Being an Entrepreneur | March 2026
- Chris Herbert
- 1 day ago
- 15 min read
Featured in this Post
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AgriFood Tech Investing
EcoTech Capital's Adam Bergman delivers a blunt assessment of the agrifoodtech investment landscape: 2026 will likely see the largest number of agtech and foodtech bankruptcies, restructurings, and fire sales to date.
A cohort of "zombie" startups — kept alive through internal safe rounds without meaningful market traction — are running out of runway.
The deeper problem is a vicious cycle: the sector raised roughly $40 billion but has returned only about $2 billion, and the big corporate acquirers (Bayer, Syngenta, FMC, Corteva) are all dealing with their own structural challenges.
With no exits, existing funds hoard capital for portfolio companies and struggle to raise new funds, while private equity avoids the sector entirely due to lack of EBITDA.
Despite the correction, Bergman remains long-term bullish — and his most actionable insight may be about where winning technology actually comes from. As he notes, technology developed specifically for the ag sector takes a long time to reach adoption and will be used at such low quantities that costs stay high. But automation, robotics, and AI developed in other industries arrive proven, validated, scaled, and at lower cost — dramatically improving the path to farmer ROI.
The article sparked sharp commentary from practitioners across the sector. Ag entrepreneur Sam Duncan, who has lived through these dynamics firsthand, argues that founders shouldn't lock their technology into a single vertical. The smarter play is to harness tech from adjacent industries to serve agriculture, and equally, to expand agtech innovations into sectors with parallel use cases — automated tractor technology applied in mining, gardening, or even space.
Duncan points out that investors bear some responsibility, compartmentalizing technology into narrow verticals for portfolio clarity, which pushes founders toward over-specialization. As he puts it, the world's largest advertising technology company — Google — certainly didn't start out that way.
Contributors to the discussion added further ground-level reality checks. If there is no experienced farmer on the team, that's already a red flag — too many startups build solutions without understanding the operational realities of low and seasonal margins, sparse data points, farmer reluctance to adopt, unpredictable weather, and the ongoing economic impacts of geopolitical conflict.
The practical advice: focus first on building hardware at scalable cost, which establishes the foundational data layer before further development can proceed. Get the economics of the physical product right before layering on software and intelligence — the reverse of what many VC-backed agtech companies have attempted.
However, as Zhao Yan Cheah noted, even that strategy carries geographic constraints: building hardware at scale may be an option in Asia, but it is not viable in many countries with declining manufacturing capacity.
For Canadian and Western agtech founders, this is a critical planning consideration — your hardware supply chain strategy may need to be international by design, adding complexity and cost that must be factored into unit economics from day one.
Others in the discussion pointed to a harder truth underpinning the entire sector's struggles: greed. Many of the underlying technologies are generic, but agriculture is exceptionally hard to get started in — seasonal, conservative, slow to adopt, with poor historical returns for investors.
It is not fertile ground for developing technologies in the context of declining manufacturing and dwindling R&D expenditure. But the commenters also offered something closer to optimism than Bergman's long-horizon patience: in this desert, only the toughest survive — and those who survive are likely to thrive.
The shakeout is brutal, but the companies that emerge from it with real unit economics, domain credibility, and customers who pay will face far less competition and far more receptive markets.
For entrepreneurs, the combined takeaway is clear: start with non-dilutive capital like grants, which can be transformative compared to venture capital that may not be available anyway.
Build toward profitability rather than the next funding round. Include real agricultural experience on your team. Think about your technology as a platform with cross-industry applications, not a product confined to one vertical. Sequence your development — scalable hardware and reliable data first, then intelligence on top — but be realistic about where and how that hardware gets manufactured. The survivors of this correction won't just endure. They'll own the market that remains.
Date: March 23, 2026 | Sources: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AgriFood Tech Investing – AgFunder News | LinkedIn Discussion – Sam Duncan
The Real Secret to Scaling Support: A Chain of Trust
An early Weebly employee shares hard-won lessons from scaling customer support from 600 emails a week to 20,000.
The turning point came from a single call with Mailchimp's support lead, who handled the same email volume with a team four times larger — a conversation that finally unlocked permission to hire.
But the hiring philosophy mattered as much as the headcount: rather than building a scripted call centre, the author sought people who were technically sharp, strong writers, and brought their own voice to every interaction.
That talent came from unexpected places — a technical writer in Georgia found through hiremymom.com and a software engineering student in Canada, both hired remotely years before remote work was mainstream.
The deeper lesson was about trust. As volume grew, the author began answering the co-founder's emails as the co-founder, and the two most trusted hires began answering the author's emails in turn. The chain of trust scaled the team's humanity rather than replacing it with process.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, this piece challenges two common instincts: that scaling means standardizing, and that delegating means cloning yourself. The most effective support teams don't sound identical — they sound human. And the path to letting go starts with hiring people you trust enough to represent you, then actually letting them do it. Competence and speed matter more than polish, and customers can tell the difference.
Date: March 2026 | Source: Newsletter (LinkedIn/Substack)
How to Make Your Next Hire Count
Quo founder Daryna Kulya shares two practical lessons from tracking every hire she's made, focused on making leadership recruitment sharper and more effective.
First, she recommends identifying each candidate's "major" and "minor" — rather than searching for a generic title like "marketing leader," define the two or three capabilities most critical for the next 18 months. A Head of Marketing hired to build a new category, for example, needs a major in product marketing and a minor in growth. That specificity narrows the search and dramatically improves fit.
Second, she argues founders should ditch the traditional 30-60-90 day plan request in interviews. Without real context, candidates produce vague, generic answers. Instead, pose a specific, real challenge the role will face — how would you handle a customer threatening to leave over a price increase? — and evaluate how the candidate actually thinks through the problem.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, these are immediately actionable insights. Most hiring mistakes at the growth stage come from poorly defined roles and interview processes that test presentation skills rather than problem-solving ability.
The "major and minor" framework is especially useful for small teams where every hire carries outsized impact — it forces founders to articulate what they actually need rather than defaulting to a job description template. Both lessons point to the same principle: precision in hiring comes from knowing your business's real priorities, not from following conventional process.
Date: March 2026 | Source: Founders Corner – Daryna Kulya
How To Make A Difference
Saskatchewan farmer Jake Leguee reflects on eight years serving on the board of the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission (SaskWheat), and what that experience taught him about leadership, governance, and letting go.
He joined the board in 2017, eventually becoming chair, helping the organization join Cereals Canada and the Grain Growers of Canada, funding millions in research, and building relationships with legislators, international grain importers, and scientists.
But the personal growth mattered as much as the institutional achievements: he learned how to speak to government, manage conflict, collaborate effectively, and develop professional governance skills that transformed how he manages his own farm.
When his term ended, he confronted an uncomfortable truth — the organization moved on without him, and that's exactly how it should work.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, this essay is a quiet but powerful argument for getting involved in industry boards, commissions, and community organizations — even when the timing feels impossible.
The leadership, governance, and stakeholder management skills developed through volunteer board service translate directly into running a better business.
Leguee is candid that it consumed time, caused stress, and pulled him away from family and farm. But the professional networks, the ability to navigate government and institutional relationships, and the governance discipline he gained were transformational. When the call comes, take it. And figure the rest out later.
Date: March 22, 2026 | Source: How To Make A Difference – A Year in the Life of a Farmer
Five Canadian Scaleups Crack Thrive Top 50 AgTech Companies List
Five Canadian companies have been named to the 2026 Thrive Top 50 AgTech Companies list, recognized as among the most innovative scaleups shaping the future of agriculture and food systems.
The companies span the country: BC-based 4AG Robotics (mushroom-harvesting robots), Kitchener-Waterloo's BinSentry (remote animal feed monitoring), Halifax's Milk Moovement (dairy supply chain software), Quebec's Entosystem (insect-based animal feed protein), and Mississauga's Vive Crop Protection (precision crop chemistry).
Two additional Calgary-based startups — Brilliant Harvest and Cellar Insights — made the separate 10-company "Rising Stars" list for high-potential early-stage companies.
Companies were assessed on funding, revenue growth, market traction, partnerships, team strength, and sustainability impact.
RELATED: Government Grants for Agriculture: What Canadian Agri-Food Businesses Actually Need to Know
For Canadian entrepreneurs, this list signals real momentum in an often-overlooked sector. AgTech sits at the intersection of several macro trends: food security, climate adaptation, labour shortages in agriculture, and supply chain optimization.
These aren't moonshot plays — BinSentry raised a $68.8-million CAD Series C, and 4AG Robotics was tracking toward $7 million in revenue. The breadth of Canadian representation — from Atlantic Canada to BC, across robotics, SaaS, biotech, and precision chemistry — suggests a maturing ecosystem with diverse entry points.
For founders in rural and agricultural communities, AgTech offers a path to build globally competitive businesses rooted in local industry knowledge.
Date: March 19, 2026 | Source: Five Canadian Scaleups Crack Thrive Top 50 AgTech Companies List
Anthropic Economic Index Report: How AI Is Reshaping Work and Productivity
Anthropic's fourth Economic Index report analyzes how Claude is being used across the global economy, drawing on millions of anonymized conversations.
Key findings: usage remains heavily concentrated in coding-related tasks, with the top 10 most common tasks accounting for 24% of sampled conversations. However, usage is diversifying — educational and creative writing tasks are growing, and businesses are increasingly using Claude to automate back-office workflows like email management, document processing, and scheduling.
The report estimates that widespread AI adoption could increase US labour productivity growth by approximately 1.0 to 1.8 percentage points annually over the next decade, depending on task reliability and complementarity assumptions.
Critically, how users prompt Claude determines how effective it can be — the education levels of human prompts and AI responses are nearly perfectly correlated.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, two insights stand out. First, AI delivers the greatest time savings on complex, higher-skill tasks — not just simple automation. Founders who invest in learning to prompt effectively will extract disproportionately more value.
Second, the shift toward AI-powered back-office automation (scheduling, invoicing, email triage) is accelerating in enterprise settings. Small businesses that adopt these workflows early gain a real operational advantage.
The report reinforces that AI skill development isn't optional — it's becoming foundational infrastructure for competitiveness.
Date: January 15, 2026 | Source: Anthropic Economic Index Report: Economic Primitives
Unscale the Internet
Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler reflects on a recent experience that crystallized a growing tension in online life: after sharing an essay that garnered hundreds of likes and over 200,000 views on X, waves of hostile responses flooded in — academic gatekeeping, anonymous trolls, and critics whose throughline was dismissal rather than engagement.
The experience became a live demonstration of the thesis he'd been developing with collaborator Josh Citarella: that the Web 2.0 assumption of pursuing infinite scale has been so deeply internalized that it now distorts how we approach work, creativity, and relationships. Scale doesn't just amplify the signal you want — it hands a megaphone to everyone else too.
Strickler's response is a call to "unscale" — to build and participate in smaller, private internet spaces where ideas can develop without performative hostility. He's building toward this vision through DFOS (Dark Forest OS), a project focused on shared private digital environments. AREA 81 offers such an environment called Nexus.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, this piece challenges a default assumption: that bigger reach always equals better outcomes. Many founders invest heavily in public visibility — social media, content marketing, broad audience growth — without weighing the costs of exposure at scale. Strickler's argument is a reminder that curated, trusted, smaller communities, such as AREA 81, often produce more meaningful engagement, better client relationships, and less operational noise. Our attention and energy are too scarce to treat scale as the only metric that matters.
Date: March 2026 | Source: Unscale the Internet – Yancey Strickler
Forget the Business Plan. This 10-Slide Deck Helped Me Raise Millions
Fintech founder Ksenia Yudina shares how she abandoned a 40-page business plan in favour of a concise 10-slide pitch deck — and saw immediate results in investor conversations. After weeks building a detailed plan at UCLA, she found that no investor asked for it; nearly every conversation started with a request for a short pitch deck or one-pager.
The insight: early-stage investors evaluate opportunities based on clarity of the problem, conviction in the founder's insight, and how quickly they can understand what makes a company worth backing — not by studying long documents. Her 10-slide framework covers five essentials across paired slides: the problem, the solution, why the timing matters, early progress, and the founder narrative. The problem slide consistently mattered most, shifting conversations from questioning whether the opportunity existed to asking about scale, distribution, and long-term potential.
For founders without revenue, she recommends reframing traction around progress and validation — MVP development, user engagement, advisor involvement, and regulatory readiness.
For entrepreneurs preparing to raise capital, this is a practical playbook. Stop over-investing in documents nobody reads and start building a narrative investors can absorb in minutes. If you can explain your company clearly in ten slides, you're not over-simplifying — you're demonstrating that you understand it well enough to build it. That discipline applies whether you're pitching to prospective customers, partners, angels and applying for grants, or presenting to a bank.
Date: March 2, 2026 | Source: Forget the Business Plan. This 10-Slide Deck Helped Me Raise Millions
What Draws People to Harmony Centre?
Harmony Centre in Owen Sound is a versatile, multi-use community hub offering flexible spaces for organizations, performers, and community groups. The facility includes over a dozen offices and meeting rooms, three large event venues (Greaves Auditorium seating up to 500, The Commons at 1,300 square feet, and the fully accessible Lower Hall), a Health Department–approved commercial kitchen, a boardroom equipped for hybrid meetings, and studios with natural light.
Regular tenants range from performing arts groups and choirs to yoga and martial arts instructors, social service organizations like Safe 'n' Sound, and food security initiatives like Food Not Bombs.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, Harmony Centre represents a practical model worth studying: a shared infrastructure approach that reduces overhead for multiple organizations simultaneously. The facility demonstrates how flexible space design — hourly, daily, or long-term rentals — can serve diverse needs without requiring any single tenant to carry the full cost of a professional venue.
For those launching community-facing businesses, teaching practices, or creative ventures, spaces like this eliminate the capital barrier of securing dedicated premises. The commercial kitchen, in particular, offers a low-risk entry point for food entrepreneurs testing concepts before investing in their own facilities.
Date: 2025 | Source: What Draws People to Harmony Centre? – Harmony Centre Newsletter
Canada's Top Startup Ecosystems Are Hemorrhaging Value and Growth Due to Structural Funding Gaps
A new report from Startup Genome and the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) reveals that Canada's three largest startup ecosystems — Waterloo, Vancouver, and Montreal — collectively lost $66 billion in ecosystem value between 2019 and 2024 relative to global peers, representing 133,000 fewer high-quality startup jobs.
According to the report, the root cause is a structural funding gap at the earliest stages: $141 million nationally at pre-seed and seed stages, and $181 million at Series A — with Series A gaps largely inherited from seed-stage deficits. Canadian seed rounds are 37–40% smaller than U.S. peers, and Canada's share of high-potential companies among the U.S., EU, and Israel dropped from 4.3% to just 1.5%.
For Canadian entrepreneurs, the implications are stark: underfunded seed stages mean slower growth, weaker follow-on investment, and increasing pressure to relocate. Domestic company formation by Canadian founders fell from 70% to 32% over four years.
The report argues that strengthening pre-seed and seed capital creates cascading benefits through the entire pipeline. Quebec's model — combining direct equity, tax credits, and accelerator partnerships — offers a replicable framework.
The Federal Budget 2025 committed $1 billion to the Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative and $750 million toward a growth-stage capital strategy beginning in 2026. Founders should watch how these structural investments reshape access to early capital over the coming years.
Date: February 25, 2026 | Source: Canada's Top Startup Ecosystems Are Hemorrhaging Value and Growth Due to Structural Funding Gaps
Bruce Power Unit 3 Is Moving Into the Final Phase of Return-to-Service
Bruce Power has begun loading fuel into its Unit 3 reactor, marking a major milestone in the unit's Major Component Replacement (MCR) outage. Following approval from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, operations staff will refuel the unit's 480 fuel channels with 5,760 fuel bundles over the coming weeks, followed by system testing, inspections, and commissioning before reconnecting to Ontario's electricity grid.
Once operational, the refurbished unit will produce enough clean electricity to power a city roughly the size of Brampton for decades. Unit 3 is the second of six units undergoing refurbishment as part of Bruce Power's Life-Extension Program, Ontario's largest privately funded clean-energy infrastructure project, which will extend the site's operations through 2064.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners in the Bruce, Grey, and Huron county region, this project carries direct economic significance. The Life-Extension Program supports approximately 22,000 jobs annually, and more than 60 supplier partners now have a local presence in the surrounding counties.
Reliable, low-cost electricity is foundational infrastructure for business competitiveness, and the long-term operational commitment through 2064 provides planning certainty for enterprises considering investment in the region. Businesses in skilled trades, supply chain services, and energy-adjacent sectors stand to benefit from sustained demand driven by ongoing refurbishment work.
Date: February 27, 2026 | Source: Bruce Power Unit 3 Is Moving Into the Final Phase of Return-to-Service
Ontario Backs Historic $250-Million Expansion of SON-Bruce Power Isotopes Partnership
Bruce Power and the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) have announced a $250-million expansion of their partnership to deliver cancer-fighting medical isotopes, creating the Gamzook'aamin aakoziwin Limited Partnership.
The investment — the largest investment support for a single Indigenous Nation in Canada — is backed by a provincial guarantee through the Indigenous Opportunities Financing Program. The expanded agreement includes a separate revenue-sharing arrangement providing $10 million annually in direct community payments, shared equally between Saugeen First Nation and the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation. The partnership now encompasses cobalt-60 production, used for both medical equipment sterilization and cancer treatment, with Ontario aiming to double medical isotope production by 2030.
For entrepreneurs and business owners, this announcement illustrates several noteworthy dynamics. First, it demonstrates how Indigenous economic reconciliation partnerships are becoming a significant channel for infrastructure investment in Ontario — creating supply chain and service opportunities around nuclear and medical technology. Second, it highlights the growing commercial value of Canada's medical isotope sector, an area where CANDU reactor technology provides a distinct competitive advantage.
Businesses in Bruce County and surrounding regions should note the expanding economic footprint of this sector, particularly as isotope production scales. The partnership model itself — combining provincial financing tools, Indigenous equity participation, and long-term revenue sharing — offers a template worth studying for entrepreneurs working in resource development or infrastructure-adjacent industries.
Date: February 27, 2026 | Source: Ontario Backs Historic $250-Million Expansion of SON-Bruce Power Gamzook'aamin aakoziwin Isotopes Partnership
Grey County Projected to Experience Strong Growth Over Next 25 Years
Grey County's population is projected to grow from 105,000 to 149,000 by 2051, according to a new growth management plan prepared by Hemson Consulting and presented to Grey County councillors.
The driving force behind this 42% increase is intra-provincial migration — people relocating from major urban centres elsewhere in Ontario, particularly from the south. Communities such as The Blue Mountains, Southgate, Hanover, and Owen Sound are expected to see the largest population increases due to their urban character and available land supply. Total households are forecast to rise from 42,350 to nearly 61,000, and Owen Sound is expected to remain Grey County's largest employment centre with around 17,000 jobs by 2051, with approximately 60,000 jobs county-wide.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, these projections signal meaningful opportunity. A 44% increase in households translates directly into growing demand for services, trades, retail, food, and professional services. The shift toward more diverse housing types — already visible in Owen Sound's apartment growth — creates openings for construction, property management, and related businesses.
However, employment growth is forecast to trail population growth due to an aging demographic, meaning businesses that serve retirees and older residents may find particularly strong demand. Entrepreneurs considering the Grey-Bruce region should factor these long-term projections into their market sizing and investment planning.
Date: February 27, 2026 | Source: Grey County Projected to Experience Strong Growth Over Next 25 Years
Comments