Moonshots For the Many
Within the next 5 years, space flight will be open to tourism and we’ll have cures for most cancers. Within 15 years, for every year you live, technology will add 1.5 years to your life. This is not science fiction, and the moonshot we are announcing today will affect every one of us in equally profound ways.
Where do moonshots like these come from, and how do they manifest? As forward looking entrepreneurs, its our job to think about inventing the future in which we want to live, rather than sitting idly by and waiting for it to happen to us.
A moonshot is a radical solution to a big problem. When they succeed, they 10x everything they touch. Successful moonshots change our world. However, they tend to have extremely high failure rates which make them hard to materialize. The recipe for a moonshot tends to require a few key ingredients: high tolerance for risk, a culture where failure is celebrated, and capital from forward thinking futurists.
An entrepreneur is defined by his tolerance for risk. If the idea were easy, someone else would have done it already so entrepreneurs by nature have to be able to dive in with 2 feet and just keep going. And we often fail. The key is to fail fast, learn from your failures, and continue moving forward. Unfortunately, in most organizations with the capital to fund a moonshot, failure is unsung and moonshots never get off the ground. A successful moonshot is nurtured in an environment where teams relentlessly learn and leadership and capital are not tied to ROI.
At Megafood, we are drawn to a moonshot thats been close to our hearts for years. We manufacture the highest quality supplements because we believe that optimal nutrition makes the world a better place to live. Optimal nutrition means people receive not the minimum required to sustain life, rather the maximum to ensure health, longevity, and a disease-free life. There isn’t a term for the opposite of optimal health, so our first learning turned out to be that we are trying to solve a problem with no name.
We coined the term Nutritional Poverty to help us define the scope of our moonshot. We believe that if you are not eating 100% sustainably farmed dense nutrition 100% of the time, and supplementing according to your genetics and epigenetics, you are likely nutritionally impoverished. This is a 180 degree shift in thinking since our ancestors created minimum RDAs many moons ago. When we think big, we think of a world where everyone has access to optimal nutrition — where no one is nutritionally impoverished.
Our moonshot is to eradicate nutritional poverty from our planet in our lifetime.
How are we setting ourselves up for a successful moonshot? Thats the first question we asked ourselves too. And the answer was to fund an entirely separate blue-sky program within MegaFood called MegaFood Blue.
Blue is a nimble small team of successful entrepreneurs, operators and doctors capitalized to explore the cure for nutritional poverty. And we put our money where our mouth is. MegaFood put up a sizable, no-ROI-required investment to nurture entrepreneurs and our explorations and failures. If a pilot project has legs, we can fold it into the MegaFood umbrella and nurture it to life. If it does not, we can kill it quickly and move on.
As the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Megafood, I really am thrilled to be handed the keys and resources to such a forward looking project. Will we cure nutritional poverty in our lifetime? I honestly can’t say, but my heart says that if its physically possible to do so, then we now have the resources to realize the dream.
I’ll be updating this blog and sharing our successes and failures here. Please follow along and reach out if you have an idea to duscuss.
To the moon,
Andrew Brandeis, ND
