Today we’re interviewing Jennifer Stokjovic, author of The Future of Food Is Female, Founder of the Vegan Woman’s Summit, and VC partner at Joyful Ventures. Jennifer is pretty much everywhere when it comes to food tech and coincidentally enough, she was in South Korea while I was there.
But unlike me who was in South Korea goofing off, Jennifer was there advocating for food technology at the World Knowledge Forum. Helen told me after her interview that she was in town, I sent a quick text, and 4 hours later, I took a Korean taxi to one of the fanciest hotels I’ve ever seen and met Jennifer, where we proceeded to do a podcast right at the hotel. Amazing.
Jennifer is, of course, a force. Extremely passionate, extremely productive, and extremely knowledgable and her ability to use her connections, knowledge pool, and mission brings me in awe.
So expect a ton in this interview as we go back and forth on our predictions in food.
Lots of very interesting tidbits on policy, environmental issues, and the funding environment.
Big insights on the diversity of our current food tech environment and how Jennifer has taken charge to change this. We also dive into practical advice on how we can make our ecosystem flourish through diversity.
Jennifer has a great and compelling reason for fighting for compassion and animal rights. Deeply personal, but extremely valuable to learn and process.
One of the quotes I loved during this interview is about how to think about the future. One of the quotes that Jennifer says is that: The world is not going to be worse but it’s going to be different
What’s Up With Adam
It’s been a pretty chill week.
I’ve been trying to expand my network in San Francisco and one of the most enlightening things I’ve encountered is talking to people in the tech industry about the innovations in food technology and spouting facts in an almost encyclopedic manner. They are absolutely amazed that this technology is happening right under their noses.
In a city where tech and AI seem to be the most dominant profession and topics, having someone say “wow you have the most interesting job ever” really brightens my day.
By the way, sounds familiar? I copied this from my own LinkedIn. You know, I realize most influencers (which I’m not) repeat content for messaging and effectiveness reasons so this is an example of this.
Anyways, I found a writing club through friends from a meetup group in San Francisco so it’s been really fun trying to navigate the waters to ultimately find a group of confidants. I’m actually doing the same with nerdy board games like, well, Dungeons and Dragons. It’s always nice seeing the same faces again and again, and starting to build rapport, but it’s hard, and I feel like it gets harder with age.
Links
World Knowledge Forum
Davos
David Cameron
Teresa May
Oatly
Better Meat South Korea
Better Meat Co
Cultivated Meat Tech
CellX
Asian Clel-based Trade Association
Singapore Water Story
Infrastructure Bill
Matthew Hayek NYU Professor
Methane 30% of greenhouse emissions
Biotechnology executive order
Garbage in Animal Feed legal
JBS
Smithfield
Smithfield Price Gouging
Uma Valeti
Josh Tetrick
Ryan Bettencourt
Miyoko Schinner
The Future of Food is Female
506-B
506-C
LPs-Limited Partners
Beyond Meat
Pea Protein Drought
Midwest Drought
FBS – Fetal Bovine Serum
Prolific Machines Funding
AWS Amazon Web Service
Sam Altman
COO Bites off Nose
Joyful Ventures
Partake
S-curve Innovation
Vegan Women’s Summit
Instagram
Tiktok
LinkedIn
End of Show
So a friend of mine, Brian Spears recently announced that he will be shutting down his business, New Age Meats. I met Brian when he was first starting his company. The same time I was starting Better Meat Co.
I wanted to share his post and perhaps give a little bit of insight.
Recently, we made the painful decision to shut down New Age Eats.
WHAT WE WERE DOING
As a mission focused founder, I started this company to shift meat production from industrialized animal agriculture. Along the way, our incredible team developed technology to create meat without slaughter. While our company will no longer survive, multiple companies will pick up the baton and use our technology to further our shared mission. If interested, please contact me.
Creating the experience of meat without slaughter is extremely difficult. We start with biotech borrowed from human health applications designed for high cost, low volume products. We worked to flip to low cost, high volume products. That is expensive, takes time, and needs a lot of patient capital.
WHAT HAPPENED
In our regulated industry, we can’t and won’t be able to sell for a while. Without revenue, we rely on other sources of capital. Investors proved to be the most efficient way to validate whether cultivated meat would be commercially viable. Unfortunately, with recent capital market turmoil, we have been unable to attract investment.
As the CEO, I take ultimate responsibility for this shutdown. When we started ~5 years ago, we had no blueprint to develop and commercialize cultivated meat. I am grateful to everyone who supported our brilliant, talented team as we learned along the way. To those who are hiring, many of these people are starting their job search!
WHAT NOW
As for me, I will take time to sit and learn from the founder journey. It has been the best and worst thing I have ever done. I have an entirely new perspective on who I am, consciousness, meaning, suffering, happiness, and the stories that create our reality.
The toll on my mental heaIth to gain these perspectives over the years has been tremendous. I am encouraged that mental health – including of founders – is being more openly discussed.
I currently have 3 areas of interest. Influence flows from top to bottom like pools of water. At the top is how each human sees him/herself and how we integrate the parts of us into a whole self. The second is how we interact with other selves to organize the world through incentives and disincentives. The third is the result of that incentive system.
I have been drawn to fix the problems in the third pool for years. That pool will never get cleaned up as long as the first two pools create dirty runoff, so I believe my next chapter will focus on those.
GRATITUDE
Lastly, I want to express profound gratitude to everyone who supported me and the team along the way. I’m also grateful to those who worked against us. Without them, I wouldn’t have learned what I did, that everything is one – no crest without trough, buyer without seller, villain without victim. My gratitude is for everything in this beautiful existence that we share. Ideally, my future work leads to broadly sharing that increased appreciation.
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Startups are hard and this year hasn’t made it any easier. I think we are going to see a lot of slow deaths and well, that’s life. Startups are designed to be a high risk job and one of the risks is failure. Everyone who loves startups has survivorship bias, but even those that do fail, I believe wouldn’t have it any other way.
There is a romanticism to startups that is generally overdisplayed. They are described as myths when told well, but some are also tragedies.
The best thing about outcomes like these is that it makes you a more fulfilling, humbled, person. There are a lot of silent failures and what Brian did, expressing openly about his closure is a sign of courage and self-reflection.