Briefly describe your work with agtech and explain what motivates you to invest your time in this work.

As Manager of Kirchner Impact Foundation, one of my responsibilities is to manage our portfolio of food and ag investments, ~67% of which are in agtech. In addition to managing the portfolio, I oversee engagement with pipeline companies, also within agtech, and provide technical assistance where possible. Agriculture plays an outsized role in climate change and I am motivated to seek out investment opportunities that fundamentally change the way our food is produced and consumed and accessed. I have many motivations beyond interests in ecological sustainability, mostly related to social change and social justice but I am enthusiastic about all of these aspects.

Briefly explain any commitments to sustainability that you or your organization bring to your work on agtech innovation. Be as specific as possible regarding what kinds of social and environmental impacts you aim to produce, and the relevant strategies you are pursuing.

We monitor a number of environmental sustainability metrics, reported on by our agtech portfolio companies and aim to help them measure with more precision where possible. Some of these metrics include:

• Carbon emissions and sequestration
• Water efficiency and utilization (a number of metrics)
• (Smallholder, often) farmer income changes

Briefly describe the way(s) in which you assess/measure social and environmental impact in your work on agtech innovation.

I believe this was answered in my previous response, but in addition to environmental impact, we measure social impact in terms of:

• Producer income changes
• % of leadership and staff that identify as women, LGBTQI+, and BIPOC or Latinx
• On the capital allocation side (we have investor training programs within the agtech/food space), we also measure a number diversity attributes, dollars deployed by our alumni, to name a few

Our research and this workshop aim to investigate tensions between the demands/imperatives of the tech-finance industry and the demands/imperatives of social-environmental problem solving. Please comment on this problem frame in general, and in relation to specific examples from your own experience.

The two most important “tensions” I can think of are the conditions which the “tech-finance industry” often demands in terms of scalability and growth and the resources required to do IMM (impact measurement and management) properly. In my work, I run up against these challenges often. For example, there are many cases where we will not invest in a company that we know will have social/environmental impact because they have a fundamental barrier to achieving the scale that we expect within a VC (albeit impact VC) context. On the other note, the resources required (and who bears the cost of them) for proper IMM is a continual risk to ensuring intended impact is achieved. We encounter this a lot in our portfolio optimization practice that clients want to/are willing to do the minimum because they have an established cost structure that they are unwilling to add to.

To investigate the tensions suggested above, we rely on the concept of “mission drift”. We understand mission drift as a tendency for social and environmental impact commitments of individuals and organizations to leak out over time due to pressures and opportunities to expand revenue, valuation and capital gains. Our project aims to investigate mission drift applied to entrepreneurial ventures as well as to organizations dedicated to supporting innovation. Please comment on this thesis in general, and in relation to specific things you have experienced where possible. To the extent you find this thesis useful, what strategies can you identify to defend against mission drift?

I believe my previous response answered this question in part.
One thing we do in our fund design process is to build in a more accurate budget for IMM, but this only applies to new funds (although this is where the majority of LPs spend their time thinking).
In relation to our portfolio companies, we have little control as a minority/small check investor. In cases where the portco truly values our feedback and the connections/TA we are able to offer them, we do have some influence on helping them stay true to their impact commitments. The reality is, though: we invest at such early stages that the companies are principally concerned with cash management and staying afloat. One thing I have recently started doing is giving talks (industry events, etc) on IMM as business opportunity, and that seems to be pretty effective, at least initially, at getting early stage companies to commit to the process.

Please share something you would like to take away from the workshop.

I want to understand how are others are thinking about the questions I just responded to.