. There's also that route. So the first is sort of motivation of starting through a problem that you're genuinely passionate about because then that sort of leads you to sort of the right solution. Right. And I think that to me the first was what made me realize that was just how complex the challenge was going to be and how much funding it would need over time. And, and, and also sort of the different interests you'd have to weave. If you're solving for something as complex, complicated as food security, you're dealing with, you know, farms that are half acres and farms that are 100,000 acres. You're dealing with very small food and beverage companies, you're dealing with mega companies, you're dealing with governments and you're dealing with traders and you're dealing, you know, so you have to deal with sort of a very sort of complex system. And as a business you can sort of design yourself around how do I solve for that problem. And so, you know, we started by really saying, who are the domain experts that we want to hire as opposed to who are the technologists we're going to hire? Because the domain experts then said, you know, here's how I think, I mean, when we hired our first environmental scientist, it was because I saw their resume like, because it came in and I said, oh, I've never worked with satellite imagery before, but like this sounds like something we should do, we should hire this person. And you know, so that sort of deep domain expertise informing it and bringing in sort of world class engineering to scale, that sort of human knowledge became the lens by which we sort of took that path. And you know, I think one of the, one of the great things about sort of taking the path of a VC funded startup or, you know, sort of the path of a business is that you, you innovate and you're super agile and you change your ways as you get more data and information and you have to be stuck. I always say, like you have to always be driven by sort of your mission and your purpose, but the strategy and sort of especially the tactical moves you take from a day to day, month to month basis will change, while sort of that final end goal always remains the same. And that just, I think, works really well for the types of investors that we brought on board early, which I think that's what VC is great at.
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