Here's a story that explains everything that’s wrong with how we think about metrics in agtech.

In colonial era India, the British government had a problem. Cobras were everywhere. These snakes were disrupting life, and more importantly, commerce.

So officials put out a bounty on the snakes, convinced that the entrepreneurial vigor of the local population would quickly bring down the reptilian population.

What they didn't bet on was that Delhi-ites were even more entrepreneurial than they thought. Rather than activating city dwellers to capture and kill snakes, the policy encouraged people to breed the cobras, ensuring a steady and growing supply of farmed snakes to turn over to the British government for cash. In short order, the number of snakes in the city boomed.

In other words, the British created more of the exact problem they were trying to solve. 

Sound familiar?

This ‘cobra dilemma’ is another name for Goodhart's Law, which states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 

When dead cobras became the target in Delhi, it created a perverse incentive to juice the metric rather than solve the underlying problem.

The agtech cobra farm

Many early agtech software companies fell for this same gimmick. In that era, "users" was the metric that investors cared about. Facebook was the model, software was the game, and users were how the score was kept.

So startups chased users relentlessly. They could market, cajole, "educate," and eventually buy millions of people onto their platforms. Pitch decks overflowed with user acquisition slides while farmers downloaded apps, used them once, then promptly forgot they existed. Those millions of users were no longer measuring what mattered—they just proved these companies were good at getting people to download an app. They were confusing attention for reputation. 

Most of those free tools turned out to be mostly useless. There was no reason for farmers to click on the icon every day. The user counts looked impressive, but the cobras were being farmed.

Today's cobra breeders are winning the wrong game

Many founders have moved beyond these early pitfalls, pursuing more meaningful metrics that actually tell them and their investors what their customers think. But the growing bearishness on the investor side—especially around slow agtech adoption rates—makes me suspicious about whether everyone has learned this lesson. In response to sluggish growth, there's pressure to juice adoption metrics: add more farms, more acres, more customers, more units sold.

But constantly adding numbers isn't necessarily a sign that a startup is healthy. These metrics could indicate genuine progress, or they could indicate that founders are back to breeding cobras.

In agtech especially, pushing for rapid adoption can be wildly expensive and erode trust among current and potential customers in ways that don't show up on the balance sheet for years. Ron Adner, author and recent podcast guest, would call this "winning the wrong game." 

The right game often requires a slower approach—finding a path through ecosystem partnerships to optimize capital, deliver an excellent product, and sell it profitably to truly happy customers. This model is less likely to boast impressive metrics, but it can be much more successful and defensible.

Building a "no cobra farms" strategy

I appreciate how tough the incentives are for founders, especially in today's market. Investors often do a cursory skim for metrics, so having good ones keeps the door open. And what gets you funded and what builds a real business can feel like two different games. The temptation to breed a few cobras becomes almost irresistible. Navigating this demands both an offensive and defensive approach.

On offense: tell a compelling story that earns you the right to have investors focus on what actually matters. Show them you understand your customers' actual workflow, not just their willingness to download an app or sign a contract.

On defense: know the kinds of metrics an investor may want and prepare to thoughtfully explain why those figures aren't good indicators of success for your business—but that you can give them insight on the underlying goal those metrics were meant to illuminate. 

The best founders I see have figured out how to make the funding game and the business game the same game. They're not avoiding metrics—they're redefining what the right metrics should be. And when you can teach an investor something new about how your market really works, everyone starts measuring the right things.