"Looking back with concern and humility"
SFTW Convo with Shubhang Shankar of Syngenta Ventures
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Shubhang Shankar is one of the foremost thinkers within the Agrifood community. He is the Managing Director at Syngenta Group Ventures, the venture capital arm of Syngenta Group. Shubhang and the team at Syngenta Group Ventures has invested in companies like Decibel Bio, Agrolend, Green Eye Technology, Vestaron, Sound Agriculture among others.
Shubhang has a unique and oftentimes contrarian way of looking at things. He is extremely well-read, pulls examples and analogs from multiple sources to inform his work at Syngenta Group Ventures.
He is not afraid to express his contrarian views in his own inimitable style. Shubhang and I both went to the same undergraduate college system in India (different campus). Due to this, I believe I have some sense of understanding his thought process, and where he is coming from.
My only complaint about Shubhang is he needs to publish more of his thoughts and let them out in the world. In lieu of that, given the interesting times we live in, the next best thing I could do is to get him to talk with me for an hour and a chance to pick his brain and understand how he thinks, how he makes decisions, and where he thinks the world is going..
I hope you guys enjoy reading this conversation, as much as I enjoyed having it.
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Summary of the conversation
Shubhang reflects on his previous articles and clarifies that his "anger" was more concerned about AgTech's direction. He discusses the boom-and-bust cycle in the sector, the suitability of VC funding for different types of agricultural innovations, and the importance of corporate venture capital.
He believes venture capital is crucial for starting projects but not always for seeing them through. He also touches on regional differences in entrepreneurship, particularly the U.S. as the "spiritual home" of VC, and the potential for disruption from India. Shankar advises young people entering the workforce to explore different experiences and not to feel pressured to choose a fixed career path early on.
Shubhang Shankar, image provided by Shubhang Shankar, artwork by EI
“Looking back in anger or disruption”
Rhishi Pethe: It’s 2025. About five years ago, you wrote an article (“Look Back in Anger Or Disruption that Incumbents can love – AgTech in the 2010s”) which totally blew up, for all the right reasons. You made some predictions about the future, and like always, some of them didn’t pan out. In 2024, you followed it up with a super honest look back (“Look back in (even more) Anger – a ‘Ruckblick’ four years on”), what you got right, what you didn’t. Some stuff, like the VC funding, you actually called pretty well, even if it showed up a few years late. In both articles, you said you were angry, and in 2024, even angrier. So let’s start there. How are you feeling about the industry now?
Shubhang Shankar: Firstly, rhetorical titles are tricky, you don’t know how people will interpret them. Anger isn’t really an emotion I associate closely with myself. It wasn’t about being angry. When I wrote that first article in 2020, I approached it with humility.
At its core, the intent of the article was to ask whether we’re getting stuck in a cycle of incremental innovations that aren’t bold enough, that don’t stray far enough from the straight and narrow. Or are we actually being truly disruptive? That’s what much of the article explored, can we really call what we’re doing true disruption? And then there were other parts that looked at why real disruption tends to happen the way it does.
So I approached it from the standpoint of: we have a great opportunity in front of us, could we be doing more? I wouldn’t even go so far as to say I stated definitively that we should be doing more. It was more of a question: could we be doing more? Are we focusing on the right problems, for the right people?
The concern I did express, and it wasn’t anger, came from some research I had done on clean tech. In the early 2000s, clean tech looked like a hugely promising and absolutely necessary space. But it went through a wave of failures that set the sector back and turned investors off for quite some time.
And I worried that AgTech could go the same way, not because of bad intent, but because we might focus on the wrong things, or fail to ask whether the asset class aligns with what investors expect.
And in doing so, we might disappoint investors, let customers down, and end up dimming the promise of AgTech for a while. A kind of "once burned, twice shy" effect.
The retrospective, which came four years later, circled back to those points. In 2020, I had thought it was a good moment to take stock. But the following two years, 2020 to 2022, only intensified the conditions I was concerned about.
I think it’s widely acknowledged now that those years were marked by irrational exuberance across many asset classes, including ours. And the correction that followed, that decline, was real. It affected investors, it affected companies, and it affected individuals. And I think the pain of that correction was probably deeper because of the buildup that came before.
So the second article didn’t come from a place of anger either. It came from a sense of asking: were we, as a sector, willfully blind to some of the warning signs? Did we get swept up in the hype? And honestly, that happens really easily, we’re all human.
So no, I wouldn’t say there was anger. What I felt was a need to be honest with ourselves. If we look at how much value we’ve actually delivered, to customers, to the industry, it’s clear we still have a long way to go.
If I had to sum it up, I’d say that in 2021 and 2022, maybe, like Bush in Iraq, we put up the “mission accomplished” banner too early. We mistook the influx of capital as a sign of success, when clearly, it wasn’t. Just like the lord, the market giveth, and the market taketh away, and when it taketh away, it really hurts.
That’s where I think we are as a sector right now. And the questions I raised back in 2020, unfortunately, it gives me no joy to say this, are now becoming mainstream. People are finally asking whether a given challenge is actually suitable for venture capital. And from my perspective, the answer is yes, for certain types of problems.
What I think the last few years have shown us is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for agriculture. You can’t apply pure venture capital to every fundamental issue in this space and expect it to work. That’s how I’d describe the arc between those two articles.
I work in corporate venture capital in agriculture, and I’m excited to show up and do this work every day. I still believe deeply in the long-term potential of this space. But I also think we went through a classic boom-and-bust cycle, and it left scars.
Venture Capital Model for AgTech
Rhishi Pethe: You’ve raised two big questions. First, is venture capital the right kind of funding for the types of problems we’re trying to solve? And second, are we even solving the right problems? Are we thinking big enough?
The full conversation includes Shubhang’s thoughts on the fit for the VC model within AgTech and the role of other types of capital, Corporate Venture Capital within and outside of AgTech, learnings from outside the industry, skill sets necessary for a Corporate VC, regional differences between entrepreneurs and corporate venture capital, Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory, and Shubhan’s advice for new graduates.
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