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Dialectic Ep. 27: Mackenzie Burnett - Accounting for America I talked to Mackenzie Burnett 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 Ambrook, 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: https://dialectic.fm/mackenzie-burnett Video, podcast, Zora, Pods links below.

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