How books and a career in business operations led me to love working in cultured meat 🥩
Two years ago I had no idea a book on climate change would result in me road tripping through rural New South Wales to procure an alpaca biopsy.
Ironically, despite my best attempts to take initiative and plan, some of the most significant decisions in my life have been driven by entirely innate, unsuspecting objects: books.
This is a blog post dedicated to those books and to the decisions they influenced, including the most recent one, which resulted in the aforementioned road trip for an alpaca. I also hope this provides some insight into the life of a non-technical person working in cultured meat, and perhaps sparks some curiosity for others to dive into a similar adventure.
Let’s begin though with a kudos to those books.
At age twenty-two, it was Michael Pollan’s famous book on our food systems, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” The book sat on the desk of another young person in my office who I very much wanted to meet, and seeing a book I liked gave me an excuse to initiate a conversation.
As a side note, I had read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it, unlike my now lifelong partner, who never finished it. But hey, we’ve been together since.
Two years later, a friend recommended Dan Ariely’s behavioral economics book, “Predictably Irrational.”
After learning that Dr. Ariely worked closely with a new startup in NYC, I spontaneously submitted a job application to join that company: Lemonade. Joining Lemonade became the single-most defining choice in my career. I joined a small, rapidly growing team and was given the opportunity to learn from absolutely brilliant leaders and teammates on a journey to becoming a global company with a successful IPO.
Fast forward a few years to an ironically anxiety-filled honeymoon in Alaska during which I was convinced I’d be eaten by a bear.
As I hid in my cabin, I came across an immensely exciting book: “Clean Meat.”
“Clean Meat” blew me away. There were brilliant people out there trying to grow real, much more sustainable meat from cells. Despite being an environmentally-driven vegetarian, I was under no delusions: real meat tastes good, and a world filled with all plant-based alternatives didn’t seem to be the solution.
I became the troll of all cultured meat startups and eventually stumbled across a scrappy, quickly growing company called Vow in Sydney, Australia, a mere 10,000 miles from my current home in New York City.
I was fascinated with the company’s creative, forward-thinking approach. And despite all conversations being via Zoom, I felt a genuine connection with the team.
It’s now been over six months since my partner and I packed up our lives and moved halfway around the world to Australia. It’s a journey that hasn’t been without its challenges, but I can’t help but reflect on the experience with amazing gratitude, for both yet again, a book, and to this wonderful company called Vow.
I’ll assume that many of you reading this are not scientists or deeply technical engineers. You’re like me. You’re genuinely interested in a fascinating field and wonder how you can contribute.
I’ll share a few themes and insights on working in cultured meat that shed light on what a non-technical role in this field can look like, and why I believe the decision for more business generalists to dive in is personally exhilarating and important for the industry at large.
1: Developing cultured meat provides an endless supply of complex, thrilling, problems to be solved.
The first piece of cultured meat was eaten in London in 2013. It cost about $330,000. Like the first iPhone, or the Tesla Roadster, one of the largest challenges of scaling cultured meat production to the masses is dramatically reducing the cost.
So how do we decrease the cost of production so that billions of people can eat cultured meat?
Vow’s mission isn’t just to recreate meat that exists today though. Rather, we’re focused on tapping into the functional-level biology of various species to create new categories of food derived from cells that’s more delicious, nutritious, and sustainable than anything we eat today.
So how do we get our hands on all of these different species? How do we manufacture them at scale? How do we get regulatory approval from governments around the globe? How do we tell this story to consumers in a compelling way?
These are the types of fascinating questions I dig into each day. I may not know the answer to them, but what I do bring to the table is an ability to ask good questions and to work through highly ambiguous problems in a structured, focused way — skills that business and operations-related roles are excellent at developing.
2: Non-technical hires can serve as valuable ‘translators’ between different parts of a deeply technical company.
The ability to collaborate and communicate effectively with others may seem like one of those ‘soft’ skills that business roles overemphasise, but I’ve found it to be immensely important and of value to a cultured meat company like Vow.
Building out a techno economic model for Vow, which calculates our current and potential costs of production, was a massive team effort which required input from a number of science and engineering experts. These ‘soft’ skills I developed in business enabled me, even as a non-technical person, to add value as ‘translator’ and bridge between these different experts.
I’m not the person who can do the stoichiometric chemistry calculations, but I can discuss this patiently with a scientist and work to turn the complex science into something surprisingly user-friendly and distilled to a level that most people can interact with and easily gather insights from.
3: Startups, especially ones like Vow, just need hard-working, bright people who are eager to ‘get their hands dirty.’
In a given week at Vow, I may work closely with our product gurus to send food prototypes to international investors, or I may help to brainstorm goals for a pilot production facility. I’ve had weeks where I’m knee deep in procurement for our lab, and others where I spend hours setting up a new recruitment system and interviewing future “Vowzers.”
I love this part about my job, and I’m convinced it’s one of the largest upsides of joining an early stage company. You have the opportunity to see and engage with multiple aspects of a growing business that would otherwise be siloed off at larger corporations or even late-stage startups.
I’m also convinced it’s a role that hard-working, eager business generalists are well-positioned to play. We’re curious and happily flex and dive into new challenges, but are also shockingly effective at just getting shit done.
To TL;DR this, don’t underestimate the potential of your own skills to move the needle forward in a deeply technical field, working in cultured meat is awesome, and go read more books. 📚
And join Vow! We’re hiring.
Huge kudos to the entire Vow team, my partner, for supporting my crazy dreams, and of course, to the books.
