Try/Catch

Try/Catch is an in-house podcast from Farm Credit Services of America. The organization's own developers host it, and it is built on conversations with the people they work alongside. That origin shapes the show. When the subject is innovation, the voices belong to the innovation managers who do that work. When the subject is rural investment, the conversation turns to how those commitments get underwritten. A run of episodes forms a connected series on innovation, hosted by application developer Sydney Andreessen with innovation managers Amy, Dane and Michael Jarrow. Sydney mostly plays the curious questioner, handing the floor to the specialists and admitting on air to having learned a lot. The ground covered is practical. One discussion works through how to judge whether an experiment is producing value. The first measure is time saved, such as trimming an hour of data entry to thirty or twenty minutes. Later, as a prototype grows into a business, the measures become revenue, returning customers, customers leaving and lifetime value. Another conversation looks for ideas well outside agriculture. Gamified fitness and virtual reality come up as unlikely sources, and the team asks what they could mean for an organization on the finance side of ag. Competitors such as community banks come up too, as possible partners or co-builders. Zach Macklin joins for an episode on the Rural Business Investment Program. Its most useful point is that committing money to an equity fund is underwritten very differently from assessing a prospective customer's creditworthiness, and that closing a fund investment can take anywhere from six months to two years. The effect of those investments on rural communities comes up as well. Partnerships get their own hearing. The innovation managers describe accelerators that put startups in front of potential customers, and startups that pivot mid-year once they see their original solution is not what partners need. The Combine, a Lincoln, Nebraska incubator focused on Nebraska-based startups, is one named example. A trends episode follows the long evolution of automation, from massive scale down to tiny and electronic scale, and how it will affect both the organization's own work and the producers it serves. Outside the series, developers Shane Fitch and Natalie Gerdes talk about leadership in IT with Todd Campbell, whom they met at the AIM Emerging Leader Academy, where Campbell was a facilitator, instructor and mentor. Campbell recalls starting with a computer science degree and developer work, then finding that the problem solving appealed more than sitting behind a screen coding in Java, C or C#. The tone throughout is friendly and conversational, like coworkers who know each other. A good place to start is 'Innovation: What is it and how to think about it?', where the innovation team introduces itself. The later episodes in the series keep sending listeners back to the earlier ones.