Mysterious glowing liquid, chef/scientist hybrids & robots. Just your average day at Vow

First impressions really do last

Walking onto the factory floor at Vow was awe-inspiring. My eyes were immediately drawn to a floor-to-ceiling stainless steel cylinder. It was inside a glass box with an assortment of tubes, pipes and cables poking out in all directions. I could see a mysterious pink tone glowing from within one of the “peek holes”.

I walked into a “control area” and saw a large poster explaining a cell’s life cycle posted on the wall. The room was full of computer screens flickering as real-time data flooded in, various pieces of scientific equipment, and what appeared to be some mid-build custom electronics. As we walked around the corner I saw a robotic arm picking up some labware and putting it into another complicated-looking machine. Before exiting, I briefly passed a kitchen where someone that looked like a chef-scientist hybrid was laying out a variety of prototypes across the counter.

There was a clear pattern: this wasn’t an ordinary business. Working at Vow would be unusual, and I’d learn things that I couldn’t anywhere else. There was an energy in the air, a feeling that these people were on a mission to do something that hadn’t been done before. Every part of the experience drew me in. I knew I had to work here and that every other job that I could get would feel dull in comparison.

I’ve been at Vow for eighteen months now, and on reflection, my initial impulses were spot on. Vow is unusual. You learn things that you won’t learn anywhere else. Every day is different, and the variety of work you are exposed to would be hard to match. The pace is frantic, the vibes are “chaotic good”, and the experience feels like an emotional rollercoaster, but I could hardly imagine a better place to have started my career after university.

Vow is launching the Hyper Learners Internship, a program for those early in their career who are open-minded, curious, and want to jumpstart their journey in startups. To illustrate more of what a hyper-learner’s experience at Vow may look like, I’ll share some of my experiences at Vow after having started in an equivalent program and joined full-time thereafter.

A mind-exploding first month

Vow has a belief that people learn fastest by doing, even if that means making mistakes, all of which we view as opportunities to learn. From Day 1, you’re thrown into this fast-paced environment and given heaps of ownership, but coupled with support and encouragement from the team around you.

Two key areas I dove into within my first few days at Vow:

1. Learning the ins and outs of cell culture. I hadn’t studied biology since high school, so my first week on the job was a sprint learning the basics of cell culture (i.e., growing cells in an R&D setting). Despite being hired as a software engineer, understanding the core R&D underlying Vow’s food products is hugely important, so I spent a few weeks hands-on in the lab. This experience set the tone for the next few months. Vow expected me to learn how all the different parts of the company worked together, and to really learn it, with hands-on experience. Vow’s culture is largely permissionless: as long as you are being safe you are allowed to get involved anywhere.
2. Food safety and manufacturing. One of the key company priorities early on in my time was obtaining a HACCP certification for our factory, a crucial standard for managing food safety risks within the manufacturing process to ensure that consumers could eat safe, delicious food. To do this, I had to understand every step that occurred in our factory, from the very first cell we used in a batch, to the end product, so that I could then help to apply engineering skills to create the right internal tools and systems to enable effective safety tracking, data collection, etc. The best part of going so deep into these new areas was just how kind everyone at Vow was. I asked a lot of questions but always received kind, considerate and thoughtful responses.

Some personal highlights

Bioreactors, robots and other machinery

Vow is a manufacturing company, which means working with physical machinery: robotic arms, automated liquid handlers, microscopes, bio-analysers, chromatography machines, bioreactors and centrifuges, none of which I’d ever worked with before

At times I have been a student, learning in high levels of detail how one of our cell counters works or thinking about how to better regulate the back pressure in a centrifuge. Other times I have been given ownership of large open-ended projects, such as managing the creation of an automated media mixing process, and given free rein to make it a reality. Vow moves at a pace that is impossible to match for the typical vendors in the biotechnology industry, which often leads us to build in-house solutions ourselves. Because of this, I’ve had incredible opportunities to build first of their kind machinery and tools, ranging from in-house bioreactor control systems to getting my hands dirty assembling a physical bioreactor.

Mammoth Meatball mayhem

Two weeks before Vow wanted to share its now infamous Mammoth Meatball, we realised that we didn’t have a website live that the world could visit to learn more about this very special project (i.e., the creation of a meatball from DNA extracted from the long-extinct woolly mammoth). I made a case that this was a worthwhile priority, and suddenly I was involved. Despite not considering myself a web design person at all, “that’s not my job” is never a phrase you hear at Vow, so the new task was mine to run with.

To make this website happen, I needed designs, a tool to build it with, and the content we wanted to share. I was thrown in the deep end and had to figure out everything, ranging from how to find and support a good freelance designer, negotiate a contract with them, implement their designs in the website builder, and implement the analytics tools we needed to understand what was happening. The largest takeaway from that project was learning that whilst experience matters, you only need first principles thinking and a genuine desire to accomplish something even if it’s completely new for you.

I thought I had good taste…

As someone who loves food, you can only imagine my excitement when I was added to Vow’s internal sensory evaluation panel. Put simply, one of our quality control processes is making sure what we produce tastes as we expect: it should be delicious. Our panel was trained by an external sensory evaluation company through which I “learned” how to actually taste and give more critical feedback around food, its properties, characteristics, etc. Now, every time the product team develops a new dish we get to taste it first; often we’re the first in the world to taste the weird and wonderful prototypes and give feedback to shape the direction the company moves in. It is a minor thing, but to me, it is symbolic of the variety of experiences you are exposed to at Vow and how we believe that everyone on the team is part of our mission to help create delicious, sustainable food.

BLE (Big Learning Energy)

Trying to distil learnings from the last 18 months is a challenge, but I’ll highlight two key lessons which resonate from my experiences:

1. Don’t underestimate your ability to become an expert, especially in new technologies, quickly. Whilst it may sound like Vow is the kind of place where you become a jack of all trades, master of none, you will undoubtedly be allowed to become a specialist in something. We have world-class talent in several disciplines, and as part of your growth, you will be mentored by very experienced colleagues and then given the opportunity to use these skills to build out and develop new technologies, products, etc. As a software engineer, I felt supported in developing pure, critical software engineering skills, but Vow also made an active effort to help me develop and level up across many skills and areas of the business. The team has a strong belief in nurturing employees and developing the best talent base in the world. If there is one thing about Vow that is truly special, it’s the people. They are unlike anywhere else.
2. The ‘softer skills’ may be the more critical ones to help you grow and for companies to achieve their mission. Back when interviewing with Vow, I asked: “What is the thing you have learnt at Vow that surprised you most?” My interviewer answered that Vow has a truly diverse range of teams and expertise: engineers, scientists, manufacturing operators, project managers, regulatory teams, marketing and product development. Every one of these teams almost speaks a different language, has been trained in different ways, and sees problems from different perspectives. Learning to work collaboratively with such diversity is something that I don’t think I could have learnt anywhere else, but I’m increasingly convinced just how important it is. At Vow, you learn to communicate clearly, manage projects with a fine-tuned attention to detail, and to work effectively with the diversity of people around you. You’re prompted to appreciate that your colleagues might possess distinct skills and have unique perspectives, yet you all share a common goal and can benefit from each other’s insights. For the rest of my career, I believe the skills I acquired working with such a diverse range of people will serve me both at Vow and beyond.

Sound like your vibe?

If you’re eager to learn, a clever and curious generalist, or a tech nerd looking for an out-of-the-box career path, we’d love to hear from you.

Find out more and apply here:

Vow - Hyper-learners Internship