Pat Brown | Hustle Con 2018

OK. Well, thank you for being here. It's actually 2,000 restaurants and more like 2 million burgers a month, but— So it's a little strange that I'm here purporting to be a kind of business expert, because I'm still a complete freshman in the business world. And I think half the people in the audience probably could teach me more than I could teach them about how to function in that world. And I definitely have as much to learn as anyone here. So, 10 years ago, the last thing that I would imagine myself doing was founding a business. And even laster than that was founding a food business because I had essentially no interest in business. 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. So I was completely unqualified for this gig. And at the time, I had what was really my dream job. 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 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 kind of unnerving. Okay, so this here is a scenic view of Mars. This is the second-best planet in our solar system, and it's probably the second-best planet that we could travel to in our lifetimes within 50 light-years of Earth, okay? And it sucks. It has no breathable air, no liquid water, it's winter all the time, but there's no skiing, and dim light, and nothing but rocks and boulders as far as the eye can see. It's a sorry excuse 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 just a patch 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 4.5 billion years old, old, and when it was 4 billion 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 400 million years ago that the oxygen levels got at all into the range where animals could survive. So this is, you know, this is not something we can take for granted. The lives of our children and future generations basically depend on how good a job we do of taking care 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 planet 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 nutrient-density food with relatively little labor. 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 all the ways in which that's true, Just say that it's responsible for more greenhouse gases than every 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 land on Earth that's not covered by ice or water. The land that is devoted to raising animals for food, either growing crops to feed them 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 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. We kind of take for granted, as I was saying about how basically when mosses appeared, that's the first time animals could breathe. 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 just keep our planet and us alive and healthy. And 10,000 years ago, we shared this planet 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 slides were rapidly re-edited in the past hour or so, 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 animal farming. Overwhelmingly responsible for destruction of habitat and ecosystems. And in water, of course, it's overfishing. So it's our use of animals, of 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 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 reduce wild animals by the amount that we did in the past 40 years, there'd be zip left. 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 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 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 that's kind of the one take-home lesson that, if there is a take-home lesson from any of this, is that, you know, When I looked at this problem and realized what a big deal it was, I looked around. Actually, my first instinct was, okay, someone's got to do something about this. So it didn't seem like anyone was 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 and a huge opportunity. Someone is going to make a bundle of money if they take on this problem. And the people there, you know, whatever, Pepsi-Cola and so forth, were just like, "Come on." And that's the point that— I mean, I think this is a point 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 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 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 billions of people, the food that we get from animals is really an essential part of the pleasure of living. They're not going to be willing to sacrifice something that contributes as much as meat and fish and dairy foods do to their quality of life. And even when I've gone to these environmental conferences that there's 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 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&A. So 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. All right. Good. Future customers. So— and now, do you love meat in part because of the way we make it from animal cadavers? Is that part of what you value in the meat? It's a serious question, actually. No. No? Okay. Do you love meat in spite of the way we make it? Yes. Okay, good. You're— that's virtually everywhere I've gone 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 way that it's made. They just live with it. And that really defines the problem in a useful way. Oh, and this business about $1.5 trillion, this is why it was possible, I think, for me to raise money for this project. Okay. And this is really 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 give it value to them: taste, nutrition, affordability, convenience, and so forth. If we can do that, if we can do a better job than the cow of making the best meat in the world and just put it on the market, 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 tens of thousands of years, horses were the definitive technology for power transportation. And if you asked someone 200 years ago what the future of transportation looked like, they highly likely would have told you that horses will probably be faster. And then the first mechanized transportation came along in 1830. This is the first commercial locomotive, and it famously ran a race with a horse in 1830 and lost, slightly lost to the horse. But the important point here is that it never lost again because the horse never got faster. And once you switch to a technology from a completely unimprovable technology, like basically 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. OK, so— OK, I'll talk fast. So this Impossible Foods started out as a mission. And the mission basically was to replace the world's most destructive technology by 2035 by making the most delicious, nutritious, affordable meats, fish, and dairy foods in the world and letting the market do the rest. This became a company. The mission of getting rid of this technology became a company when I realized that the solution was market-based. And the first step was convincing someone to invest in this as a business, which I had never done before. But fortunately, I happened to live on the Stanford campus, which was within short biking distance of half the venture capital in the world. And so I could just, in less than a 10-minute bike ride, pop over to Khosla Ventures and knock on their door— didn't really do that, but walk in and gave my pitch. And it was a completely amateurish pitch. Pitch deck. And it's kind of like— I'm going to show it to some people at the company at some point because it's so embarrassing in retrospect. But basically, 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 trillion on it, which was that magical moment when they reach for their checkbooks. And anyway, 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 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 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 pitch deck to just get— move this on, which was some ideas about how we might do this 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 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 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 leg hemoglobin that has heme. And I thought— I did a calculation, I realized that there's enough leg hemoglobin in the root nodules of the US soybean crop to replace all the heme in all the meat in the U.S. diet. And I thought, holy crap, this is such a great idea. We'll just, once they harvest the soybeans, we'll come across the field and harvest the root nodules, and it'll cost us almost nothing, and it's genius. These are root nodules. You can just see, cut them open, they look like meat inside. A small amount of pea root nodules, like 1 ounce of pea root nodules, you can get all this red juice. That team. OK, so then the first 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 gober 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 million discovering that. But it wasn't a waste of time for a couple of reasons. First of all, the only way that 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 build a team than than to be working on this kind of ridiculous project where you find yourself with your small group of colleagues at the start of the company at 4:00 AM mopping up the floor of some godforsaken pilot facility in South Texas. It really helped us 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&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 anyway, and so that was just part of the science that went into, you know, the job that we assigned ourselves was study meat the way I would in my previous life have studied a disease, to figure out in molecular terms how it works, and then once you know that, to figure out how to make the best version of it. Using a new set of tools. The R&D team, which was the best group of scientists ever assembled in the food world by far, did that task. And then— OK. And about 2 years ago, 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 again, here's how I know we're going to succeed here, OK? So this product, they were serving it in the food trucks. I encourage you to try it and email us if you have any comments on it. But here's how I know we're going to succeed. Basically, the cow has been working on this for a million years. And we've been working on it for about 6 years. And at this point, 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, and the cow is not. And this, just the mission here, the original motivation, or a big part of it, was to reduce the environmental impact of the food system. And 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 greenhouse gas emissions, and less than one-twentieth 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 you know, 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, and all we need to do is to keep from turning Earth into Mars, and we're good. And so— anyway, so this is the planet that I'm going to bet on, and it's this that gets me excited to go to work every day. And the other reason is this: I absolutely love all the people that I get to work with every day. And that's it. Thank you.