Immediate Impact Through Entrepreneurship

I never defined myself as a biochemistry professor or something like that. It just happened to be what I was doing at the time. And I always felt like I want to do the most important and impactful meaningful thing that I can do, given the things that I know how to do. And for a long while, it was trying to develop a better basic understanding of sort of the fundamental mechanisms that keep cells alive and how genes work and stuff like that, both as pure knowledge and also because that's kind of like the foundation for being able to develop better ways of treating and diagnosing disease and so forth. So I thought, okay, that's pretty impactful, and I was happy doing that. But I. I had a sabbatical, and I had the opportunity to basically just step back from it and ask myself, okay, what right now is the most important problem in the world that I can potentially contribute to solving? And I realized very quickly that the most important and urgent problem in the world, in my very strong opinion, full stop, is the destructive impact of our use of animals as food production technology, which not just according to me, but according to the UN Environmental Program and many other environmental scientists, is, by a big margin, the most environmentally destructive technology on Earth. And so, okay, that's easy. So that's the problem. And it took me a while to come around to realizing that the solution involves starting a business. In fact, when I got into that thought process, it was like the farthest thing from my mind. But I realized that no one was taking this seriously as a solvable problem. I went to the COP21 conference two years ago, and there's all these people who live and breathe climate change, and not a word. I mean, I basically, I think, was the only person in the entire city of Paris who was talking about the animals in our food system as a major cause of climate change. And yet, if you talk to anyone there, they'd say, yeah, of course, it really is, but it was on no one's agenda. Why? Because for billions of people around the world, the foods that we get from animals are such an important part of the pleasure of living that it's too much of a stretch to contemplate basically leaving those foods behind, even for people who live and breathe these kind of environmental issues. And so you have this dilemma that billions of people and rapidly increasing demand for these foods and the way we're making them is completely unscalable. I mean, the magnitude of the environmental impact, don't get me started, but is humongous. How do you solve that dilemma? You basically separate the things that people demand and desire, which is the functional properties of these foods, flavor all the things that you love about those foods from the way we make them. And I felt like, ok, actually if you do that, that's a solvable problem. And that what it enables you to do is that it should be possible to do, is to create products that outperform in every way that consumers care about the products that we get from animals much more sustainably. Basically deconstructing the problem and making these products directly from plant ingredients. And if we then just put them on the market and let the market work, let consumers make the choice, and it's on us to make a product that's so good that people choose over the existing products. But if we can pull that off, we solve the problem. And at potentially a very fast pace, we set our target as basically this is our internal strategic target. We want to effectively, completely replace the use of animals as a food production technology by 2035. And I think that the only way you can do that, the only system fast enough to make that happen, is the market and products that outperform.