We're focusing on the wrong problem! Pablo Ricaud explains how the future of our food, agriculture, must be fixed to build a skilled respected workforce that will help create a sustainable climate.
We're focusing on the wrong problem! Pablo Ricaud explains how the future of our food, agriculture, must be fixed to build a skilled respected workforce that will help create a sustainable climate.
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Vertical Ventures Podcast en español
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Chapters
00:00 Intro Music
00:18 Guest Intro
00:30 Changing Farming for Climate Change
05:58 "Now we are seeing the consequences"
07:41 AgTech vs FinTech
08:55 Must Align to Solve This
11:17 How to Scale FinTech
14:40 A Family Business - Three Profiles with Different Strengths
21:29 How Much Tech is Too Much?
28:08 Disrupting Real Estate Industry
30:07 Built to Suit Model...in Agriculture
32:53 Developing Responsibly
34:12 A Sustainable Workforce
39:15 Fluent English gives you access to content and ideas
44:19 How to Contact Pablo
45:26 Have less fear
46:52 Follow Clever Hybrids
GabyV: This is going to be really interesting and a very timely topic right now. We've got the Amazon and the west coast of the US and Canada with a lot of wildfires right now. Floods recently in Western Europe, India, China that have destroyed cities, many people are still missing. So your company Rising Farms of which you are the president is trying to change farming to have it be ready for climate change.
Could you tell us some of the premise behind that?
Pablo Ricaud: Exactly. So like you were saying, Gaby the climate is... the climate's extremeness for the past years is just showing us and giving us a pretty clear warning that we don't have much time to curb things before it's too late. So it has to do a lot with how we produce the things we consume and secondly the amount of things and resources that we consume for the amount of people that we have on this planet. So we are treating this planet like we have unlimited resources, but this is a place with limited resources.
There's a lot of people that talk about financial inclusion as one of the cornerstones of impact and sustainability. But at Rising Farms we believe that the most important thing that we need to be looking at in terms of impact is how we do more with less in terms of how we produce our food and how we consume our food.
70% of the planet's fresh water resources are already being used in agriculture. What's the problem with that? The rate at which we're consuming, the planet's resources how are we going to [feed] 2 billion [more] people [by 2050]? If we're already using 70% of our fresh water resources, the answer is we need to do more with less.
There's a lot of AgTech that's focusing on making open field farming profitable. What we think we need to do is not make open field profitable, but migrating to an indoor farming model where you're not just protecting yourself from extreme weather. We're seeing phenomena of rain where it does not [usually] rain or not raining where it should rain. The seasons are not as marked as they used to [be]. So this is putting a strain onto open field farmers that you can solve with indoor farming. At an high-tech indoor farming facility, we're able to produce 20 to 30 times the yield per square meter than you can do in open field farming using 90% less water per pound produced.
So the way we see it, this is the answer to do more with less. By doing 20 times more per square meter what you could understand is that we need 20 times less land to produce the same [amount]. We believe there's no better impact than being able to feed the world. There's no financial inclusion if people can't eat.
GabyV: Yeah, that's amazing with the way that works using less water. Even, with all this climate change, we've been seeing protests specifically about lack of water in Iran, Chile. Now in California, there are places where because of climate change, it's so much hotter the wells are drying up. No matter how much money you have, like financial inclusion, you have a bank account, but there's no water to buy or... yeah.
Or you dig a well, and because of the open field farming next to you, the water has nitrates in it and you can't drink it anyway.
Pablo Ricaud: This can be solved with precision irrigation. The middle step is to bring precision irrigation to open field farming, but the full step is to bring it indoors. So you have more yield and you reduce waste. Because what happens like it's been happening in Mexico for the past two years, extreme weather brings a lot of waste to crops because a lot of farmers lose their entire crops because of too much rain, hail storms, lack of rain.
Something that you can solve in an indoor facility. Bringing technology together to make it even more efficient is very important having climate control software and hardware, having ventilation systems, irrigation systems, having the right nutrients for your plant and the vehicles to bring it to it. So bringing it all together, you really can have a square meter of farming that can be the most efficient right now with the technology we have.
What I've seen and what we've seen is that this trend is not seen as [very] important. It's definitely becoming one of the forefront problems to solve for the past two years, especially because before the data was there, but the consequences were not there.
Now we are seeing the consequences. California is on fire once a year. Australia was burned to the ground last year. We are seeing drought. We're seeing extreme weather, extreme rain. So as people see the consequences of our collective actions, we now are beginning to see this as a real problem.
What happens is first the problem arrives. Then you start to see movers and technologies trying to solve these problems and then investors catch up. The stage that we're in, I believe is where people are starting to realize it in a collective manner, not just a couple of studies or people that dedicate their lives to [finding] this data, but in collective manner we're starting to see these problems. We're starting to see technology and investors moving towards solving this problem but it hasn't reached that point where investors are actively looking to invest in these new technologies. And there's a big problem with investors and people understanding it. Most investors are trying to deal with AgTech like they would do with a FinTech. You can't do that. I wrote an article for Mexico Business News, trying to compare why AgTech is different because we are limited to the physical realm, to the realm of physics, you actually need a piece of land. You need sun. You need water. You need a physical, actual plant to produce pounds of produce that have shelf life that you need to transport. It's very different than having a FinTech, that you have a piece of software that's cloud-based and you can use the same code for Singapore [as] the code that you'd use for Brazil. It's just not the same with agriculture.
So first we need to understand the incentives and the key drivers of the industry and how it works and then for us and them to be able to invest in it. So there's a lot of education that needs to happen before this is an investible area where we see a lot of efforts. It happened with the Space Race, it's impressive how when investors and entrepreneurs align and the government also aligns behind one goal, it's just impressive what we can achieve and what humans can do.
But until everyone is aligned, like the capital, the entrepreneurs, the ideas, the brains, until we are aligned behind this problem we're not going to be able to solve it. The good news to me is that if we push further and further for people, investors, governments, to understand this problem hopefully one day soon, we're gonna align in the way that countries did with the Space Race.
And we were able to have so much progress in so little time. That is impressive. So I really think that we need to get there but... but soon.
GabyV: Yeah, there are definitely two other Clever Hybrids that I want to make sure I get you in touch with Pablo. Hugo Garduño from Verqor. He's working with the farmers there in Mexico to help them to improve their AgTech usage and also their yield. Then we have Luis Gomez who does imports of different vegetables and fruit from LATAM into the UK. He's also trying to help farmers to do the same thing where they have their product and they're trying to increase their yield, increase the price that they're able to get per pound or per crop. In that article that you mentioned, you wrote for Mexico Business News, and also another one, 'How Silicon Valley Set Agtech Back A Decade', a medium post from July, 2021 is like you said, people are approaching agtech, like fintech and they're making it very hard for the farmers to adopt these more expensive technologies or they don't really see the need. So how can you help a farmer to see the need to improve his yield?
Pablo Ricaud: Exactly. It's not just the fact that we need to increase that yield, but that increasing that yield and migrating to high tech indoor farming is very expensive. That the reality is that this business model is not as scalable as a software model, just because of the realm of physics. I can't point this out enough because as long as you're looking for the same scale and exposivity on this business model, you're never going to find it, but we still need to invest in this space and to solve this space, to make it happen. It's not that you can't find scale. You can find scale. I've written and I've talked about this. And this is one of the core aspects of the business model at Rising Farms. How do we bring more scale? Because the problem, especially in a country like Mexico, is there's a lack of sophistication within agriculture. There's not enough focus on talent. There's not enough focus on technology, but there is also a lack of scale because you need a lot of capital to grow.
But I've talked about this. You can bring scale and we will bring scale to this industry by aligning incentives. A hotel company, a hospitality company, usually does not build the buildings, right? The facilities or the office space, the retail space, mostly a restaurant chain does not build the real estate building. They have investors, real estate investors that take care of the facilities and lease it out to the operator. The airlines usually don't own their planes. They lease them out. You have this [model] in a lot of industries and that's why they're able to scale, but you don't see this in the farming industry and not in the high-tech indoor farming industry.
So we want to align incentives. So real estate investors are able to take that investment for the facility and us to do the operation by leasing the facility because our business is farming not real estate. So when we're able to bring this to the table, then you'll have not just an industry that is extremely important for the future of the planet, but a scalable industry that can attract more investors with less risk. Also by bringing sophistication focused on talent, focused on technology, we're going to be able to migrate from a perception of agriculture, being a very risky and sporadic thing to it being seen as a corporation and as an attractive business model because it's not as risky.
GabyV: Okay, with Rising Farms too, it does seem to be a family business. Your brother Mauricio is the COO, and then there's another Mauricio. Is that your dad? He's the CTO.
Pablo Ricaud: He's my dad. Yeah. This is funny because we are co-founders, it's not like the company existed before. We came together because we're very good at each of the pivotal pillars of the business, right?
Starting with my dad, he has more than 25 years experience within farming, [specifically] 20 years in high-tech indoor farming. He was the COO for two of the biggest operations in Mexico for high-tech indoor farming from buildings to operations, to stabilization of these ventures. So he has all the know-how.
My brother, he's an industrial engineer. He has a lot of experience with certifications, with people. He has a masters in sustainability from HEC in Paris, management masters from the Norwegian School of Economics, and he was working at the [OECD-UNDP United Nations Development Programme] the worldwide organization in Paris before he came over to Rising Farms.
And on my side, I started with finance - private equity. Then I did some trading. Then I moved towards the startup realm, the high-paced growing environments with a San Francisco based FinTech called PayJoy. Then I moved to a Mexican FinTech. Then I was hired by a San Francisco private equity fund, private debt fund sorry, where we invested in a lot of startups with different business models. That helped me a lot to understand the funding side and the fundraising, the investors side, the finance side of a business.
All of the three profiles that we have, they complement each other really well to start a business within this industry.
So yeah, we are cofounders. We have a meritocracy model where we know who's good for what, and we try not to interfere with each other's lanes. Although we have a great feedback group where we're helping each other, see clearly from outside our core responsibilities. It's very important for this business. It's one of the key things.
But also financial planning, sophistication, being able to see 10 years into the future and say,
'How do I get to that point where I want to be?', and not just build something and go from there, but going at it more like SpaceX, right? With Elon Musk he says,
'I want to go to Mars. What do I need to do to get there?'
It's not that he started with a company that wants to launch satellites. He first said,
'I wanna go to Mars. What's this step before that? And before that?'
Up to the point where he reached, where he said,
'Okay, first I need to make a profitable company that is able to build this technology so I can fund the trips to Mars.'
That's more or less what we are doing. We're looking into the future of what we want to do. We're thinking big. We're putting ourselves into great challenges and risks so we're able to do this.
For example, the purchase of Rising Park. We purchased a big plot of land that's 160 acres in the Bajio corridor of Mexico. So we are able to grow for the next three to five years. That took us like a lot of creativity and risk because we are a young company. It's not like we can buy 160 acres of land from our pocket. We need to find creative ways and partners to do it. But we also need to bring the company to the level, to being able to take these steps.
So it's like a collective challenge of:
There's not a lot of investors for this space.
There's not enough sophistication.
So we need to put all the pieces together to be able to get there. The good thing is there's a lot of good examples of investors and companies, in the US especially, that are getting to understand the space and investors are ramping up.
That's good news. We need to bring them to Mexico because Mexico is a great place to grow things. We're not just extremely close geographically to North America, which is the biggest market in the world. We also have one of the best climate and temperature deltas there is in the world. We're able to grow the same quality produce as a high-tech indoor farm in Canada or in the US but by using 10 times less fossil fuels per square meter because of the cold. Simply put it's too cold in Canada and in some parts of the US. Labor is cheaper here. Resources are cheaper here. The climate is better. We have access to the same technology. We can have a better business within the same space here in Mexico.
The problem with Mexico is there's a lot of misconceptions and there's this aura of risk and unsophistication that we need to fix. We've been able to do that with FinTech, with PropTech, with a lot of industries where investors from the US, from Europe, are starting to invest very aggressively Mexico because they see there's talent. There's sophistication. There's a market. And we need to do this with agriculture, not just because we have the means but because of the geography, which is so important. It's not the same for me to grow something in Russia or Singapore or Mexico. It's completely different. So when looking at this industry we not only need to look at talent and sophistication and business model, but also geography. I can't stress this enough.
GabyV: Yeah, you made an excellent point about that in your Mexico Business News article, where you mentioned you try to figure out how much tech is too much tech. And as you mentioned, Mexico has a very nice climate, very jealous right now, as opposed to many Northern countries that also use indoor farming.
So you use less greenhouse gases and you can also use less expensive materials. You mentioned in this article, where you might have a greenhouse in Denmark made of glass, and you have extra heating systems with Mexico because it's more of a warmer climate you might be able to make the greenhouse with plastic materials. So that does help bring the costs down a little bit as well.
Pablo Ricaud: There's good reasons for implementing technology and there's bad reasons for implementing technology. We live in a era where perception is more important than reality and something looking good is more important than something working. There's a lot of buzzwords and technology for technology's sake. You just put it out there to say that you're using technology. That's the same in the indoor farming space where you can use too much technology or too much automation from a business standpoint.
So there's good reasons for using too much technology. Let's say if I build a glass greenhouse in Mexico, because eventually if you look at it from a very longterm standpoint, it's going to pay off in 10 to 20 years.It's There's a sustainability argument where you don't need to be changing this plastic that that creates waste. The plastic needs to be changed every three to four years. So you might be spending more, for example, with a glass greenhouse, because you're looking at a very long-term horizon or from a sustainability standpoint, that's a good reason for implementing technology.
A bad reason would be for it to look good because when you are spending more on our automation, for example, in a country like Mexico, where labor is not as expensive as in Europe or in the US you might be automating to the detriment of your bottom line.
This is something we... we've forgotten in the past years that a business needs to make money eventually. So you might say,
'I have the highest of technologies at my facilities, but I'm not making money.'
You need to have both eventually. So as long as incentives are put for the right reasons, it's okay to implement technology and even too much technology for the climate you have. But not the other way around because you really need to look at the bottom line for a company to exist in the long-term. You can hype a company. You can hype it up and have a lot of investors but at some point, like we've seen with a lot of startups, it's just the unit economics doesn't work. So where does that leave a company?
So that's another of my views that I try to put at the core of what we do at Rising Farms. It's not just the future. It's not just implementing great tech, but also implementing it for us to have a good business. Because we have a good business, we can hire the best people and we can grow and we can exist for the next 30 years. Not just have an awesome business model and hype it and sell it and for it to die.
GabyV: Yeah, that's nice. You have sustainability on multiple fronts. So now you have, as you mentioned, all of these acres for Rising Park number one, and you have some staff working with you, it's almost two years in, what stage are you at right now?
Pablo Ricaud: So we have Rising Park. We can start building whenever we want. There's a lot of work with a piece of land like that, not just with hydrology studies, access studies, environmental studies. You need to have water. You need to have a well. You need to have the permits for that. You need to have the blueprint for the best configuration for the farms to exist in this plot of land.
So we've done all that to the point where we're ready to start building. To start building, we are raising a round that's our Series A. That's going to allow us to kick start stage one. Our hope is to start this stage one hand-in-hand with real estate investors. So we can be more aggressive and scalable. If at this point we are too small to access those real estate investors, or because it's just too early for them to understand this business model because that can happen, that's not going to stop us.
Our plan A is to start these stages with real estate investors, for us to be more scalable. But our plan B is to build it ourselves and later do a sell and lease back to the same investors. It happens that you might be a little early to the show where investors don't understand the importance of the industry, the returns of the industry, that this is an industry that can have scale. So you need to wait a little bit. We will be able to do that by doing this first stage within our balance sheet with our own resources. But hopefully we can start this Q4 of 2021 with the first stage, whether it be on our balance sheet, with own resources or partnering with a real estate investor.
Real estate investors are seeing a lot of problems with their portfolios because retail assets are not as good of an investment as they used to be because the pandemic just accelerated the trend of e-commerce where people don't need to go to an actual store.
And also with the office space. As we realized that we don't need to work at an office to make things happen what real estate investors will start to see is as their contracts are being renewed in the next two to three years, they're going to find that most of their tenants are not going to renew at the same rate that they did [before]. Because they have a part-time office model or a completely remote model. That puts them in a place where they need to diversify, find new niches, find new markets. Our business model is perfect for them because we are offering real estate assets that never stop not for the pandemic not for anything and that are solving the future of food in the world. So it's going to take a bit of time for investors to realize this, but we want to be at the forefront and perfectly prepared for that moment to happen. That's why we bought Rising Park. That's why we're ready and that's why we're raising this round for us to be ready when this catches up to us.
GabyV: Awesome. And I hear what you're saying with these real estate developers, but could you explain to me more of how that would work? Would it be that they... you have them owning a share of the land or would they own some of the greenhouses and other facilities that you would set up? What is your plan?
Pablo Ricaud: Yeah. So the perfect way of working with them is with a built to suit model. Within real estate, a built to suit model is like, for example, Samsung needs a manufacturing facility in Mexico. Let's say, in Tijuana. Normally, Samsung doesn't build this facility with their own money, but a real estate fund that focuses on industrial assets builds it for Samsung and leases it to Samsung.
So the fund basically says,
'What do you need? How much are we going to spend? What technology do you want? Where do you want it?'
And then they lease it out to Samsung for 10 to 15 years. This is a good business. So this is exactly what we want to do to go with all these investors and say like,
'Hey, I need this type of facility here. I have the land. This is the technology. This is how much it's going to cost.'
So the fund knows,
'Okay, I need to put up $10 million, $20 million to build this facility and I'm going to lease it to Rising Farms in the long term.'
So they can have the same return or better returns that you would have with an office building with retail space, with industrial space.
The problem is this is seen as a very risky investment because of the lack of sophistication in farming in Mexico. They are thinking that this is going to blow up and I'm going to end up with a huge facility with all this technology that I can't use because it wasn't a good business. So first we need to make them understand that what is happening in the US, it's happening in Europe, where you have great sophisticated corporations in indoor farming, you can have them in Mexico, like Rising Farms, for it to be a good investment.
It's very important. We are already talking with a lot of real estate funds. Some of them are very close. We have letters of intent with them for these dynamic to start. There's going to be like a spark where the first mover, the first real estate fund is going to find out like,
'Hey, I can have real estate within a resilient industry that's never going to stop, that gives me the same or a better cap rate than all of my other portfolio and this is the future of food. This is great. Let's do it, but on a big scale.'
And we definitely want to be positioned for when this is a wave for us to ride that wave.
GabyV: Okay, this sounds like it's going to be a very big disruption. Now I'm going to go a little bit to the negatives, the possible negatives, to ask you about the environmental impact of having such a large area. There's been a lot of protests due to climate change. There have also been some protests with large companies buying big areas of land from the local farmers or the local community.
So how does Rising Farms plan to work with the local community to help them develop responsibly, their staff, the community in general?
Pablo Ricaud: First we would need to develop 20 to 30 times less land. So that's a great thing. Secondly, we grow hydroponically. That means we are not messing with the soil. What happens a lot with open field farming is that all the things that you're putting into a plant, you're putting into the soil and each time you put a new crop in, you are releasing all the CO₂ that was trapped in the soil, which is one of the mechanisms to increase climate change. We don't do that.
So first to let them know what's going on and what are the dynamics of what we're doing. But also by developing the communities that we are trying to employ. There's a big problem in Mexico where the agricultural employees are not always treated very well. Sometimes they're not paid with their welfare benefits that by law you're required to give. There's a lot of problems with the education within these communities, poverty, challenging situations that they're facing that are not normally addressed by the companies that employ them. Mostly they're just hired hands.
'I hired you to do this and I don't care what background, what problems you have.'
We're facing this from another standpoint where we want to educate these people to know that they're building a CV, like someone that studies finance, and wants to get into consulting and wants to get the right jobs to then get an MBA. They have an understanding that they're building a CV and they choose the right companies, the right skills that they need to develop to build the CV that they want to build.
So we educate our people. Right now we have 180 employees. So we educate our employees to know, 'Hey, you are building your CV. You're specializing in these specific tasks within the greenhouse. And guess what? If you learn to do it more quickly and with more quality, we pay more to people that are more specialized that do their job better than to the newcomers.'
So they have an incentive of working up their way through the ladder and then moreover, if they want to go to a new company or to another company that does high tech indoor farming, they can get there with a CV saying, 'Hey, I'm good at this. I can do this better and this and this.'
So they can get paid more. These are people that usually get stuck with the same range of income since they are 18 to when they're 50. Because it's exactly the same work paid the same. So we want them to understand that if you build a CV, you can climb not just through the corporate ladder, but to get more income as time passes.
Another thing is unfortunately Mexico has a lot of challenges with domestic violence, with drug abuse, especially within low income populations. So, we try to give them programs. Like we have a program that not just helps them psychologically, especially women. We have 67% women within the workforce and that's 90% within senior management.
So we try to educate them psychologically, but also legally to tackle these challenges. It's not like 'You're being abused in your home. That's too bad.'
No, we want to show you that's not okay, the legal resources that you have to make it stop, but also psychologically,
'It's a challenge to get out of that situation, but we can do it together.'
And eventually that's good for both of us because we have better quality people that do better jobs and we need less head count in the future. It's not just about technology, reducing the overhead, but also having better equipped people at our company. So this is crucial, and this is one of the efforts that my brother is spearheading in the company, because he has a sustainability masters.
And sustainability, it's not just climate, it's also the workforce. It's also what you do with the people. So that's a very important thing that we put a lot of focus on. We are also like raising our hands saying
'Hey, all of those companies that are not paying welfare because they say that it's not sustainable. That's not true because we have much better wages than the comparables within the agricultural industry. We have all of these programs. We pay welfare. We operate within the law and we'll still make money.'
So every other company that says that it can be done, it's not only wrong, but it's not true.
GabyV: That's excellent...to be able to set an example like that. Now you've been speaking with me now, Pablo, for almost an hour and your English is very good. Plus Rising Farms has clients in the US and Canada, as you mentioned. So besides having an access to these other clients, how else has speaking English fluently benefited you?
Pablo Ricaud: Going back, I must say that I am very lucky. It's very easy to just say,
'Yeah, I'm smart and I'm here because I'm smart.'
But that's not true. Every single person needs to thank a lot of people along their way in their careers and their lives for enabling where we are now.
There's a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The outliers book talks about how people don't get where they are just by themselves. So in my case, I was very lucky to have parents that gave me the best education possible in Mexico and that education included English from preschool.
It's just funny how we focus on a lot of things and learning all of these subjects in primary school and elementary school, and then in college. People should know that knowing English and Excel... like you could just have those two and do something successful. For me to be able to know English since I was little that has given me access to a lot of content in English. I admire the US a lot because of the quality content and the amount of content that you guys have. You can listen to a podcast almost about any subject you want with experts and the people that are leading their fields. There's books. There's articles. There's blogs about any subject you want. So being able to know English allowed me to have access to better content, to read books, listen to podcasts, to read articles about the subjects that I was interested in. And that's one of the challenges in Mexico that content is not always very good and people are stuck looking and listening and reading poor quality content that doesn't add to their cognitive skills or their IQ.
So learning English allowed me to have access to this vast amount of worldwide content that helped me developed a criteria and an IQ to be able to tackle the challenges that I've had. But also then being able to work at US-based companies like FinTech startups, San Francisco based companies, where I learned a lot about how they think, how to build a company from scratch, how to work at a fast paced environment and a lot of things that are very important.
So I would say it's not as much as to be able to communicate with the US. English doesn't mean like,
'Oh, then I can communicate with the US.'
It's having access to all this content and all these investors and all these people that are English speaking that you can have contact with. Being able to express myself [from] a business standpoint in English has allowed us to talk with a lot of investors, access a lot of people within other countries, not just the US, Canada, Europe. So I would definitely put knowing English as one of the most important things that you can do to propel, not just your career, but your access to...to content and ideas.
GabyV: Yeah, definitely. We've been doing a lot of stats today, but even on my podcast I've said it a few times. There was a study recently that showed that most of the internet is in English. Of course we know that, but it's 50%! Then Spanish only has about 5% of the internet. So that's a lot of information that someone would be missing if they didn't know how to read English well and understand it. Plus, as you mentioned these yeah... these extra opportunities, you have to talk to more people. One in four people speaks English and of those people probably only 25% of those are native speakers. So there are so many different perspectives that are brought in with the English language right now.
But I know you have a lot of stuff to do today, Pablo, so I've got to go ahead and wrap it up here. If someone wants to get in touch with you, besides your awesome podcast that you were telling me about, Vertical Ventures, to increase that access to quality content in Spanish, where else can people find you?
Pablo Ricaud: On LinkedIn. That's pretty much the only social media platform that I have LinkedIn. I don't have Facebook. I don't have Instagram. But they can find me on LinkedIn. They can reach out. That's my name on LinkedIn. You can search for me or Rising Farms. You can find me there and there I try to publish content or talk about topics within entrepreneurship, AgTech, agriculture. I also write for a page called Mexico Business News, like you mentioned, and there, I write about a span of subjects, from philosophy to agriculture business and entrepreneurship as well.
GabyV: Okay that's great. Pablo, thank you so much for being here with us today. As a last note going out, what would you tell to someone that is trying to get used to this pandemic new collar lifestyle?
Pablo Ricaud: First, thank you very much, Gaby, for the space. I had a great time talking to you and my advice would be have less fear. Pay less attention to the rules. Pay more attention to what you want. Really know that no one knows what they're doing. Doesn't matter the money, the position, the job, they don't know what they're doing. They're dealing with things as you are doing right now, step-by-step figuring things out.
Fear is the biggest creativity destructor, because we have all these rules that are made for us to navigate through life in automatic pilot mode that just leaves us in the majority of the cases having a lot of regrets. Have less fear. Yeah. Just go at it. What's the worst that could happen? I haven't heard yet a single person that regrets being brave. So be brave, have less fears. And I can guarantee that you won't regret being brave.
GabyV: Wow. That's a great point to end with.