Ambrook CEO Mackenzie Burnett on American agriculture, rural resilience, and carrying 50lbs of fresh pork on Amtrak
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
Mackenzie Burnett, CEO and co-founder of Ambrook, joins this episode to discuss how her company is revolutionizing financial management for American farms and family businesses. Starting as a COVID-19 stimulus program helper, Ambrook discovered that farms needed sophisticated financial tools despite their complex, multi-entity operations that often rival startups in complexity but lack dedicated CFOs. The conversation explores the challenges of modern agriculture, the economics of farming in America, and how technology can preserve rural resilience while supporting the American dream for entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley. (01:02)
- Core theme: Building financial infrastructure to help family businesses become more profitable and resilient, addressing the gap between complex operations and accessible financial tools
Speakers
Mackenzie Burnett
CEO and co-founder of Ambrook, a financial management software company serving farms, ranches, and industrial mom-and-pop shops. She previously studied climate security at Stanford and has deep expertise in agricultural economics and rural business challenges. Her parents both worked for the USDA, giving her unique insights into agricultural policy and the farming ecosystem.
Key Takeaways
Focus on Problem Access Before Product-Market Fit
Burnett emphasizes that "your first job as a founder is to get access to the problem" rather than rushing to build solutions. (03:42) Ambrook spent their first year and a half talking to hundreds of farmers and the entire ecosystem around them, including ag lenders who revealed they had to physically drive to farms and sit at kitchen tables to help producers understand their finances. This deep problem discovery phase led them to realize that the core issue wasn't technology adoption but the complexity mismatch between sophisticated business operations and available financial tools. The lesson: spend significant time understanding your customer's actual pain points rather than building based on assumptions.
Build for Business Owners, Not Financial Professionals
A key strategic decision Ambrook made was designing their software for business owners rather than financial professionals. (10:03) Most ERP systems are built for people with financial training, but Ambrook recognized that small farm operators often spend more time in the field than in the office yet need to handle complex multi-entity accounting. They built workflows that wrap complex journal entries into intuitive processes and provide extensive financial literacy training. This approach enabled them to serve customers who need enterprise-level complexity but lack enterprise-level financial teams.
Don't Give Away Free Money to Prove Product-Market Fit
Burnett made a controversial decision in startup land by refusing to offer below-market lending or free payments to acquire customers. (39:55) Her reasoning was that she wanted customers adopting Ambrook because they genuinely liked the software and workflows, not because of financial incentives. She focused on building accounting software with high NPS scores first, believing that subsidies can mask whether users are coming for the product or just the subsidy. This old-fashioned approach to building sustainable unit economics gave them more optionality to leverage fintech features later.
Solve Multiple Accounting Layers Simultaneously
Ambrook addresses four distinct types of accounting needs within one platform: cash basis, accrual accounting, enterprise accounting (multiple business lines), and managerial accounting (unit economics like cost per acre). (36:09) Rather than forcing customers into one approach, they allow people to enter at any layer and progress upward as their sophistication grows. This architecture enables a dairy farmer to start with basic cash tracking and eventually reach the level of unit economic analysis that might otherwise require hiring ex-bankers. The key insight is that accounting software can scale with business complexity when properly architected from the beginning.
Target the Complexity Gap in Mid-Market Businesses
Ambrook identified a critical market gap: businesses that have outgrown QuickBooks but lack the resources for NetSuite implementation and maintenance. (09:04) These companies, particularly in agriculture, often operate multiple entities with complex operations that would require a CFO if they were startups, yet they run on margins too thin to afford enterprise-level financial teams. By building sophisticated features into an accessible interface, Ambrook enables husband-and-wife teams to manage five-entity businesses effectively. This represents a broader opportunity in vertical SaaS to serve complex SMBs that traditional horizontal software doesn't adequately address.
Statistics & Facts
- Only 10,000 out of 1.8 million farms in the US make more than $5 million annually in sales, representing an extreme power law in agricultural economics. (05:54)
- 90% of payments in US agriculture still go through paper check, not because farmers are behind the times, but because digital payments can be expensive for producers operating on thin margins. (17:26)
- About one-third of Ambrook's customers use exclusively mobile devices to do all their bookkeeping and accounting, despite the complexity level typically requiring laptop-based enterprise software. (11:56)
