Founding Hoxton Farms and Creating the Future of Food with Max Jamilly

Welcome to the Axial Podcast. Axial is an early-stage investment firm based in San Francisco. We partner with great founders and inventors investing in early-stage life science companies, often when they are no more than an idea. Axial is fanatical about helping the rare inventor who is compelled to build their own enduring business. Let's see, recording. Okay, Max, thank you for doing this podcast. Great talking. Huge fan of your career and Hoxton. Maybe you can do a brief introduction on you and Hoxton and we just go from there.

I'd love to. Hey, Josh. Hey, everyone. My name is Max Jamali. I'm the co-founder of Hoxton Farms. We are based in London and we exist because we know that everyone is craving delicious meat alternatives, but plant-based meat doesn't taste good enough. Um, and that's why we grow cultivated fat as an ingredient for meat alternatives that finally look and cook and taste just as good as the real thing. So we're here creating a fatty and delicious future where people can eat meat alternatives that are truly satisfying and, uh, don't force them to compromise on the things that they really enjoy eating.

Great. And so how would you describe, like, what's Hoxton's mission? Like, what's the core problem you're trying to solve? And then how do you think about, especially for synthetic biology companies, like product launches?

Great question. So we exist to make meat alternatives that are indistinguishable from the real thing. And fat really is the challenge here. Fat is the most important sensory component of all the meat that we eat, whether we're talking about a burger or a chicken breast or a Kobe Wagyu steak. It's what makes meat sizzle and brown and smell and taste amazing. And our mission is creating this fat from stem cells in a cleaner way. Now, you're right. One of the most exciting parts of this, of being a synthetic biology company, is building a product. And we live within this exciting world of industrial biotech or tech bio, where we're not making a clinical product, we're making, in our case, a food ingredient. Now, Hoxton Farms is 2.5 years old. We raised our Series A last year. We're approaching 30 people based here in sunny central London. And we're getting closer to our launch. The journey for us is now taking a process which works and scaling it up from grams to kilograms to tonnes of production. And while we do that, selling our ingredient to our B2B customers, which are flavour creators, plant-based meat manufacturers, so that they can ultimately combine our synthetic biology ingredient, cultivated fat, with their plant-based protein to make these awesome alternatives that are just as good as the real thing.

Great. I think it always kind of— there's always kind of— you and a few others have convinced me that like plant-based meats or like maybe non-animal meats, non-animal products make this transition from fully plant-based to maybe a hybrid, then maybe fully cell-based, but maybe it's some time from now. But these are kind of hybrid products where you can kind of improve plant-based meats, make them more realistic, and add specific ingredients rather than trying to make a fully cellular-based food product. Maybe we can talk about— we could back it up and talk about the origin stories of Hoxton. The story is always more interesting. So maybe you can like, how did you start off in like science? How did you like, were you always entrepreneurial? When did that spark to come?

Yeah, sure. I'm happy to go way back to the beginning and talk about my, my journey, Josh. So I'm from North London. I started off studying.

All north, all north, like Liverpool, Newcastle, North London, not north of London. Oh, North London.

Oh, North London. Very much a Londoner by heart. I've actually never been to Liverpool. Liverpool, which is the kind of thing that Londoners wear as a badge of honour. But I grew up in, in London town itself and then headed over to Cambridge, which is just an hour north of London, to study biology. After doing my undergrad there in biology, I stayed to do a master's in bioscience enterprise, which is really a combination of biology and entrepreneurship at the business school. And I think, Josh, that was the first time that I became incredibly excited about not just fundamental science, which is cool, but applying this basic science to the real world. I think that's where it gets exciting, and that's where you can really make a difference. And although, especially in a place like Cambridge, most of the translational biotech going on was for clinical applications. I was becoming more and more excited, uh, around 2013, 2014, by this growing field of synthetic biology, which is using biology to build new stuff rather than just making the most of what, uh, biology's already invented. And that interest led me, um, across the pond to the other Cambridge in Massachusetts where I worked for a George Church gene synthesis company called Gen9, doing relatively large on-chip DNA synthesis to serve the synthetic biology industry. And I was only there for a short time, but that was one of the first times I learned about fast-moving startups building products using synbio, and it made me realize that I was at this kind of junction where I could continue as a scientist doing cool translational stuff, but to take it to the next level and probably increase my chances of being able to found a deep tech startup, it really made sense to go and do a PhD. So that's what—

Let's talk about like SynBio. You're in college, you join Gen9. What was that spark? Because like 2013, '14, Ginkgo had just gotten a lot of attention. I think they bought Gen9, and then you saw this kind of at least popularization of synthetic biology became popular again from the ashes of like Ameris and industrial biotechnology versus maybe biotech and life sciences, maybe it's more prominent in UK at the time. What got you interested in synbio? For me at least, synthetic biology was interesting. Like when you make a drug, you could impact like a small number of people. Really deeply, but SynBio, you can impact like a billion people potentially.

That is exactly it. You know, um, I even at that time and since have spent a lot of my career as a scientist working on clinical applications, as have most people in the life sciences. That's why it's called the life sciences. Um, and lots of people get sick, but almost everyone eats. Using the example of food. And food is just one of these incredible applications of synthetic biology where you have the opportunity to touch the lives of almost everyone on the planet. Um, and you know, just as biology is everywhere, so is synthetic biology. So I, I think at the time, one of the reasons that I was so excited to move into synbio, and still am just thrilled to be in this space, is the, the sheer breadth of its reach. Um, now, uh, if that's a very kind of high-minded and philosophical reason for being excited about the space, it's also just really freaking cool. Um, synthetic biology, uh, especially at the time, um, was built on this super cool analogy between computers and biology. Um, now That analogy is seductively simple, maybe simplistic, but nonetheless there's a core of truth in it, which is that if you, if you apply engineering principles to biology, rather than just making the most of what already exists, you can treat biology as building blocks to build new stuff. And to an entrepreneur, to someone who likes to invent things to solve real-world problems and change people's lives, this just gives you kind of an incredible almost endless palette of colors to paint new solutions with. And that's what companies like Gen9 were doing, finally, at these incredible boundaries between different fields. And in their case, you know, computer science, hardware engineering, and molecular biology. And since then, many other companies have done similar things, and it feels like there's almost an endless set of possibilities. But at the core of it, It's cool applications that come from really exciting and really difficult science.

So like when you're in college, you got into synbio because it just, it was interesting, impactful. And were you— I'm always curious, at least in synthetic biology, like what is— how do you define it? Because is it a 20-year-old field? It's from the 80s, like this idea of using engineering principles in biology has always been around. Even like Monod and, you know, like Black Operon, you know, could be chemical synthetic biology in some ways. I'm always curious of like the why now, right? Like, is there like some sort of technology enablement of synbio, or is it just more of like demand where it's like there's demand for these products So people are willing to find new applications for bio. Something I don't have the answer to, but is it, is it, is syn bio enabled because like synthesis costs have driven down or is it just more enabled because consumers want these products? Maybe both.

It's difficult to say, and I can always come up with some anecdotal reasoning post hoc, but the space is nowhere near finished developing. So perhaps, perhaps we'll know in a decade. But you're right, whenever synthetic biology formally started, or maybe it's always been around, it definitely descends from kind of, uh, you know, the bad old days in the '80s when people were first discovering genetic engineering. But there is a lot more to it than that. And I think the reason that it started to grow so exponentially in the last, say, 15 years, um, is definitely down to kind of its synergy with other supporting technologies. And of course, DNA sequencing and synthesis, um, are, are two of those technologies. Um, all I can say is that there's, there's a lot more room for SynBio to grow. Uh, and in fact, I think SynBio isn't yet enjoying that much kind of pull from consumers because there are still relatively few real-world applications of synthetic biology. You know, we're beginning to see some in biopharma, especially with the cell and gene therapies. There have been some kind of low-value commercial applications rising out of iGEM projects. That's one of the big synthetic biology competitions that students do. But I would actually point to cultivated meat as one of the first industries where, you know, we see a very, very clear value proposition against an enormous market opportunity, and synthetic biology provides a solution. Now, actually, especially within the cultivated meat industry, people don't spend that much time talking about synthetic biology, maybe because it's not a very helpful term and it doesn't mean much to people outside the field. Really, what this is, is again biotechnology. It's building cool stuff with biology. And I think that's the common thread from the '80s to now, and that's the future as well.

That's a good point. I think it's a synthesis of technologies that kind of led to the growth of synbio. Okay, so you're at Cambridge, you go to Oxford, but you do your PhD in cancer drug discovery. So what was in your head? You're in Cambridge and you're loving synbio. I love this field. I'm gonna go to Oxford and do a PhD in cancer and do that for like, what, 4 or 5 years? How did you reconcile the two? Was it— did you get sucked into cancer unwillingly almost, or was it part of some master plan, or was it— what was in your head at the time?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I wonder what's in anyone's head at the time of starting a PhD. I think, I think many people say, and this is definitely my advice to your listeners, the best reason for doing a PhD is that no matter what anyone says, no matter how much they try to talk sense and dissuade you, you still want to do it. That means you've got the perseverance to finish, finish a tough PhD. Taking a step back, my PhD was a combination of cancer biology and synthetic biology. What I wanted to do was learn a whole bunch of interesting biology. And that's, that's got to be your main reason for doing a PhD, or you probably won't have much fun. But on top of that, I wanted to explore applications of synthetic biology, build tools using synbio, and use them to do important stuff. Now, at the time, and this is kind of one of the themes I've been talking about, the best way to apply synbio was in, in the life sciences. So I joined a lab that was developing fundamental tools using CRISPR-Cas9 as a tool in synthetic biology, and the application that I found for that technology was in, was in cancer. So I was using a technology called genome-wide CRISPR screening, which allows you to essentially turn on or turn off genes across a genome at very high throughput, one by one, and then test the effect of turning those genes on and off on a particular phenotype. And in my case, I was testing what happened when you turned those genes on and off in a particular kind of difficult-to-treat paediatric leukaemia. So although I was really interested in this disease, and it's a very worthy problem to be solving. I was also there for the technology. I was building this technology of doing genome-wide CRISPR screening, which is just an incredible technique and also poses some really big practical challenges. Now, it turns out that while I was doing this, I'm really obsessed with food, so I was also wondering whether I could eat all the cells that I was growing. And I was also doing a lot of entrepreneurship on the side and building on these entrepreneurial projects and combining them with the science that I was doing during my PhD was, I think, a perfect way to prepare for becoming a founder and allowed me to get really broad exposure before I dived in.

Let's talk about those side projects. So you did an internship at OSI, or some work at OSI, and you're doing entrepreneurship. Can you talk about some of the entrepreneurial projects you're doing? You got some exposure as a VC. One question I have, how did you not become a VC? How did you not get sucked into the seductive nature of venture capital versus— most of the time meet scientists and they get exposure to VC too early. It's such an easy job. I should just do that. How did you say, I'm going to be a founder, which is harder? Can you talk about this project, doing some VC as well? And then ultimately how that maybe built up Hoxton?

I definitely considered working in VC, and I think most people who describe their career as one predetermined step leading to the next, as if there were a plan, yeah, they're lying. It's always easy to look back and understand your path, but at the time I was maximizing optionality, learning about as many different things as possible. And learning about VC made a lot of sense because, uh, it might turn out to be a career I was interested in doing. Um, but even if it wasn't, it was a cool way for me to learn about lots of different technologies all at once and ultimately prepare myself really well for being a founder when one of the most life or death skills is your ability to fundraise. And when you're on the founder's side of the table, if you can understand what's going on in the VC, in the head of the VC on the other side of the table, then it puts you in a really good place. So I sought out those VC internships as a, as a way of learning about an industry, but also building some really important skills. Now, my advice to people thinking about VC is that generally it could make you a better VC and definitely open more doors for you if you get some operational experience first. Now, that doesn't work for everybody. Some people are prodigies and go straight into investment, and I think I'm looking at one. But for lots of people, you know, the path into senior roles in VC is nonlinear. You don't start at the bottom and work up. You chop and change, moving horizontally between different industries. And I always figured that I could do that. And I was just so excited about operating, solving some problems, working on them with my own hands in my own agency, that becoming a founder was the right thing to do.

So could you talk more? Okay, so sometimes my best ideas, and talking to friends who have really good ideas, they've often been in the back of their head for years. And so you're nearing the end of Oxford PhD program. What kind of options did you have when you think about join the startup? How did you meet Ed, your co-founder of Hoxton? Was food always something you wanted to work on, or was it something that like— how did you figure out what to actually solve? How did you pick the right market and product? And, you know, all that stuff, you kind of— you're, you're in that transition period, which is always the tough part between something else and something new. And so between your PhD and Hoxton, How did you make all these? These are really important decisions.

You're right.

Co-founder idea. Do we start up or not? You know, these are really hard things to figure out.

Yeah, you're right, Josh. They are difficult decisions. And I think they're even harder for scientists. They're harder for scientists because, hey, we're scientists. We don't like making decisions with limited information. That's not what we're trained to do. And depending on where you do your PhD, you may not get much exposure to translational biology or entrepreneurship or industry, as academics call it, at all. You know, you might be lucky enough to work in a lab where your PI has started a few companies, but more likely you work in a lab where the only career advice that you get is to do a postdoc. And so it can be pretty tough. And my, my experience is that the best way you can prepare yourself for that transition is by, during your PhD, using the time that you have and the flexibility to expose yourself to as many different things and, and kind of career paths as possible. Although PhDs are busy and intense, you will probably never have as much free time and certainly as much flexibility to be the master of your own time as when you're in that academic role. So, you know, my advice is make the most of that. My transition was just as bumpy a one as anyone else's. I spent some time working for a friend's startup, then I briefly worked at a precision fermentation startup called Formo, helping them make dairy proteins using yeast. But to answer your question, food had been in the back of my head for a very long time. Now, speaking of long times, my relationship with my co-founder is an unusual one as well. Ed and I go way back. And when I say way back, I mean to 1995. So we've almost known each other for 30 years. We were at elementary school together in North London. We spent 15 years at kind of junior and high school together, and then Ed went off to study maths at Oxford and I went to Cambridge to do biology, but we'd always stayed in touch. And even during my PhD, when Ed was working at a fintech company and then he started a company with an Oxford maths professor, we were thinking about food. We were meeting where British people love to meet in the pub. And sharing ideas. We almost started a company with another friend from school, um, making high-protein fish feed for the aquaculture industry, but it didn't quite take off. And so by 2020, when I'd finished my PhD, I was casting around for what to do, um, and then talking of unexpected, uh, journeys, the pandemic hit, uh, Ed and I decided that the world was falling apart, so it was the perfect time for us to make a clean break and start thinking about some ideas. And actually, we did not have a fully formed idea when we decided to start the company. You know, people often assume that you come up with the idea, then start the company. In our case, I think we locked down the most important thing, and by far the riskiest thing, which was our relationship as co-founders and our commitment to working together on something. Now, we knew that it would be in food. We knew that there were incredible, kind of, there was incredible application potential from this combination of maths, Ed's background, and synthetic biology, mine. And we were absolutely crazy about the cellular agriculture industry, cultivated meat, But beyond that, we weren't entirely sure what we would do. We set ourselves a deadline of about 6 months, which was roughly how much savings we had to live off ramen and work on ideas from our living rooms, and probably the limit of our girlfriends' patience. And we said, we're going to start a company, and within 6 months, we're going to lock down one of these many ideas that we've got bouncing around our heads. And see if we can raise some money to make it happen. So that's, that's what we did. We spoke to hundreds.

One thing, how did you— you alluded to this, this is a really important decision. You decided to establish the founding relationship from the beginning and then think about the idea. What was the, like, how did you figure out, like, hey, I'm going to be CEO and you're going to be, I think, CTO or CSO? But like, how did you delineate your role? Did you delineate your roles from the beginning and like figure out expectations and like the founding relationship?

So all those aspects of the founding relationship are really important. And when I speak to people just starting their companies, you know, where I was a couple of years ago, or getting ready to find a co-founder, I always say that it's really worth having those conversations as early as possible. Ed and I are lucky, we've known each other for so long that we have a really intrinsic level of trust for each other. But nonetheless, your co-founder relationship is going to be tried. It's going to be tried by stress and the difficulty of what you're doing. And there are always important aspects that that make it, make it a difficult relationship but a fundamental one. In our case, we both approached the startup as co-founders and we didn't place much emphasis on titles. We knew where the difference in our skills lied and also our interests, and we've used that to guide what we focus on. But we've also kept pretty flexible and That's different, I think, to your traditional idea of, you know, a co-founder pair where one person's the scientist who never goes outside the lab and one person's the business person who never goes into the lab. I think that model's been blown out the water now. There are some extremely good, deeply technical, but also commercially minded founders. In that sense, Ed and I both fit that mold. He has a technical background in maths, and I have a technical background in biology. And without both of our technical backgrounds, it would have been impossible to do this cool combo. But also, we both have complementary non-technical commercial experience as well. So from the beginning, both of us were working on the tech, and both of us were working on the fundraising. As the company's grown and matured, there is more to do than humanly possible. And so we do have to delineate our roles more and more. And that means I spend more time speaking with investors and customers and doing outward-facing things as Ed focuses on inward-facing CTO, COO-type tasks. But we still cultivate a lot of overlap between what we do. And we think, especially with this really trusting co-founder relationship that we have, that it's the most important thing.

What do you guys do outside of work? Do you guys have like, you guys play football together? Do you guys like have a shared hobby? Like, it's like it's something you've done for a long time together. Do you guys like play board games? Like, there's something outside of work that keeps you bonded as well?

It's so important to maintain that co-founder relationship, to be able to step away from work and also not talk about work. And we do that in a few different ways. We try every few weeks to go for a beer and just sit down and be friends. And, you know, we joke that Whoever first mentions work has to buy the next round. Pretty difficult challenge, you know, and the longer you spend running a startup, the more it takes over your life. And that's just the reality of it. It's a great privilege to do something that you enjoy so much that you want it to take over your life. But at the same time, you have to be careful about burnout and cultivating that relationship. So he and I do all kinds of things like like that together. And also we keep our own hobbies that we do separately from each other, because when you spend 18 hours a day together, it's good to get some time apart as well. And Ed plays football, soccer. I'm terrible at it, so I don't do that with him. And I love to run and cycle. So it's good to keep some sense of perspective and balance when you're a founder.

That's great. And so you and Ed start off this journey. Trying to find like a market problem to solve in SynBio.

Yeah.

How did you do that? Especially in SynBio, how did you avoid the issues of like a hammer looking for a nail? Like we have a cool technology, we're looking for a problem to solve. How did you identify a problem first and then build up the solution? That seems to be a big issue. It's a big issue for biotech companies in general, especially synbio, where a scientist might have a cool invention, but then they're trying to fit it in unnaturally to, like, you know, a product or some sort of food market.

Yeah, you're quite right, Josh. I think this is one of the first and most common pitfalls, especially for brilliant technical founders. You lead with the technology and therefore lead with the solution rather than the problem. And, you know, in a way I alluded to that earlier by saying that Ed and I came together because we knew that there was something cool to apply our, um, our combination of technical backgrounds to. But that's not the point. You're quite right. You need to build a business around the problem that you're solving. And so very early on, we took a step back from our technical background and set about finding out as much as we possibly could about problems in the food industry, and we quickly discovered that by far the most pressing problem in the production and success of plant-based meat is the fat. So today's plant-based formulations like the Beyond Burger use coconut oil, and in general these plant oils are rubbish. And we realized that using real animal fat, just made in a cleaner way, was this really elegant solution to this problem that could not be solved in any other way. I say elegant solution because it's much easier to grow fat cells than it is to grow muscle cells, which at the time was the big focus of the cultivated industry. And you You need a much smaller amount of fat cells than you do muscle cells to completely transform the product. Something like 10% fat is enough to make a plant-based alternative taste amazing. So from a unit economic perspective, it made a lot of sense as well. So having identified this problem, um, how did you do that though?

How did you identify fat was a central problem in taste and then feasible? Was it, What was that? It seems intuitive when you say it, but at the time, how did you pull that thread? Who did you talk to? How did you get in touch with that KOL? Or how did you, did you make a list of a spreadsheet? Like what was the kind of the actual work to get to this insight?

We networked like crazy.

But how? Cold email or introductions or like going to events or maybe a bunch?

So this was, this was the pandemic, which made it interesting. On the one hand, there were no events. On the other hand, if you remember, especially the first half of 2020, everybody was talking on Zoom, even, you know, your, your long, your long lost friend that you wouldn't have spoken to otherwise because it was the pandemic. Everybody was chatting. So I think we found it really easy to reach out to all kinds of stakeholders. In the kind of existing but nascent cellular agriculture industry, but also in the very established plant-based industry, and just talk to them. And it's amazing, if you stop and listen and let someone talk and talk and talk, eventually they will land on their biggest problems. We also became connected to two of the big kind of industry bodies or NGOs that help coordinate the future food industry. One is GFI and one is New Harvest, and they're really good at helping kind of pair entrepreneurs with stakeholders in the industry to do market research. So whatever industry—

Shout out to Good Food Institute and New Harvest, they make good reports. I agree. I really do. Yeah, they need some really good, like, 100-page reports, and I'll just read them and be like, this is cool.

Yeah, for real. And, you know, we're pretty lucky to have the Good Food Institute and New Harvest in our industry, but there is normally an equivalent. And if there isn't an equivalent, then, you know, basically do the legwork, speak to the people, find the experts, and see what they have to say. Now, once you start to build hypotheses, like any good scientist, you should test them. And one of the things that we did Um, once we'd landed on fat as this core problem was see whether traditional, i.e., real animal fat solved the problem. So we spent hours and hours, uh, again in our kitchens at home during the pandemic, making plant-based meat and trying to mix existing plant-based meat with real animal fat from the butchers. So we started making sausages and burgers and all kinds of things, um, and doing taste tests, you know, as blinded as possible with our friends to see what tasted better— the, the normal plant-based burger or the burger with 10% pork fat, say, or beef fat or whatever. Um, and the results were pretty conclusive, and that was one of the big things that led us to believe that if we could only make real animal fat using cellular agriculture, then we'd be really onto a winner.

I didn't know that. Okay, so your MVP was a plant-based product mix of animal fat product. And could this taste good? That's pretty good. Most synbio companies actually don't do taste testing until the very end when they spent all the money. I mean, what makes Hoxton unique, you actually were able to do the taste test in the beginning. Is this going to work? Is it worth our time? And then we should go do it. That's pretty— I can't think of another company that did that. Most food companies end up having to build it first and then taste it. Maybe one thing, did you and Ed have like a second idea? I've observed that like some great companies always had like a second, even a third idea, just in case.

It's funny, the longer we run Hoxton Farms, the more we see other massive problems in the industry and are full of other ideas, but you have to focus on the one. But in the process of finding the one, I think there was one thing in particular that we had in the back of our minds, which was instead of building a vertically integrated business that goes almost all the way to B2C, but stops short with a B2B ingredient, we wondered about becoming a horizontally integrated service business instead. Uh, and in fact, that was our first idea. It was, I think, much more solution-based rather than problem-based. But we realized that in bioprocess optimization and scale-up, whether you're making cultivated meat using cell culture or antibodies or vaccines or whatever, there is a really kind of big unmet need for maths and good modeling and kind of up-to-date techniques. The problem was that just like I said, that was a, that was a solution looking for an application. And we really wanted to be working in the cultivated meat industry, but most of the companies that would have been our customers if we were a kind of service or consulting business were still focused on solving every problem themselves. They were too immature to be our customers. And we realized that the real way to generate value using this same kind of core competitive advantage, which we had, which is this combination of, of maths and biology, the way to do it was by vertically integrating and making a physical product ourselves. So yeah, on top of that, we had a million other ideas, but I think that's an instructive one. That shows the way we looked at our advantage, but also looked at the commercial opportunity and worked out the best way to make it real.

Let me push on that more. So you, you found a problem to solve, uh, adding cultivated fat to plant-based meat. Great. How did you then think about, like, the actual technical aspects of, like, actually the feasibility of it, like a proof of concept? I think you probably have it handled. So Max has that handled because you're the biologist and cancer— you've done cell, cell cultivation, cell growth. And then Max— Ed, Ed, probably he is the math guy, so like he does the techno-economic stuff, economic like modeling, how to get this like the unit economics right, I'm assuming. And so what was, what was the kind of— once you identify the problem, how did you then build like the business model the kind of the feasibility stuff to it to make it kind of realistic?

The hardest thing is testing the technology, especially a capital-intensive syn biotech before you fundraise. And so you need to ask yourself really critical questions about what is the absolute minimum of data that you can generate to prove your concept. A lot of scientists, I think, get caught in the trap of thinking they need paper-quality data and hundreds of hours in the lab to prove a concept, when frankly, at the early stage, investors are looking for the strength of your team, the strength of your idea, the strength of your plans, and last of all, they're thinking about whether you have any traction, whether you have any data that proves the concept. But the reality is that they know that you can't generate that much data before you have the money, and chances are your idea or the problem that you're focusing on might change a little bit anyway. So today's data doesn't give you kind of tomorrow's chances of success. So we asked ourselves that question and we found a very minimal case where we could demonstrate that the application of mathematical modeling would improve our ability to make cultivated fat. We hustled our way into the back of our friend's lab. He was running a startup growing algae. We were trying to grow mammalian cells in the same lab, which for anyone has done cell culture, they'll know it's a nightmare. But within a few weeks, and using mostly borrowed reagents, we were able to do just enough to show that that worked. The data were not good. Um, in fact, there was barely anything there at all, but it was just enough to prove this kernel of our competitive advantage so that we could raise some money, build an actual process and team, and go from that.

So you can show technically it's possible. Did you have to do anything on the back end? I think a lot of synbio companies don't have good modeling. They don't have good— like, the term is techno-economic modeling, whatever that means, but just like understanding, can you actually get to that price point? And some stuff I see, just a lot of spreadsheets are kind of lazy and just start from $10,000 a kilogram to $1. And it doesn't really make sense. Like, from— like, how did you figure that out? I think maybe the hardest part of SynBio is like drive— knowing the key cost drivers, um, for your product. Uh, it is super— how did you learn how to do that? Maybe Ed is the expert there.

Yes, you're quite right. Uh, although I've talked a lot about taste today, that's because taste is sexy and really important in our industry, actually success comes down to cost and scale. And that's true in food, but it's true in nearly all synbio. We run these complicated, expensive, multi-step bioprocesses, and they need to produce high margin, high volume outputs at the end, which is fundamentally quite different to the approach that biopharma has taken. For decades. To do that, you need really great techno-economic analyses. And TEA is a fancy way of saying understanding your unit economics.

Yeah.

Now, that was one of our core advantages, thanks to this mathematical modeling that we could do. We could essentially describe the entire bioprocess in the computer rather than on paper. And that allowed us to predict really accurately what our costs would be. Now, whether or not you have the ability to do that in-house, getting that locked down as early as possible as a syndiary company is really, really important. And I think that's the biggest piece of backend development that we did. Now, don't do your TEA and then leave it until the next round. Your TEA is only as good as the bioprocess that it describes, and your bioprocess will continually change. So you need to update your TEA continually as well and make sure that you use realistic data.

Yeah, this is like the core competitive advantage for any synbio company, that model and updating it and always tinkering with that model on the back end. So then your front end product is not only tastes good and compelling, but is a reasonable price. That's going to be probably the majority of the reason why people buy your product is it's like price parity to the animal-based equivalents. So can you raise the seed round, raise a Series A? Maybe you talk about raising money as an English company, a British company. And I think you raised your seed round from Precise Capital, the origins from Germany, but based in LA. And then you raise your Series, I think from a European firm. Or maybe you talk about just raising money as a British startup and the fact that you need to come to the US to have more success and maybe your experience building in London and raising outside of London.

A whole extra hour to share about.

Yeah. We don't have to talk about this. I think there's a lot of things to touch upon. Yeah.

But let me say briefly that Uh, first of all, so our seed round was led by Founders Fund, uh, although Presight Capital participated as well. And our Series A was co-led by Finestructure Ventures and Collaborative Fund. In all cases, these are US leads. And although we had several really awesome UK and European funds participating in the rounds too, there is perhaps a reason why we had to go to the US. I say we had to, we chose to, because the US represents by far the best access to capital for SynBio startups and also the best understanding of our space. This is a relatively new space, and I think UK and EU investors, although many of them, including the ones on our cap table, really understand the space well, we're a little bit behind. And so I look forward to a future where UK startups don't immediately need to look elsewhere to raise money, and there are really good opportunities for early-stage startups, whether spinning out of universities or standing independent, to raise money in the UK. But nonetheless, we found the best traction with US investors because they understood our problem and our solution and our market the best. What I would say is look everywhere. No two investors are the same. Find the investors that are the best fit for your plans, that really understand what you want to do with your business, and they'll be really great partners, you know, for as long as you're running things.

That makes sense. Yeah, I think London has so much money, it's just like you think it'd be so easy to raise venture capital there, and it kind of isn't. Always, you know, and so it just kind of seems like a shame. I think it's another conversation. I think UK will be fine for startups over time. So maybe you build Hox and you raise this money and you're 30 employees, you're getting near commercialization or preparing for commercialization, talking to partners and thinking about go-to-market. As a CEO, how has it been like? How have you updated your repertoire of skills? How did you become a better leader, better manager? How did you get better at talking to corporations and partnering with them? How did you learn all these different skill sets? You know, how did you find the right people to do those type of work? And how did you get better at like trusting those people to do the work and you can focus on other things, right? How'd you get good at handing off things? You know, stuff like that.

I think it's critical to stay humble, to be curious, and adopt a mindset of constantly learning. The best thing that you can do in this kind of leadership position is surround yourself with people who are better and more experienced than you are, and know how to have an expert conversation whilst not necessarily being the expert. It's knowing what you know and what you don't know. And I think if your startup is going well, then as a founder or CEO, your job is reinvented roughly every year, and you have to be willing to do that and also comfortable being continuously outside your comfort zone. As soon as you're in your comfort zone, then you should be delegating that role to someone else in the organization so that you can get back to doing the hardest, highest-risk thing that nobody else in the team can do apart from you. So if your company is pushing the envelope, it's only because you're pushing the envelope as the founder, and you kind of have to accept that it's going to be really difficult and sometimes sleepless and find the fun in that, which I think I do.

That makes a lot of sense. I think just like that's Being a CEO is almost like an athlete. Every year you have to get a new skill set. That's something I've observed. The best CEOs are always trying to add something new to their toolkit. It's kind of the growth part of it, but then it's also to run a company at the same time. So you have to be good at trusting other people to handle things. I think sometimes founders, you work so hard in the beginning to make it work and then you're like, I gotta hand this, I gotta hand this off to somebody else.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's, you get a little, that's where the tension can get involved. And so you'd be really good at hiring great people. And that's when do you find you spend most of your time, what are you spending most time on now versus in the beginning? Do you spend most time on hiring or is it talking to customers?

Maybe I would say hiring customers and technology. In that order are my biggest time spends. They've always been my biggest time spends, but the order has changed. At the beginning, I, like my co-founder, was deeply involved in the technical work, and in many ways I still am. Uh, we are still, uh, kind of in charge of all of the technical work that we do, but we've delegated the day-to-day, month-to-month, sometimes year-to-year decisions to other brilliant members of the team who are much better than we are, so that we can spend time on the hiring, bringing in the next people, and of course customers, the sales, so that we can get our product out there into the world. I think if you're a scientist who becomes a founder, you should always remain involved to some extent in the technical work. Because your vision is what sets the commercial imperative and creates the cadence for the work that you do. But of course you need that brilliant team. You need to be willing to let go and delegate so that you can leverage your time effectively and essentially get as much done as possible. That's how my time spend has changed, but it is constantly about reinventing yourself.

Do you have like a CEO coach? I found that also kind of like some do, some don't. Some like having other founders as their pseudo coach. Some people like hiring a formal coach. I think it all depends.

Yeah, funny you should mention it. I just started working with a coach this week, so it's an experiment to me. I've heard many founders whom I really respect saying that it's a great way to work on your skills. And have conversations which aren't with your team or with investors, but in a kind of very protected way, learn about how you can do your job the best.

The last thing before we have to go is what's on the horizon next year or two for Hoxton? And do you have like an end vision? What's your end dream for Hoxton? Like in 10, 20 years, what do you want Hoxton to be?

It's not even gonna take 10 or 20 years. Okay, um, but there will be a near future where in every recipe, every plate, every meal in the world, people are eating meat alternatives. Those meat alternatives will be a combination of plant-based and cell-based ingredients, and the cell-based fat that makes them incredibly delicious will be Hoxton Farms fat. And that's how we change the world. Now Over the next couple of years, the way that we get there is by scaling up our production from grams to kilograms to tons in London's first cultivated meat pilot production facility, which will be open in a couple of months. It's making awesome prototypes that taste better than anything anyone's ever eaten before in the meat alternatives world. And of course, it's working with amazing customers as well. So watch this space.

Cool. Max, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.

Absolute pleasure. Really, really great to chat, Josh. We'll talk soon.

Talk soon.