Shailu Verma

What is the Right GTM for Hardware or Solution Sales to Farmers or Rural Areas? Tractors have become an essential part of modern agriculture, fundamentally transforming farming practices. Their integration into the #agricultural ecosystem is driven by a simple yet effective model: a high-end farmer or rural entrepreneur purchases a #tractor through financing, uses it on their land, and leases it to small-scale farmers in the village. This approach not only facilitates the acquisition of tractors but also ensures a sustainable return on investment (ROI) by creating a revenue stream from leasing. Challenges and Opportunities with New Farm Mechanization Tools With the introduction of new farm mechanization tools—whether as tractor add-ons or standalone equipment—the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy becomes even more critical. While many propose using the same model as tractors, it is crucial to evaluate whether the cost of these add-ons justifies the investment. One potential model involves large farmers purchasing equipment like a weeder for 5-7 lakhs, using it for their own operations, and leasing it to smaller farmers. However, several challenges need to be addressed to make this model viable: Repair and Maintenance (R&M): Ensuring reliable R&M services is essential for the long-term success of any mechanization tool. Farmers need assurance that their investments will be supported with prompt and effective maintenance services. Financing Options: Can financing be enabled from the beginning to make these tools accessible to farmers? Offering financial solutions tailored to the specific needs of rural farmers can drive adoption and sustainability. Localized Implementation: Starting with a small area, such as 1-2 villages, can help prove the model's viability. This approach allows for the testing of assumptions, gathering feedback, and refining the strategy before scaling up. Distribution Challenges and Solutions: Distribution remains a critical component of the GTM strategy. The traditional distribution model, which involves distributors, still holds value. However, ensuring profitability at scale requires addressing several key factors: Distributor Margins: Balancing the margins for distributors is essential to incentivize their participation while maintaining overall profitability. This involves setting competitive pricing that accounts for the cost of distribution and the value provided by the mechanization tools. Training and Support: Providing training and ongoing support to distributors can enhance their ability to market and service the equipment effectively. Empowering distributors with knowledge and resources ensures that they can address farmer queries and provide valuable insights. For entrepreneurs building solutions in #agriculture, it is vital to validate these aspects early in the product lifecycle. Would love to hear thoughts on an effective GTM? #AgriTech #Kalaari

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I had a lot of fun recording a podcast episode with Shiva Singh Sangwan. We discussed the evolution of Humba Ventures & Susa Ventures; tips for raising and building a fund; how to improve investment sourcing & picking; the role of luck in investing, and so on. https://lnkd.in/eiqsStej

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I first met Mike Maples, Jr in 2010, when Founders Network was just an idea. Over the years, Mike and his team at Floodgate (special shoutout to Arjun Chopra) have been great mentors, sharing their insights and guiding our founders. Most recently, their advice played a pivotal role in helping us launch Founders Network Fund. Today, Mike shared the key ideas with FN'ers from his new book Pattern Breakers (https://a.co/d/buKBd5O ), which explores the insights he’s gained from backing companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta -- and which put him on the Forbes Midas List 8x. This is the most important book on startups in the last ten years, according to Steve Blank. My notes on the key concepts of his talk: 1) Inflections – "not a trend but a change event that represents a turning point in our ability to provide empowerment." e.g. The GPS chip in iPhone 4s 2) Insights – "a non-consensus and right insight about the future that's powerful and non obvious and leverages inflections." e.g. Lyft = GPS + strangers driving you 3) Founder future fit – "Living in the future before other people live in the future and then try to build what's missing in the future." If you're a founder, check out the book. Grateful for the impact Mike and Arjun continue to have on both me and the Founders Network community!

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Indoor farming has attracted over $6 billion in investments since 2019: It's a year-round method of crop production that optimizes space through its use of vertically stacked layers. It’s projected to grow (10% by 2032, reaching $96 billion*), yet many are struggling to deliver returns. Notably, AppHarvest recently filed for bankruptcy after reporting a net loss of $177 million, highlighting the challenges in achieving profitability in this sector. ⬆️On the up - Plenty® is one to watch - they are flush with funding from SoftBank and have formed a JV with Abu Dhabi-based Mawarid Holding Investment .They are building a network of indoor farms, likely starting with an indoor strawberry farm in Abu Dhabi. If successful, it would help elevate indoor farming as a more marketable proposition - particularly in locations that are too dry for traditional farms. Indoor farming has appeal for sure..but they an infrastructure-heavy, pricey endeavor that has proven incompatible with venture exit time frames. This begs the question around the sustainability of funding models in industries focused on longer-term growth. #VentureCapital #IndoorFarming #Investment #Sustainability #Agriculture *Statista

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🔥 Thrilled to see Hydrolix crushing it with a $35M Series B! 🔥 Data is the new oil, but too much gets discarded due to prohibitive storage costs. Hydrolix cracks this with its streaming #datalake platform that leverages object storage, decoupled compute, indexing, & compression. As Marty Kagan puts it: 'We’re cheaper than cold storage and faster than hot storage' Hydrolix’s streaming data lake platform is a game-changer for #AI, #observability, & #security workloads. 💥 Real-time query performance at terabyte scale 💰75%+ savings on log mgmt & 4x more data retained  ☁️ Stateless & containerized for seamless scaling with Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Google Cloud GCS, Microsoft Azure Blob 💡 Had the early conviction (first investor) that data is key to unlocking AI & enterprise workloads. It's proving right. Huge thanks to Marty Kagan Hasan Alayli for letting me early on their journey to build an impessive company 🙏 Super pumped to have awesome Aaron Perman at S3 Ventures leading this round along with other strong existing investors - Nava Ventures (Manish Patel) Wing Venture Capital (Peter Wagner) Oregon Venture Fund (Matt Compton Scott Grout) and others 💪 Onwards! 🚀🚀🚀 #cloud #data #ai #ml #llm #largelanguagemodels #analytics #security #loganalytics #datalake #datawarehouse https://lnkd.in/g5i6afP5

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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Wow, great stuff on this first episode. I got the run down from Ataes Aggarwal and Arya Satish, and I see that critically important business and life topics will be covered in this podcast series. Follow, tune in, and spread the word. PSA: Some super thoughtful and practical content to be had here with this podcast. 🙌

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SolarSquare Energy is the largest installer and operator of distributed solar assets in India, and has become one of my favorite case studies of *nailing* product-market fit within the Lowercarbon Capital portfolio. This week, they announced a $40M Series B funding round led by our friends over at Lightspeed - it's go time, chalo! India is the world's fastest growing residential solar market, with more roofs and more sun than just about anywhere on the planet. There's a whole lot of room to run - only 1M homes have been solarized to date out of the 50M ready to install. Add that up, and we see a $100B prize up for grabs by the end of the decade. The jalebi on top? The Indian government has strategically accelerated this industry by rolling out subsidies, reducing permitting friction, and enshrining net metering as a legal right. Solar Square is in the right place at the right time. Huge congrats to Shreya Mishra, Neeraj Jain, Nikhil Nahar, and the entire team. If anyone is looking to join the next Indian unicorn at the center of the global energy transition, look no further. #tech #climatetech #climate #energy #energytransition #solar #electrification #india #emergingmarkets

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A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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Excited to announce our investment in Alta Resource Technologies alongside Leonardo Banchik (Voyager Ventures) with participation from Orion Resource Partners, Overture Ventures, and WovenEarth Ventures. Rare earths are critical in products from magnets to ceramics and it's important for the US to develop its own supply chain. While the US has some of the best rare earth resources, separating them has historically proven expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Alta through it's computationally designed and optimized proteins allows the US to bring back rare earth production with a cleaner, lower capex, and lower opex solution - and that's just the beginning. Congrats to Nathan Ratledge and the entire Alta team. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gbGnAJn3

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Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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Excellent blog post on the realities of Climate & VC. While these are "tough times for the transition," there are also many opportunities. Significant capital will continue to flow, with Corporate VCs playing a larger role in financing this transition. Through this process, they will strengthen their LP positions in funds tackling climate challenges. I receive weekly calls from large Holding & Corporate VCs seeking introductions to Climate / Energy / Infra VC Funds. When I ask about their target sub-verticals within Climate / Energy, they often mention that they default to focusing on specific regions due to limited resources and coverage. In other words, rather than evaluating whether a DACH VC is better positioned for solar or grid-tech compared to a Nordic or US VC, they simply pursue whichever regions they can access—a haphazard approach at best. I always advise LPs to evaluate VCs within their operating market context. Since sourcing is crucial in venture capital, Holding Cos. and Family Offices should carefully assess a VC's location, regulatory context, and market environment before investing and building a portfolio of Funds. I've heard "I wish I had discovered this VC / region sooner" far too many times... * At ComposeVC's Built World Fund, we do not invest in Climatetech or Energytech directly, only as it relates to our Built World thesis.

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Congrats to Abhishek Chopra and the BosonQ Psi (BQP) team on their $3M seed round, led by Roger Krakoff at Monta Vista Capital! I became an advisor to BQP over two years ago. I met Abhishek, the founder and CEO, after speaking at a quantum computing conference at the W Hotel in Miami. He approached me after my panel and started quizzing me about his business. It was clear that he wanted a VC's perspective on how to maximize the success of his company. It was also clear that he was a learning machine. Quantum computing is going to be a big deal. We’ve already seen what happens when a generalizable frontier technology like AI hits the mainstream—it revolutionizes every sector and industry in the economy. AI is a new software substrate, but now imagine what happens when we create a new hardware substrate. Imagine what happens when AI models run on quantum hardware. Recent announcements about error correction from Google and their Willow chip are rightfully getting a lot of attention. Willow demonstrates not only that error correction is possible, but that it improves with scale. Error correction is critical for building "fault-tolerant" quantum computers capable of doing useful work, so this is an important breakthrough. What fewer people realize is that quantum is already delivering near-term commercial value through quantum-inspired algorithms (QIAs). QIAs mimic how quantum systems explore multiple possibilities simultaneously, even though they run on classical hardware. BQP is commercializing QIAs for large enterprises, starting with applications in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for sectors like aerospace. BQP will be a critical company in America’s race to maintain its edge over geopolitical rivals in key areas of technology.

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Join us today for the Thought Leadership Panel on, 'Outage Management in Utility Industry: Innovation, Trends and Challenges' where industry leaders will be discussing innovations and trends in the Utility Industry.

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AI and Med Tech in Focus   AI System Developed to Identify Pathology in Tissues Engineers at Washington State University have developed an AI tool that uses images of human and animal tissue to detect abnormalities faster and more accurately than people. The AI algorithm was trained using images from past studies that involved kidney, testes, ovarian, prostate, breast and lymph node abnormalities. The new model detected disease in minutes—current processes take humans several hours and require specialized teams to check each other’s work. It was also found to be more accurate, sometimes detecting instances that humans had missed. The engineers designed the system to handle the processing load of the high-resolution gigapixel images by breaking them down into smaller tiles but still retaining the overall context of the tissue sample—akin to the zoom feature on a microscope or phone camera. Aside from getting diagnostic results more accurately and quickly, the new system also shows promise in epigenetics (the study of molecular processes that change gene behavior without changing underlying DNA). Epigenetic researchers can perform analyses and get results that used to take a year or more in just a couple of weeks. VC Investors are always adjusting their "Play Book" with a variety of options for investing. Mikal Ventures is one of those alternatives, offering curated solutions to real world problems. Reach out if you have questions on how we can be of assistance and bookmark https://mikalventures.com/ for additional insights and information.

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its not just about VC/investor appetite for more mature start-ups where the risk is relatively less, its the turn now of VCs being treated the same by LPs. very likely to happen in India as well if not already happening. The infamous long tail in VC universe is very much going to be a reality.

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Food as medicine is becoming more and more real.

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A very succinct representation of energy / power as it relates to our daily lives. Very useful and helpful in all sorts of ways for all whether you are thinking your business economics, operational planning, carbon footprint. But most of all in big picture perspective.

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