Samir Bakhru:

Welcome to the Future Fountain, a podcast series dedicated to conversations about the tech ecosystem, brought to you by Orrick and NYU Future Labs. I’m Samir Bakhru and today we’re thrilled to have as our guest, Eli Pollak. Eli is a longtime friend of the firm but, more importantly, he’s also the founder and CEO of Apollo Agriculture. Apollo is a Kenyan-based commercial farming platform that helps small-scale farmers maximize their profits. Apollo has reached more than 100,000 farmers and just recently closed their Series B financing led by SoftBank. Prior to founding Apollo, Eli helped build The Climate Corporation, which provides customized recommendations to large-scale farmers using machine learning. Eli studied engineering at Stanford, and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. Eli, thanks so much for joining us, we’re really excited to have you for this discussion. I know it’s been a long time coming.

Eli Pollak:

Thanks, Samir. It’s a pleasure to be on, and looking forward to our conversation today.

Samir:

Absolutely. Let’s dive right in. First and foremost, tell us about your career path: How did you come to start Apollo with Earl and Ben all the way in Kenya?

Eli:

Thanks, Samir. So it was initially climate change that took me to agriculture. So back in undergrad, I stayed in engineering, thought that I was going to do a PhD, perhaps work on energy hardware, but I caught the software bug and ended up just excited about the opportunities afforded by being able to build a piece of technology and get it out to farmers. And so I ended up at a company that was helping the world’s people and businesses manage and adapt to climate change, and that company when I joined was called WeatherBill, and eventually became The Climate Corporation. And so there, just got that much more excited about agriculture, both in terms of its importance in helping address the challenges of climate change, but also just as an industry that had been so much less affected by data and software than so many of the other industries. So, [I] was lucky to spend around four years there, got the help to grow it from a small company to a usage across more than 70 million acres, and just had an amazing journey there. I think that while I was there, just one of the things that I got excited about was this sense that, okay, here we are in the U.S., as important as this work is—and it’s important work—you know, our big goal was to help a U.S. farmer increase their production 3, 4, 5%. And I think I’d look around at the time and say, wow, that’s amazing. I’m so excited about working with this grower in Illinois or in Iowa, but what might that look like globally? And I think one of the things that I saw was that there were farmers who were producing, you know, 10, 20% of what U.S. farmers are producing, and I think I wondered, you know, is there the opportunity to build something, at least for me, fundamentally more exciting and fundamentally bigger that might not only operate perhaps across more acres, but might help a farmer double, triple, quadruple their production rather than gain 2, 3, 4, 5%? And so, that was the sort of seed of the idea that became Apollo. And I was incredibly fortunate to team up with Ben and with Earl. Earl, our CTO, a former colleague from The Climate Corporation, [I] got to know him there, built a lot of trust just chipping product together. And Ben was a friend who I think really I connected with, as I began to explore that idea and I think we just felt like we needed to work together. We had a shared vision, and so we founded Apollo together and we’ve been working on it together since then.

Samir:

And how did you guys land on, sort of, Africa as the beachhead market for you and Kenya as the landing spot? Was that driven by your relationship with Ben, or your understanding of that being a key market to start in, versus, you know, in India or another, or Latin America? Tell us a little bit about that.

Eli:

So I think there’s huge opportunities in agriculture and in agri-tech across emerging markets broadly. I mean, what we’re seeing in India at the moment in agri-tech is amazing, what we’re seeing in Lat-Am is amazing, but I think we felt, as we explored it, that starting in Kenya was the right first market for us for a variety of reasons. First off, as you said, Ben’s Kenyan, and so it made sense to start in the place that we knew best as a team, and so that was a great place to start. I think there are also some really exciting things about the Kenyan market. Certainly I’m not the first to remark on these, but widespread mobile money adoption and range of other technology makes it an exciting market. So I think the combination of Ben being from there and the technology landscape made it a great place for us to start.

Samir:

Makes sense. So, tell us a little bit about, you know, obviously you started Apollo 7, 8 years ago, that’s when this concept came together. Data and the tech ecosystem was very different then, especially the way people thought about fintech companies as well, where did the business and the products start? How did it—you know, what was the initial product, what was the thought behind it and how has it evolved over time to where it is today?

Eli:

So, coming from working on agri-tech in the U.S., so much of agri-tech in the U.S. is about sort of what I would describe as the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for a farmer. You know, how do we take this extremely optimized system and either optimize it further or perhaps optimize it for something different, for a more sustainable system? And I think as we dug in on the opportunity in East Africa, what we saw was that some of the opportunities were more fundamental. So, whereas in the U.S. it was all about how do we optimize this highly optimized system, what we saw was the chance to partner with a farmer and help them access, in some cases, much more fundamental agricultural products and services. And what we found is that if you could help a farmer, for example, access a high-quality hybrid seed, access to planting in top-dressed fertilizer, high-quality advice, insurance to protect them and then above all, financing, to enable them to invest and realize that big return come harvest, that you could see dramatic increases in production right off the bat. And so, in many ways the challenge was a bit less, how do we help a farmer increase their production—since we had a good sense of tools that could drive dramatic increases in production and profitability for small-scale farmers, and that we’d seen those tools work in other markets across the world, but much more—how do we help a farmer access those tools in a way that’s actually profitable and scalable for us as a business.

Samir:

Makes perfect sense. And I guess one question I’d like to ask you is, what was the reception by farmers in Africa initially and, also, has that changed over time? I assume that in other markets, maybe like the U.S., there wasn’t as much resistance towards it, it was probably a little bit easier to get widespread adoption. What were some of the unique challenges that you faced in terms of getting widespread adoption and getting people to sort of be receptive to this in Kenya and Africa generally?

Eli:

So, I mean, I think we’ve been really lucky to have really excited reception from our customers. And I think a lot of that comes from our product strategy, which I give my co-founder Ben a lot of credit for. You know, we might be at heart a technology business, but we’ve worked really hard to develop a product for our customers that doesn’t require them to want to buy a technology product. And so for a customer, they might wonder, how can I ensure that I get access to a high-quality seed or high-quality fertilizer, and the financing that I need to invest, or the insurance that I need to protect me in a bad year? And our technology is doing all that work in the background to make it possible for the farmer to access that product at a great price in a reliable way, but that farmer, they don’t necessarily need to be tech-savvy or wish to consume a technology product in order to make it work. And so, we’ve worked really hard from day one to meet customers where they are, deliver value, earn their trust, and then build the relationship from there into products that might be able to further increase their profitability or drive additional improvements to their farming operation.

Samir:

Makes perfect sense. And on the flip side of that, as you build your team and as you build the company, naturally, the talent market is really hot right now and there’s a war out there to get the best people, as there has been for the last few years. How do you and Apollo think about that? What are some of the tools that you deploy to get people to join, given that you’re not a Silicon Valley-based company that is throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars to tech employees to leave from Google?

Eli:

That’s a great question. You know, by and large I think what we’ve seen is that people are looking to do work that they find exciting and meaningful. And so I feel incredibly fortunate to get to show up at work every day and work on something that not only do I find it intellectually interesting, not only do I enjoy the people that I work with, but that I truly believe has the possibility of improving the lives of millions of people. So, I think that one of the things that really aligns us across the Apollo team is a commitment and an excitement about working on something that fills our souls. I think at the same time, we’ve been able to build a value proposition of the company that says, hey, you know what, we probably can’t pay you what Google pays you, or what Amazon pays you, at least not in cash. Maybe in stock, right? {laughter} But, what we can do is we can build a compensation package that’s going to allow you to live really well, build a team that you’re going to be incredibly excited to work with, and then bring all that together in the context of a company that is going to get you out of bed in the morning feeling jazzed and excited. And so I think what we’ve found is that our value proposition is super strong for hiring and that despite the obvious challenges and complexities of the hiring market, that we continue to be able to hire top-tier talent.

Samir:

Yeah, I mean, it says a lot about your culture and being a purpose-driven company and a mission-driven company. You guys have been that way since the beginning. And to ask you a related question, you’ve been on the forefront of being a remote-working company for a long time, way before COVID. I’m sure the founders out there and other companies out there would love to hear your thoughts on, how do you manage a remote workforce, and what are some of the tools to success in doing so?

Eli:

So, I mean, I’m sure that you’ve got plenty of clients and listeners who could teach me a lot about remote working, but it is true that we’ve always been, from the beginning, distributed. So, Ben and I have been based in Nairobi—at the beginning almost all of us were based in Nairobi, but I think as we’ve grown the team, we found it important to recruit globally, and so we’ve ended up with a team all over the world. And so I think for us, we were on Zoom and Google Meets, and that was a constant present in our meetings, you know, well before we had any idea what COVID was. And so I think one of the tools that has been incredibly valuable for us and certainly not anything we invented, but is pre-read documents. So, every time we have a meeting, we make sure that we come in with whoever’s leading that meeting having put together a document that outlines the goals of the meeting, what you need to know in advance, and then just like—or similar to how they do it at Amazon, folks will come in and they’ll read that document and that’ll be the driver for the conversation. And so we’ve found that both enables really great consistent sharing of information regardless of where somebody is, but also enables somebody who wasn’t able to attend that meeting to get a sense for what happened. And I think that’s particularly important in the context of not only multiple locations, but multiple time zones. The other thing that I’d say, and others may be better at this than we have, but just to be very candid, while I think we’ve been very successful with remote, we’ve struggled with remote across tons of time zones. So, you know, early on, we said hey, let’s hire in California. During the winter, it’s an 11-hour time zone difference between California and Kenya. And I think we’ve just found that, practically, that’s hard. I think we’ve worked really hard to keep people within at least a generally consistent time zone, and I think for us, that’s made distributed working pretty straightforward for the most part.

Samir:

That’s amazing to hear. My next question for you is, you’ve had tremendous success in building this company, you recently closed this financing round. What’s next for Apollo? And where do you see agri-tech going generally, over the next 5 to 7 years?

Eli:

So our mission is helping small-scale farmers make more money. And, you know, I think that mission is pretty all-weather. So, we started off helping farmers access the financing, the products and the optimized advisory tools that they need to invest, whether they’re growing maize or another crop. And, you know, one thing we’re doing is we’re accelerating that, so we’re going to do that for more farmers, across more acres, across more geographies. I also think, though, that we have a tremendous opportunity to expand the solutions that we provide to farmers. So today, for example, we help a farmer from planting, all the way to harvest, but there’s a key part of the farmer’s life cycle which is that time from harvest to when they sell their crop, where today, we don’t help much, and we get a lot of feedback from customers on that. You know, why don’t you help me sell this crop that you’ve helped me produce? And so we think there’s a lot of exciting opportunities to continue to expand what we’re working on and the value that we deliver to farmers.

And I think, ultimately, what we want to be is the brand, that one brand that farmers trust to access the products, the services and the financing that they need to grow and invest on their farm. I think for agri-tech globally, it’s a super exciting moment and there’s just such a diversity of stuff happening, right? I mean, we have everything from completely automated indoor farming producing higher-quality produce at lower cost, to products like us that are focused on helping small-scale farmers access what in the U.S. would be considered relatively fundamental tools that previously haven’t been available. And so, obviously, I’m particularly excited about the emerging market’s opportunity. And I think that to me is exciting both commercially because, just as an example, sub-Saharan Africa has somewhere around 20% of the world’s farmland, yet farmers there are producing between 10 and 20% of what U.S. farmers are producing, and so the opportunity to both generate commercial value but also to improve the lives of millions of people is profound. And I think you see similar opportunities in India, and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and so I think that to me, agriculture represents this opportunity to build powerful, amazing, lasting businesses, but that are very much positive sum for customers, and deliver amazing value for customers, as well as delivering that value for the companies themselves.

Samir:

We totally agree. Couldn’t agree more. We’re seeing tons and tons of companies out there that are building unique products and in various emerging markets all over the world and are changing people’s lives. Speaking of which—and transitioning to the investment side of this a bit—I think it would be really interesting for the founders out there that are listening and also thinking about building a company in the emerging market space to hear from you, how have you seen an evolution in the market from an investor standpoint, in terms of, one, investing in emerging market companies generally, but also how investors view start-ups in the ESG space? And how has that changed over time?

Eli:

So it’s been a journey. I’d say we’ve been really fortunate; we’ve been able to access capital and invest and grow our business. And, you know, this recent financing—while perhaps not huge by current U.S.-centric standards—is huge for us and is going to allow us to deliver just immense value for our customers. When we were first raising capital back in 2016, I think a lot of people felt like we might have lost our minds. Rural, Africa, all of these trends that people were thinking about, I think they kind of felt like perhaps we were looking in the opposite direction. And that was okay. We were lucky to have some amazing people who believed in us from the beginning—folks who were coming from an impact perspective and were able to see the powerful possibilities that could be afforded by what we were building, but also folks who were willing to take a bet from a commercial perspective on something that looked exciting and on a great team that brought together not only experience in a Silicon Valley company, but deep knowledge of the market that they were operating in. But it was definitely challenging and it’s been exciting to see over the last 5, 6 years that start to change. You know, I do think that there’s been a big change over the last year in terms of availability of capital in particularly East and West Africa. And that’s been really exciting to see. And so, I think there’s been a big change since we started, and I’m excited to see that continue, because there’s just so many fantastic entrepreneurs operating in this market and I think investors frankly have been missing out. If you’re in San Francisco and Kenya just feels too far away, obviously I understand that, you want to invest in the stuff you know, but I think that so many of the biggest opportunities over the next 20 years are going to be in new markets. And so it’s been really heartening and exciting to see investors start to get boots on the ground, start to really study and understand these markets and really start to invest.

Samir:

What are some of the challenges as a founder in terms of garnering investment when you’re an emerging market-focused company, and what advice would you give to new founders today as they’re looking to start companies in Africa, Latin America, India, etc.?

Eli:

You know, I think one challenge, and this obviously isn’t true across the board, but I think in many cases the conventional wisdom, it tends to at least be in the U.S., do one thing and do it incredibly well. And that’s great advice if you can do it. But I think one of the things that we found is, we wanted to help farmers make more money and it turned out in order to help farmers make more money, we had to help them access financing, but in order to help make that financing valuable, we had to help them access the ways that they could use that financing. And in order to help them access the ways to use that financing, we wanted to provide them advisory support and so, you know, we’ve often over the years gotten this question of, right but what’s the one thing that you do best that fundamentally differentiates you? And we’ve had to say, look, there’s a number of things that we think fundamentally differentiate us, but ultimately it’s that core value proposition and the delivery of a differentiated product at a fantastic price to the farmer that makes us different. And so I do think that building a product in a market where you can’t rely on—you just plug into Gusto and Stripe and the rest is history—is different, and it requires a different attitude as a founder and it requires a different comfort level as an investor. And so, I think one thing that I would say is you do have to be able to trust your gut as a founder about what’s going to be needed to deliver amazing value to your customers and stay just relentlessly focused on what it is going to take to deliver that value, regardless of what others might say. I also think that having strong diversity on teams is absolutely critical. So, I’d be nowhere without my co-founder, Ben. I mean, he’s the shining light at Apollo and the voice of the customer and so, he has made everything possible, and so I think we’d never be where we are today without having a really strong and diverse team.

Samir:

That’s amazing to hear, and we’d also love to hear how those of us that play in the tech ecosystem—be it investors, advisors, lawyers, accountants, etc., other founders—how can we be better partners to those companies and founders that are trying to build something unique that changes people’s lives in an emerging market?

Eli:

You know, I think one of the most exciting trends that I’ve seen is—at least looking at it from an investment perspective—funds really starting to not just invest from afar but really to build teams in capacity, in Nairobi, or in Lagos, or in Johannesburg, or in Cairo. I think it’s really only by deeply embedding in one of those ecosystems can you really understand it and see what’s happening from a talent perspective and where those most exciting companies are going to be. And so I think one thing is just really deeply getting to know the ecosystems and not assuming that the investment thesis that’s working in San Francisco is necessarily going to be the same as the investment thesis, because that investment thesis might preclude you from noticing an incredibly exciting team or an incredibly exciting market that doesn’t pattern match to what you’re looking for in the Bay Area. You know, I think that most of the most of the most valuable companies both in emerging markets over the next 10 years may not pattern match to what these VCs have been investing in over the last 10 years in San Francisco, and so I think the VCs who adapt and understand that it’s going to be a different set of skills, the teams are going to be different, look different, think different, are going to be the ones who not only generate outside returns but are also part of building really powerful lasting businesses.

Samir:

My final question then for you is, are you optimistic?

Eli:

I am optimistic. This is a time where there’s plenty to be pessimistic about, whether that’s climate change, returning to the beginning of our call, whether that’s the ongoing war in Ukraine, but ultimately, I mean, I look to people like our customers and they’re still optimistic, and they are dealing with far more hardship than most of us deal with on a day-to-day basis. And so they can get out and deal with a drought, or deal with a doubling in their cost of fertilizer—which is what we’ve seen happen this year—and still get out there and keep farming, and keep on going, then who am I to be held different? So, I am optimistic. You know, I don’t think I could run this business if I wasn’t fundamentally an optimist, agri is just too punishing. You know, if it’s not a drought or a locust that gets you, it’s a dissolution of global supply chains, but I think if I look out 5 years, 10 years, I think the future’s bright. And I think we just got to keep working, and pushing towards the abundant future that we want to see.

Samir:

We’re proud to be your partner. It’s been amazing growth to see, and we’re thrilled to work with you to see where this goes over the next 4 to 5 years, so we’re really looking forward to it. Thanks for joining us, Eli; thank you for joining us for the Future Fountain and giving us a little bit of your time today.

Eli:

Thanks for having me on. It’s such a pleasure to talk and very grateful to be a friend of Orrick.