The S2G Podcast

American agriculture has never been more productive, yet the system supporting it has become increasingly fragile. Farmers can produce extraordinary yields and still struggle to generate durable profits, while rising costs, concentrated markets, dependence on government support, aging farm ownership, input vulnerabilities, and intensifying global competition expose structural weaknesses that higher yields alone cannot solve.

That is the central argument of Building the Missing Market: A National Strategy for American Agriculture, a new S2G report by Grant Leslie and Aaron Rudberg. The report calls for a fundamental shift in how American agriculture measures success, from yield per acre to risk adjusted profit per acre, meaning how much a farmer actually keeps from each acre and how reliably they keep it once costs and risks are accounted for. But changing the measure is only the beginning. Farmers who want to grow something different often lack the market around them: a committed buyer, a fair price, the financing and infrastructure to make the transition viable, and access to the innovation needed to manage it successfully.

In this episode, report co-authors Aaron Rudberg and Grant Leslie are joined by Al Tank, an Iowa farmer, entrepreneur, and agriculture and trade policy expert. They discuss why the current farm bill may provide farmers with needed short-term certainty without addressing the underlying structural problems, why agriculture belongs in the same national security conversation as semiconductors and critical minerals, and why innovation, capital, policy, and market demand have to move together.

The conversation ultimately asks what it would take to build a different system over the next decade, one in which a farmer who wants to grow something different has a real buyer, a fair price, and financing that allows them to make the transition without betting the farm.

Chapters: 

05:10 – Why This Report, and Why Now
 08:08 – Shifting the Goal from Higher Yield to Higher Profits
 11:03 – Who Moves First: Farmers or Buyers?
 14:24 – A Dairy Success Story and Food as National Security
 16:32 – Why the Current Farm Bill Falls Short
 20:34 – How Farm Payments Discourage Change
 24:59 – The 10-Year Plan in Three Phases
 29:09 – Getting New Farm Technology to Market Faster
 34:47 – What Success Looks Like in 10 Years

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

Omran Al-Kuwari has been counting: September 16th marks 200 days since the Strait of Hormuz was closed, and there's still no fallback plan. As he puts it, a small regional airport might have more built-in redundancy than the Strait that feeds much of the world's energy. 

Omran, whose career in gas dates back to 1999, joins S2G's Sanjeev Krishnan and Frédéric Michel, the former chief strategy and communications advisor to Emmanuel Macron, to argue that Hormuz was never a regional problem. It's global critical infrastructure, and the risk reaches well past oil and gas into fertilizer, food prices, and even the helium hospitals need for MRI machines. Oil had its wake-up call in 1973 and built strategic stocks in response. LNG is having its wake-up call now. 

Omran explains why the weak points sit in the gaps between institutions, why we've built an architecture that keeps producing crises, and why the fix comes down to redundancy, governance, and deciding who pays for it. The conversation closes with a reframe: energy transitions don't swap one fuel for another, they stack new systems on old ones, and those systems now have to be built for a more volatile, fragmented world.

Chapters: 

01:52 Why Gulf energy is a global issue
06:12 What the headlines miss about Hormuz
08:09 Why global institutions haven't kept up
12:17 Who pays for backup supply?
15:49 How China weathered the shock
19:28 Gas prices, exports, and AI demand
23:46 How Qatar is bouncing back
29:41 Building a more resilient energy system

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

Concerts, construction sites, and data centers waiting on the grid all run on temporary power. That means a generator big enough for the rare occasions the site needs full power, burning through unnecessary fuel when the load is a fraction of what it can handle. ANA's system lets a battery carry the load and runs the engine only to recharge it, cutting fuel use for temporary power needs by as much as 80%. This week, we're featuring an episode from our friends at the Energy Empire podcast where hosts Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan sit down with Alicia Waineo, Co-founder and CFO of ANA, one of our portfolio companies. They discuss how Alicia went from being a registered nurse to running a business doing roughly $400 million a year, why they kept the diesel engine when everyone else was trying to kill it, and how they funded the whole thing on $700,000 of their own money plus one outside check. Before we hand it over, S2G's Gokul Raghavan explains why this was the bet we wanted to make in mobile power.

Chapters: 

00:30 — Why S2G Invested in ANA
 05:18 — From Registered Nurse to Co-Founder
 07:37 — Betting on a "Sleepy" Distribution Business
 11:06 — The Invisible Industry Behind Every Job Site
 14:17 — Inside EBOSS: Letting the Battery Carry the Load
 18:06 — Why Nobody Did This Sooner, and the LTO Bet
 21:35 — $11M to $400M on a Single Outside Check
 25:09 — Europe, FlexBoost, and Powering the Super Bowl

This episode originally appeared on Energy Empire. Energy Empire is hosted by Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan, and covers the people, capital, and decisions shaping the future of energy. Check out more of their episodes at https://www.energyempire.fm/

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

The longest-serving finance minister in modern French history thinks Europe's problem isn't talent, money, or ideas. It's that Europe can no longer make decisions. Bruno Le Maire joins S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan and Frédéric Michel, former chief strategy and communications advisor to Emmanuel Macron, to explain how power shifted away from elected governments, toward Washington, Beijing, tech giants, and the bond market, and why Europe's institutions were built for a world that no longer exists. His fixes are structural, with a core group of six countries moving on defense, chips, and AI, competition rules that let European champions form, and a capital markets union that starts with five willing members instead of waiting for 27. He's candid about the risks at home, with French yields above 4% and debt service climbing toward €100 billion a year, and about why voters are drifting to parties that promise rupture. Yet he ends on conviction: Europe remains the best place to live, and with a handful of big decisions, it can still compete. A rare insider account that is explicit about the problems but stays constructive and hopeful. 

02:07 — Power has moved from governments to tech and finance
 05:17 — When Musk cut Russia off from Starlink
 07:24 — Aging, warming, and AI arriving at once
 10:36 — Why voters reject pension reform
 13:01 — Let six countries decide instead of twenty-seven
 16:41 — France has 48 ministers and needs 10
 19:18 — French bond yields and what could break
 24:23 — Debt, nuclear power, and German rearmament
 28:27 — Three things Europe needs to build a hyperscaler
 36:50 — The rise of the far right, and why he's still optimistic

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

Every investor in long-duration, capital-intensive sectors eventually faces the same question: what do you do when the exit markets close and your companies still need years of funding? Keith Crandell answered it the hard way. His firm, ARCH Venture Partners, started as a University of Chicago experiment with a $9 million fund that took 15 months to raise, then hit biotech's "nuclear winter," leading to six years in the 1990s with just a single portfolio IPO. 

In this conversation with S2G's Aaron Rudberg from this year’s Summit, Keith walks through the strategies he has honed over the last three decades: licensing narrow "slices of salami" to strategic partners without giving away the core company, treating government grants like a syndicate member, viewing the IPO as a funding event rather than an exit, and scouring the globe to consolidate the IP and talent of the dozen teams working on the same breakthrough. Decades later, that playbook produced the Metsera sale to Pfizer. Keith closes with where he thinks GLP-1s and longevity science go from here.

Read the full Financing Reality Report. 

Chapters:

02:20 — How ARCH Got Its Start

07:20 — Raising a $9 Million Fund the Hard Way

09:10 — When an IPO Isn’t Really an Exit

10:40 — Surviving Biotech’s “Nuclear Winter”

14:30 — The Ladder of Capital

17:20 — Why Your First Investors Matter

21:00 — Learning to Fund the Long Haul

27:40 — What Comes After GLP-1s?

Keith Crandell was not compensated for participating in this podcast or for speaking at the S2G Summit. S2G reimbursed Keith's reasonable travel and lodging expenses to attend the Summit, where this presentation was originally delivered.

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

At S2G, we believe the best returns over the next 30 years won't come from crowded deals, but from building the financial infrastructure for businesses that don't fit traditional funding categories. But how do you finance a business that doesn't fit into any box the capital markets recognize? 

Paul Lisiak has built a career and a $1.8 billion firm, doing exactly that. Recorded live at this year's S2G Summit, Sanjeev sits down with Paul, founder and managing partner of Metropolitan Partners, a private credit firm that finances niches many investors never think about, from mobile game revenues to literary rights to non-vocal music royalties. Paul shares his "fishing holes" playbook: find an underfished niche, do the hard underwriting work others won't, earn the complexity premium, and move on once the crowd shows up. Along the way, he explains why he passed on YouTube royalties and funeral homes, why he's now looking at housing affordability, trade schools, and even a bowling alley roll-up, and why he believes we've moved from a K-shaped to an "E-shaped" economy. This episode will leave you with a sharper eye for the opportunities hiding in plain sight and a better sense of what it actually takes to be the first one there.

Read the full Financing Reality Report. 

Paul Lisiak was not compensated for participating in this podcast or for speaking at the S2G Summit. S2G reimbursed Paul's reasonable travel and lodging expenses to attend the Summit, where this presentation was originally delivered.

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

Farmers today are in a tough spot. With input costs climbing and crop prices falling, many farm businesses are barely breaking even, yet they still have very little insight into one of the most important parts of their operation: the soil. And it's not just growers who want this information. CPG companies, carbon accounting firms, and anyone trying to understand what's happening below the surface need it too. Measuring soil accurately and usefully has always been expensive and difficult, in part because a single field can hide completely different chemistry, structure, and microbial life from one spot to the next. But advances in sensing and AI are changing that equation. 

In this episode, EarthOptics CEO Lars Dyrud joins S2G's Chuck Templeton to discuss the company's vertically integrated approach to soil measurement and insights. They get into why we're still so in the dark about our soil and how EarthOptics helps farmers understand which inputs are worth the money so they can turn a profit while improving soil health. They also discuss how the company is integrating AI into every part of its operations and product development, and the vast potential hidden in the soil to discover solutions with transformative applications in agriculture and beyond.

If you are interested in learning more about the soil on your own property, you can try EarthOptics new consumer testing service at Living Soil Lab. 

Chapters: 

04:40 — Why Soil Measurement Hasn't Changed in 80 Years
 06:20 — The Three Dimensions of Soil Health
 07:40 — What Better Soil Data Saves Farmers
 11:35 — The Cost Curves That Made This Possible
 19:45 — Getting an Entire Company to Adopt AI
 28:05 — Turning Soil Data Into a New Revenue Line
 30:15 — The Dark Half of the Soil Genome

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

Big change only happens when someone tells a story people can believe in, and few people tell stories about the world better than Fareed Zakaria, bestselling author, The Washington Post columnist, and CNN host. In this episode, Fareed joins S2G’s Sanjeev Krishnan and Frédéric Michel, strategic advisor to Lupa Systems and former chief strategy and communications advisor to Emmanuel Macron, to unpack the forces rewiring global politics and markets, from why every successful political movement runs on a story to why private companies, not governments, are increasingly the most powerful actors of our era. He asks whether those companies will step up to fill the gaps left by policymakers or just keep making their one narrow ask, and delivers a striking reality check on American market dominance, where the US is 4% of the world's population but 70% of global capital markets. The conversation then turns to AI, and whether it will be winner-take-all or something more like electricity, a commodity that diffuses everywhere and benefits everyone. It's a fast-moving exchange that ends somewhere very human: if AI can write your column, what exactly are you still here to do?

Further Reading: 

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Chapters: 

2:50 — The French Revolution and why change must be organic
5:00 — Why narrative wins: Trump, Brexit, and the Bezos bet
7:00 — You can't prevent change, but you can arm people for it
10:00 — The backlash against managerial elites
13:30 — When companies fill the gaps left by government
18:00 — America's market dominance and the big AI bet
20:10 — What's left for humans in the age of AI

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

On paper, capital is pouring into the energy transition. But where is it actually going? In this episode, Sanjeev Krishnan sits down with S2G Managing Director Francis O'Sullivan to unpack his new paper, "The Illusion of Crowds," a five-year, data-driven look at how $88 billion across 6,400+ deals has really been deployed, and why the market is far more concentrated than the headline numbers suggest. They get into why so-called "growth" rounds are often just large venture checks, how big funds co-investing with each other creates hidden risk for LPs who think they're diversified, and why the sector is absorbing three to four times more capital than it's returning. Along the way, they trade hot takes on what zero rates did to power markets, whether the AI-driven energy trade is the next halo waiting to crack, and the lessons Frank took from the shale boom. If you allocate capital, raise it, or build companies in this space, this one's worth a close listen.

Chapters

3:20 - Revisiting the Missing Middle: Three Years Later

8:10 -  How Zero Rates Distorted Energy Markets

15:50 - Can You Raise Capital If You're Not Levered to AI?

17:30 - Introducing the Illusion of Crowds Paper

26:20 - The Wisdom of Crowds Framework

30:30 - The Capital Crowding Problem: Picking Winners Too Early

34:00 - Value Creation vs. Value Realization

37:00 - From Shale to Clean Energy: Lessons From Frank's Research Arc

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.

The old playbook built on cheap capital, globalization, and asset-light software is breaking down, and Sanjeev Krishnan thinks most investors haven't fully registered what may come next. In this episode, fresh off S2G's ninth annual Summit and the close of Solutions Fund I at $1B, Tonya Bakritzes sits down with Sanjeev to unpack the five secular forces he believes are reshaping the global economy right now: AI, geopolitical multipolarity, an uncertain price of money, entropy, and demographic aging. He makes the case that the real opportunity isn't in betting on what's already obvious, but in financing the gap between an emerging economic reality and the financial infrastructure that doesn't yet exist to serve it. Sanjeev shares what it actually took to close a fund in one of the hardest fundraising environments in recent memory, what he learned from the market builders on stage at Summit, and why the interlinkages between these five forces may matter more than any one of them in isolation. If you're an asset allocator, entrepreneur, or just trying to understand where the next decade of returns will actually come from, this one is worth your full attention.

Chapters: 

2:20 — The Financing Reality Report

5:00 — The 1970s Playbook: Four Forces That Shaped the Last Era

7:10 — The Five Secular Forces Defining Today

11:10 — The Most Underestimated Forces: Aging & Price of Money

13:40 — Why the Old Playbook Is Breaking Down

17:50 — Early Market Signals & the Case for Diversifiers

21:30 — S2G's Three-Pronged Approach: Growth Equity, Structured Finance & Bespoke Funds

25:30 — Closing the Solutions Fund in the Hardest Fundraising Environment

28:30 — Summit Takeaways 

34:50 — Building for an Emerging Reality

This content is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investor in any investment vehicle sponsored by S2G. Investing involves risk, including the risk of loss. Specific companies mentioned in this podcast are for educational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement of any kind. S2G holds positions in the companies referenced, but this podcast is for information purposes only and is not intended to promote any such company. All views of the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of S2G. Any past performance discussed is not indicative of future results. The views expressed herein are opinions based on certain assumptions and subject to change.

For more important information, please see s2ginvestments.com/disclosures.