My guest for Episode 143 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & Executive Chairman of AgriWebb, Justin Webb.

Describing Justin as a successful serial entrepreneur, would not be doing justice to his background.

He studied economics and applied mathematics at Harvard and did a post-graduate MBA at Oxford. He would then take his work on the application of Machine Learning and AI in asset management to found and grow 2 hedge funds before selling them to Macquarie Bank and Westpac.

He then went on to found and build PacWealth Capital into a $4Bn Advisory firm in the South Pacific.

He is now the Co-founder & Executive Chairman of AgriWebb which is on the mission to digitise on-farm production data.

Since launching 6 years ago, the company manages over 15m head of livestock across 90m acres around the globe and recently raised a $30M Series B round, valuing the company north of $100M.

In this interview we covered a range of topics including:

• AgriWebb’s journey to $100M valuation
• How to attract and retain great talent
• How to find your believers and early adopters
• The future of Agtech
• & much more!

Timestamps 

•  2.53 – Justin’s background before and leading up to starting AgriWebb
•  6.51 – The parallels between sport and business following Justin’s past as a Rower 
•  10.37 – How Justin started two hedge funds that were eventually sold to Westpac and Macquarie
• 13.37 – Moving back to Australia and getting involved in family business
• 16.22 – Where the idea for AgriWebb stemmed from and advice for finding a business idea for early stage founders
• 21.33 – Building a great team 
• 29.01 – Finding the early adopter customer in traditionally slow to market industries
• 34.36 – Choosing when and how to respond to customer feedback when creating features
• 42.01 – Managing a growing team and how the founders role changes as the team grows
• 47.42 – Building family first culture within a team and building culture remotely 
• 1.00.37 – Where to find AgriWebb and Justin 

Links Mentioned 

Justin Webbs’ Links 

• AgriWebb 
• Justin Webb – Linked In 

People 

• Rachael Neumann
• Al Bentley
• Kevin Baum (Justins’ Co-founder) 
• John Fargher (Justins’ Co-founder) 
• Chris Coe
• Philip Chan (AgriWebb Chief Product Officer)
• Kenny Sabir (AgriWebb Head of Engineering)
• Eric Martinez de Morentin (AgriWebb Development Manager) 
• Paul Parton (AgriWebb Software Engineer)
• Laurence Hey (AgriWebb Lead Software Engineer)
• Kogulan Baskaran (AgriWebb Senior Software Engineer)

Past Episodes 

• Ep142 – Al Bentley
• Ep57 – Rachael Neumann
• Ep130 – Rachael Neumann

Special Thanks:

Special thanks to Kevin Baum and Chris Coe for their help with research for this interview ? .

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams

Other channels:

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