Pat Brown | Hustle Con 2018

Pat Brown

Okay you think well thank you for being here it's actually it's actually 2,000 restaurants and more like 2,000,000 burgers a month but so it's a little strange that I'm I'm here purporting to be a kind of business expert because I'm a I'm still a complete freshman in the business world and I think there are half the people in the audience probably could teach me more than I could teach them about how to how to function in that world and I definitely have as much to learn as anyone here so 10 years ago the the last thing that I would imagine myself doing was founding a business and and and even laster than that was founding a food business because I had essentially no interest in business and and my only interest in food was you know just eating it when I wasn't eating it I was just not that interested in it and so I was completely unqualified for this gig and at the time I had what was really my dream job I I basically had awesome colleagues I had a research lab that I loved and great students and great funding and a very secure job and I basically my job description was invent and discover things and that was literally what my job description was and it was what I would have created for myself if if I had the choice so why would I give all that up to do something that I was unqualified to do and oh shit okay a cheesy photograph of myself that's that's kind of unnerving okay so so this here is a scenic view of mars this is the 2nd best planet in our solar system and it's probably the 2nd best planet that we could travel to in our lifetimes within 50 light years of earth okay and it sucks it it has no breathable air no liquid water it's winter all the time but there's no skiing and and dim light and nothing but rocks and boulders as far as the eye can see it's a sorry excuse for a for a planet but it's kind of a good negative control for this we got the good planet this is a little patch of planet earth this is this is just a patch of of the amazon actually and you won't find anything like this anywhere within 50 light years of here we have liquid water we have air we can breathe we have mind boggling biodiversity and beauty and we take it for granted that this is just where we live big deal but we shouldn't you know earth is 4,500,000,000 years old and when it was 4,000,000,000 years old we couldn't have lived on it for 5 minutes there was no breathable there was no oxygen in the air it was only when the first land plants appeared about 400000000 years ago that the oxygen levels got it all into the range where animals could survive so this is you know this is not something we can take for granted and the lives of our children and future generations basically depend on how good a job we do of taking care of of this because there's no alternative and we're doing a crappy job of it and this is why this is for all practical purposes the reason why this plant is in jeopardy which may sound surprising but it's just true so there the problem is actually it's not the problem but the driver of the problem is we love meat and since prehistoric times well in prehistoric times it was essential for survival we hunted animals to survive because basically it was a very efficient way of getting high high nutrient density food with relatively little labor and of course but it didn't scale and today we don't need meat to survive in fact people who don't have any meat in their diets by and large are substantially healthier than people who do but we love meat and to satisfy the growing demand for meat we've built an industry that today kills 11 cows 15 sheep 17 goats 47 pigs and more than 2,000 chickens every second and using that prehistoric technology animals to produce these humongous quantities of meat requires a huge fraction of earth's natural resources and it takes a tremendous toll on the global environment and I won't drag you through through all the ways in which that's true just say that it's responsible for more greenhouse gases than every car car bus truck train airplane rocket ship boat all transportation combined it consumes more water and pollutes more water than any other industry on earth and it currently occupies about half of every square mile of earth of of land on earth that's not covered by ice or water so the the land that is devoted to raising animals for food either growing crops to feed them or or grazing them is greater than the total area of north america south america australia and europe combined that's how much land we're using for this and that's all land that once supported biodiversity diverse plants and animals that's basically now been homogenized to a few crops and the kinds of grasses that can sustain intense grazing so this industry is overwhelmingly responsible for habitat destruction and global deforestation for example in the amazon it's responsible for more than 90% of ongoing deforestation and and you know that if you look at that image you're thinking holy shit that that beautiful amazon was turned into this kind of wasteland but it's not just an aesthetic issue you know we kind of take for granted as I was saying about you know how we how basically when mosses appear that's the first time animals could breathe we we depend on this diversity of plants and animals to keep this planet habitable to maintain the ecosystems that refresh our air and water and and just keep our planet and us alive and healthy and 10000 years ago we shared this planet with with nature and all its diverse plants and animals by 1976 we had reduced the total biomass of wild animals remaining on earth by twofold and the cows alone the cows that were being raised for food outweighed every living wild animal on earth terrestrial animal on earth by a factor of 4 that was 40 years ago and it's getting worse so whoops what happened there my my my slides were rapidly re edited in the past hour or so and I just realized a slight error but anyway today 2018 the total biomass of wild animals living on earth is less than half what it was 40 years ago so in the past 40 years we've wiped out half the wild animals that were living on earth and it's for all practical purposes entirely due to the use of animals as a food technology on land it's the expansion of of animal farming overwhelmingly responsible for destruction of habitat and and ecosystems and in water of course it's overfishing so it's our use of animals as food production technology that has basically reduced the number of wild animals living on earth by a factor of 2 and today the cows that are being raised for food at this moment outweigh every living land animal on earth by more than a factor of 10 and the pigs that are being raised for food outweigh every living wild animal on land by a factor of 2 and chickens outweigh every living wild bird remaining by a factor of 3 so we've basically been pushing nature and all the creatures that we depend upon for stable ecosystems that keep this planet thriving and keep us alive practically to the edge of oblivion you know if we if we reduce wild animals by the by the amount that we did in the past 40 years there'd be zip left and and the reason is you know the demand for meat basically that the biomass that we consume annually is so great that if we decided that we were going to as people have suggested to me pretty frequently well maybe we should just hunt animals for our meat if we went to that model there would be no wild animals at all left on earth in 2 months so basically we'd wipe them all out not a single mouse or shrew or or squirrel left on earth in 2 months so that's not a solution anyway this is just to give you I'm not trying to bum you out about this it's to give you an idea of of why as soon as I learned about this problem I thought I'm going to give up the best job in the world and do what I can to fix it and and that's kind of the one take home lesson that if if there is a take home lesson for many of this is that you know when I looked at this problem and realized what a big deal it was I looked around actually I I my first instinct was okay someone's got to do something about this so didn't seem like anyone's doing something about it so I'm going to go around and try to convince someone to take this problem on and I went around to food conferences and stuff like that I said someone this is a huge opportunity for someone it's a huge problem a huge opportunity someone is going to make a bundle of money if they take on this problem and and the people there you know whatever pepsi cola and so forth were just like come on and and that's the.

Pat Brown

That I mean I think this is a. To convey if you see a problem there's a sort of a natural instinct that someone else is working on it or someone else is responsible for solving it but don't assume that because they don't know they're responsible for solving it and if you don't see that someone is working on it it's a reasonable bet that no one is working on it and if it's not their responsibility whose is it it's your responsibility as much as anyone else's and if you care about a big problem you know it's you can't just say well someone else should fix it it's your responsibility okay and and since it's a business conference I'll just parenthetically note that usually when there's a big problem to solve if you can figure out a solution there's money to be made so okay the problem was that that I wanted to fix was this massive scale of the the system we used to produce food from animals and what made it a real problem is that for most of the people on earth for for billions of people the food that we get from animals is really an essential part of the pleasure of living they're they're not going to be willing to sacrifice something that contributes as much as as meat and fish and dairy foods due to their quality of life and even when I've gone to these environmental conferences that you know there's like lifelong environmentalists as far as the eye can see every single one of them is going out for a steak after the conference and I'm not kidding and they're not they're they're wonderful people and they understand the problem and they're not being assholes about it it's just that it's really really hard to make major changes in diet the diet that you've had all your life and you just have to accept that we are not going to solve this problem by persuading people to change their diets or making it a moral or political issue total waste of time and unfortunately I can't see anyone here but I was going to do a q and a so if if if you're in the audience don't worry I can't see your face so I won't judge you do you love meat yeah alright good future customers so and and and now do you love meat in part because of the way we make it from animal cadavers is that is that part of what you value in the meat it's a serious question actually no okay do you love meat in spite of the way we make it yes okay good you're you're that's that's virtually everywhere I've gone about around the world pretty much including middle america that's the way people feel about it they love their meat they're never going to give up eating it but they don't love the the way that it's made they just live with it and that really defines the problem in a in a in a useful way oh and this business about $1,500,000,000,000 this is why it was possible I think for me to raise money for this project okay and this is really the the way to look at the problem the problem isn't that people love meat of course they love meat it's that we're making it the wrong way and the solution is to develop a better way of making all the foods that we get from animals but not just something that's almost good enough in order to succeed we need to make foods that consumers around the world decisively prefer based on all the characteristics that that give it value to them taste nutrition affordability convenience and so forth if we can do that if we can if we can do a better job in the cow of making the best meat in the world and just put on the market that's that's the most decisive way to solve the problem sorry and just as a quick analogy although I think this is pretty intuitive to you you know for for tens of 1000 of years horses were the definitive technology for for power of transportation and if you ask someone 2 200 years ago what the future of transportation looked like they highly likely would have told you the horses will probably be faster and then the first mechanized transportation came along in 18/30 this is the first commercial locomotive and it famously ran a race with a horse in 18/30 and lost slightly lost to the horse but the important.

Pat Brown

Here is that it never lost again because the horse never got faster. Once you switch to a technology from a completely unproven technology, like basically using animals as power or as food, to one that is improvable in multiple dimensions, as soon as you're running close, the race is over. You know you're going to win. Okay, so I'll talk fast. This impossible food started out as a mission. The mission was to replace the world's most destructive technology by 2035 by making the most delicious, nutritious, and affordable meats, fish, and dairy foods in the world, and letting the market do the rest. This mission of getting rid of this technology became a company when I realized that the solution was market-based. The first step was convincing someone to invest in this as a business, which I had never done before. Fortunately, I happened to live on the Stanford campus, which was within short biking distance of half the venture capital in the world. So, I could just, in less than a 10-minute bike ride, pop over to Khosla Ventures and knock on their door. I didn't really do that, but I walked in and gave my pitch. It was a completely amateurish pitch deck, and it's kind of like I'm going to show it to some people at the company at some point.

Pat Brown

Because it's so embarrassing in retrospect but but basically this was my this was my first slide it was about mission and the next 9 slides were about the mission and why it was so important and it was not until the 10th slide that I said anything about how this could function as a business but fortunately that 10th slide basically had you know $1,000,000,000,000 on it which was that magical moment when they reached for their checkbooks and anyway when I when I launched the company I should also add what I knew for sure was that this was going to succeed I was I knew I believed it was totally doable and I was completely determined I was not going to let this fall short of complete success but I didn't know how we were going to do it I just knew it was doable and it was evident from my deck that I really didn't know how I was going to do it and I also didn't know how to run a business as it was obvious to the investors once they saw how bad a job I did of pitching to them but anyway this is another slide in my my pitch deck to just get move this on which was you know some ideas about how we might do this and and what the technology would look like and one of the ideas was that this I'm not going to go into the science behind this you can ask heme might be the magic ingredient for flavor and and I had this what I thought was a brilliant idea which is that there's this heme heme is the thing that makes your blood red and carries oxygen in your blood and it's found it but it's found in lots of high quantities in animals low quantities in plants but the one place in plants where there's a decent amount of it is in what's called the root nodule of nitrogen fixing plants there's a protein called leghemoglobin that has heme and and I thought I did a calculation I realized that there's enough leghemoglobin in the root nodules of the us soybean crop to replace all the heme and all the meat in the us diet and I thought holy crap this is such a great idea well we'll just once they harvest the soybeans we'll come come across the field and harvest the root nodules and it'll cost us almost nothing and and and it's it's genius these are these are root nodules you can just see cut them open they look like meat inside a small amount of pea root nodules like one ounce of p root nodules you can get all this red juice that's heme okay so then the 1st year of the company we spent probably more than half of our startup investment pursuing this idea which involved basically making multiple trips to texas and minnesota to soybean farms and amassing these giant piles of soybean roots and developing these root bulb globular contraptions to recover the root nodules and extract the leg hemoglobin from them and after actually more than a year we realized this is a ridiculous idea but we'd spent like $1,000,000 discovering that and but it wasn't a waste of time for a couple of reasons first of all the only way that we we could learn that this wasn't the best way to do it was to try it and realize it was a terrible way to do it it was also a great way to build a team because there's no better way to to build a team than than to be you know working on this kind of ridiculous project where you find yourself with your you know small group of of colleagues at the start of the company at 4 am you know mopping up the floor of some godforsaken pilot facility in south texas it really helped us you know bond as a team but we realized that wasn't the way to do it we figured out a way to produce heme using yeast and that enabled our r and d team to establish what we'd sort of only suspected which is heme is the magic molecule that makes meat taste like meat it's basically the explanation for why meat recognizably tastes like meat and unlike anything else on earth and it does it by catalyzing chemical reactions that turn these simple nutrients into flavor molecules and so forth I won't go into the science you can ask me about it but but anyway and so that was just part of the science that went into you know the the job that we assigned ourselves was study meat the way I would in my previous life have studied the disease to figure out in molecular terms how it works and then once you know that to figure out how to how to make the best version of it you know using a new set of tools the r and d team which was the best group of scientists ever assembled in the food food world by far did that task and and then okay and about 2 years ago we we decided we knew enough to launch our first product which was raw ground beef which we chose because it's the most disruptive product we thought we could make in the us and and and again here's how I know we're going to succeed here okay so this product they were serving it in the food trucks I encourage you to try it and and email us if you have any any comments on it but but here's how we how I know we're going to succeed basically the cow has been working on this for a 1000000 years and we've been working on it for about 6 years and at this.

Pat Brown

I would say, by a lot of criteria, we're running even with the cow. Okay, so this is like where mechanized transportation was in 1830, and we're getting better every day while the cow is not. The mission here, the original motivation, or a big part of it, was to reduce the environmental impact of the food system. Even at this early stage, where we haven't really fully optimized this for sustainability, producing our burger based on an independent life cycle analysis uses a quarter of the water, an eighth of the greenhouse gas emissions, and less than 1/20th the land to produce the same thing from a cow. And that's going to get better. So, okay, 30 seconds more. Today, there are people who are actually talking about the need to establish a human colony on Mars so that we'll be ready in case we totally mess up this planet, in case we make Earth uninhabitable. But the thing is that Mars is already uninhabitable, and Earth is awesome. All we need to do is to keep from turning Earth into Mars, and we're good. So anyway, this is the plan that I'm going to bet on, and it's this that gets me excited to go to work every day. The other reason is this: I absolutely love all the people I get to work with every day. And that's it. Thank you.