I talked to Mackenzie Burnett (@ciaomack) about building financial tools for the independent businesses of America's heartland. Mackenzie is the template of a deeply serious, strategic, and tactical entrepreneur whose engine is not purely ambition, but purpose. Hearing her talk about the big and small of her work is infectious. With @AmbrookAg, Mackenzie is focused on enabling the American Dream and by way of bottom-up resilience. She calls it Grassroots American Dynamism. She combines a rare combination of knowledge across technology, agriculture, policy, and finance that has shaped Ambrook's ability to deliver great financial software for underserved customers, starting with farmers and ranchers. Highlights: - the government's complexity: we treat it like a black box that is either fully incompetent or fully trusted; in fact it is many individuals--mostly non-political appointees--responding to incentives - pragmatic environmentalism: meet people where they are with outcomes rather than ideology - language matters: “resilience” travels further than “sustainability” - "biological factories": why farms are deceptively complex businesses - "everything goes back to accounting": Wading into complexity is freeing: it enables long-term thinking, better decision-making, and lower anxiety - "make the intractable tractable": the CEO’s job is to ingest lots of information and turn messy problems into solvable ones - explore with niche entry points: generalized explanations or histories can be appealing, but specificity can be more meaningful (like understanding Italy by way of citrus) - physical design systems: why aesthetics and spaces matter Transcript and all links below.