Paul Shapiro, CEO and Co-Founder Of The Better Meat Co. | Growing Business In The Meat-Alternatives Industry

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Today, my guest is Paul Shapiro. He is the CEO of Better Meat Co. He's also a national best-selling author of Clean Meat, How Growing Meat Without Animals will revolutionize dinner in the world. He is a four-time TEDx speaker. He is the host of the business for good podcasts. He's a longtime leader in food sustainability. The company that he founded and runs the Better Meat Co uses fermentation. Turn microbes into meat within hours, creating a far more sustainable and humane method of satisfying our meat tooth compared to raising and slaughtering animals for food. He's been interviewed by hundreds of news outlets from CNN to start talk radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson as an authority on food and agriculture sustainability. He's also published hundreds of articles and publications ranging from daily newspapers like The Washington Post to pop side publications like Scientific American to magazines like Fortune to academic journals. We spoke about his story, how he got into sustainability, how he decided to start Better Meat Co. What Better Meat Co was trying to accomplish when there's so many other options like beyond meat and all these other meat alternative companies that are starting up. We spoke about meat alternatives, Better Meat Co's product, and how it compares to real meat in terms of nutrients, in terms of taste testing, all the things that are basically going to be the main factor in whether or not the company is successful. He has some surprising results. We also spoke about building a company in a blue ocean, so meat alternatives is not a market that is enormous right now. It's growing, but it's just getting there. So finding the talents, finding the scientists, finding the investors, a lot of early stage blue oceans, startup strategies that Paul had to navigate when he was building Better Meat Co. So let's jump right into it. This is Paul Shapiro, best-selling author, four-time TEDx speaker and founder CEO of The Better Meat Co. Awesome. All right. You know, Scott, I grew up with a love for animals and love for the planet, and it wasn't until I became like a young teenager, though, that I started learning about, you know, really the fact that we don't really treat animals, especially the animals we raised for food that well. In fact, we treat them pretty deforebally, and raising animals for food is really a big driver in deforestation, climate change, wildlife extinction, animal welfare concerns, pandemic risk, and more. And the problem is that the planet's just not getting any bigger, right? Like humanity's footprint on the planet is getting a lot bigger, but the planet itself isn't getting much bigger. One of the primary ways that we leave that footprint is through it through our food print, principally in the enemy that we eat, because raising animals for food takes a lot of land, a lot of water, a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and more. And so if you think about the fact that there's nearly eight billion of us walking around on the planet today, and we're going to have, presuming there's no catastrophe that fails our numbers prior to then, within 30 years, around another two billion added to the planet. So if you think about it, like, we're not going to be farming the moon, we're not going to be farming Mars, we have one planet to farm, right? And it's not getting any bigger. So how can we continue to supply people with the meat that they want to eat without having to destroy the planet in the process? And that is when I really started thinking about, can we divorce meat production from livestock raising? So it's kind of like, if you think about, for a very long time, the only way anybody had to get photographs was with, you know, negatives and dark rooms and print photos and so on. And then digital comes along, and it still does the same thing, right? It still helps us to capture our memories, but it's done in a way more efficient and better way instead of waiting for hours or days to get your photos, you know, are waiting zero seconds really. And that's the same that I think we need to do with meat, is to create the same experience. So we're still getting the meat experience, we're still satisfying our meat tooth, so to speak, but without needing to raise all those animals and slaughter all those animals. And so a lot of my life has been devoted to thinking about and exploring how we can continue to create the meat experience without having to raise and slaughter so many animals. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode Feedback Loop. 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But also how you decided to start your thing and something you're passionate about was this the first thing you went into or did you try other iterations of entrepreneurship and then failed and I want to understand that as well because I want to tee up not everybody builds a business that is like a socially conscious business and does it successfully because I find that that's a challenge in and of itself like you aren't just building another software product taking into market. You're you're sort of building a product as an industry emerges which is a challenge. So yeah walk me back a little bit and help me understand like where you came from and and that will sort of tee up how you how you got here. Yeah sure you know as a young teenager I became really interested and concerned about how we feed humanity and what we're doing to the planet and into animals in the process and that led me down a path of working for 20 years in the nonprofit space mainly working on public policy reforms as a lobbyist in order to try to pass laws to improve agricultural sustainability to improve animal welfare especially the welfare of animals who are raised for food and that career I think was I'm proud of it at the same time it became very clear to me especially starting around like 2013 14 and 15 I became more and more concerned that maybe innovation and technology would do more to solve these food and agricultural sustainability problems than nonprofit charities could and while I was glad to be helping to create a better system through passage of laws and so on I just started thinking you know if you look back for example at the wailing problem like in the 19th century we were all lighting our homes with whale oil and it was a real concern people were writing letters to the editor in 19th century newspapers about the extinction of whales is there so concern about it but what ended up freeing whales from harpoons was not sustainability concerns it was the invention of kerosene and kerosene provided a cheaper cleaner way for us to light our homes similarly we used to live plug geese so that we could write in fact interestingly enough Thomas Jefferson had an entire flock of geese he was such a prolific writer he had such a whole flock of geese just to live plug them so he could write all these letters he was writing and it's a very barbaric practice very cruel to the animals but you know nobody stopped live-plucking geese because they were concerned about the geese they stopped because metal counting pens were infected similarly there's a big concern about the treatment of horses back in the 19th century for labor purposes because we you know under the threat of whipping them we forced them to carry us and our goods all around that was the primary method of transportation but you know we didn't stop abusing horses because we cared about them we stopped because cars were invented and we had a better way to transport ourselves so you look at all of these sustainability and human problems and time and time again they're being solved not by human sense not by sustainability concerns but by technological innovation that renders the old system totally obsolete and so I started getting more and more concerned that maybe innovation and technology would do even more than what I was doing in the nonprofit sector and as a result I wrote a book on that topic and the book is called Clean Meat how growing meat without animals will revolutionize dinner in the world and explore this basic thesis that maybe there is a faster way to solve this problem of humanity's addiction to meat and the book is a pop side book it's not technical really it's a pop side book that explores and chronicles the race between the entrepreneurs the investors and the scientists are all racing to commercialize the world's first slaughter free meat and after writing that book I had a decision to make I had just written this book and gone on a book tour to talk about these great entrepreneurs who I thought were going to end up saving the world and I could continue simply to write about the people who I thought we're going to solve this problem or I could become one of them myself and I chose the latter path and that's why I co-founded the Better Meeko is my first startup that I had ever done in fact my first time really in the four-profit world I'd spent two decades in the nonprofit world and now here I was at the very beginning of 2018 deciding to start a four-profit company but as you mentioned correctly Scott a four-profit company that is as a much higher mission than making a profit in fact I'd argue that profit is a byproduct of what we're doing obviously we have to make money we won't survive if we don't but the real purpose of what we're doing is trying to solve a serious social problem just in the same way that for example companies that are trying to make solar panels more efficient they have a goal of course they want to make money but the way they make money is by solving a serious world problem by you know making renewable energy more efficient and cheaper than fossil fuels well what we're trying to do is similar we're trying to create a the equivalent of renewable energy in the food space by getting protein with a far far far smaller footprint on the planet than is needed by raising and slavering animals for me now I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode grin now grin is the number one creator management platform helping e-commerce brands connect with their audience through the power of creator partnerships now influencer marketing it's easy to get lost in the spreadsheets and busy work combing through a messy web 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of the busy work brands like liquid IV first aid beauty movement they all run influencer marketing campaigns at scale and work with thousands of creators at the same time they're all using grin so you need to treat your creator like your brand revolves around them because in the creator economy it does experts believe that influencer marketing will become a 15 billion dollar industry by 2022 so this isn't going away anytime soon you have to figure out how to use influencers and creators at scale find out how grin can help you grow your brand watch the demo at grin.co that's g-r-i-n dot c-o influencer marketing is easier with grin find out why at grin.co that's g-r-i-n dot c-o and as you did that as you jumped into entrepreneurship like you don't have a like you mentioned the book is even a pop side books you don't have like a science background you don't have a technical background so I can't imagine like walk me through your head what you're thinking is you're like okay I have to figure out how to create love growing meat like I don't even I don't even know where I start like for a regular for-profit company I'd go find a developer or I'd go you know I'd go pick investors I don't know who does this who does who does yes you know that you know this is like a principle with entrepreneurship that I firmly believe in which is to surround yourself with people who are a lot smarter than you are so I may be the face of the better meat co but I am certainly not the brain behind it there are numerous brains that are far far far superior to mine we know a lot more about microbiology and tissue they know a lot more about things like fermentation science and so on so that's step one but I will say you know if you read clean meat one of the things that you notice is that many of the people who I talk about in the book are not people who are seasoned entrepreneurs and not people who have PhDs many of the entrepreneurs are people who just wanted to make a difference so I'll give you an example as a company today it's called perfect day they were founded in 2014 by some people who were in their early 20s who had never even met in their early 20s never even met they just met online in virtual chat rooms and they decided they want to start a company together well one thing leads to another they end up raising millions of dollars and today they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars seven years later these guys are still in their 20s today in their 20s today seven years later after raising literally hundreds of millions of dollars and their companies doing really cool things they're making they're basically making milk proteins without cows at all so they use the fermentation to make real milk proteins like way protein without the need for cows that's very technologically difficult but you know they've surrounded themselves with lots of people who know how to do it and it's really awesome it's really cool so those type of stories about looking at mere mortals who were making this happen was inspirational to me because I thought hey if these guys can do it maybe I can too and they have done a phenomenal job running their company and I hope to have a fraction of the success that they're having so it's true Scott like I am not you know the person who is you know deciding you know what we're gonna feed our microbes but we have a lot of people here who do who are really great scientists again microbiologists and fermentation scientists and chemical engineers and so on who can figure out how we can mimic meat without animals and when you were when you were putting this team together did you try and find money for the company first or do you try and find the people first well we needed money because you know we we had a just three people at the very beginning and while the first couple months were volunteer it became evident very quickly that you know these people had left their jobs to do this some of them you know were lucrative jobs that they left that we had to pay people so we ended up raising a precede around and it became oversubscribed and we ended up just continuing to raise on the safe the simple agreement for future equity that we were utilizing and so we anticipated raising a pretty big precede round like we thought maybe we would try to raise like around 500,000 which is you know pretty big for a precede round but we ended up raising 1.6 million in that round there was just a lot of demand for what we were doing by the way that's really that's pretty good for a seed round a precede round actually yeah thank you a precede round yeah so yeah that we have then we later did a seed round which after we had advanced our technology and shun what we could do is the bench scale we went on to a seed round which we raised about 8.25 million and then we've since done a two million dollar convertible note so we raised about 12 million approximately to date in the last three and a half years or so but that's been enough to help us build a fairly sizable demonstration scale fermentation facility here so in the fermentation world there's really four scales there's bench scale pilot scale demonstration scale and then full scale so we're not yet at the full scale level that's our next step we need to go out and raise our series a round to be able to afford the capital expenditures will be needed to put all that skill on the ground but we're getting there we're really good okay and then also I want to I want to tee up the industry as a whole so where how is the industry evolved and what spot do you fit in the industry in in 2021 because we all see all these different options and we see how it sort of evolved over the past three years but I don't think anybody who's not in the industry can actually put a finger on what the difference is with the the protein alternatives that you would see now versus two three years ago or more yeah well there's a lot of changes that have occurred so even if you go back to way more than two or three years but if you look at the alternatives they go back a thousand years so in early China more than a thousand years ago there is still a written plant-based meat recipe to make mock lamb and then you fast forward to like the 19th century you have people like John Harvey Kellogg who are making products that were meat replacements and even has the first patent on a plant-based meat from 1899 then you fast forward another like 75 or so years and you get companies like light life and to a turkey that are making products that are really designed for vegetarians but they weren't fooling carnivores they were you know they're basically vegetarians like them but then when you get to about five or so years ago you get companies like impossible foods and beyond meat that are trying to make products that will actually be for die-hard carnivores something that really fully mimics the meat experience so that people can enjoy meat without needing animals right and that change shifted what the universe of potential customers were because the number of people who are vegetarian and vegan is very small compared to the number of people who are omnivores right you know it's like 95 to 5 there and so all of a sudden you have this huge universe of people who yes they're omnivores but they're happy to eat plant-based every once in a while especially if it still tastes the same meat and those companies really paved a new pathway now what's similar about them is that they both are making plant-based meat meaning they are taking plants like peas and soybeans and converting them into things that look like an animal's flesh you have a whole other category of folks who don't go to the plant kingdom at all they go to the animal kingdom and they're though using animal cells this is what's commonly called clean meat or cultivated meat this isn't a meat substitute or meat replacement it is actually real animal meat that is simply grown from animal cells rather than coming from animal slaughter and those companies are are just starting to commercialize now their products are being sold for example in Singapore and pretty soon Qatar says they're going to be doing it hopefully the U.S will approve the sale of these products too but what we at the better meat code to answer your question directly Scott are doing is not going to the plant kingdom and not going to the animal kingdom we are going to the fungi kingdom and what we're doing is so what we do if you imagine like the evolutionary tree of life right you've got plants over here you've got animals over here there's a whole other kingdom called fungi and fungi are not in the middle here they're right next to animals right next to animals so they're way way more similar to animals than they are to plants and just as an example Scott so you know we all know plants breathe in CO2 and sequester it and they breathe out oxygen well animals do the opposite right we breathe in oxygen and we breathe out CO2 well fungi are so much closer to animals that they do the same that we do they breathe in oxygen they breathe out CO2 similarly like plants have to put themselves in the sun and photosynthesize that's how they basically eat whereas like us fungi after search out the food and digestive and consume it and so on so you know it's just the point is that fungi are much more closely related to animals than they are to plants that's why mushrooms have a far meatier texture than plants do in fact in Asian cuisine mushrooms have been used for centuries as they meet substitute there's a problem though which is that mushrooms don't really have a lot of protein and even though they may have been more meat like they are not necessarily meat identical that is where we come in what we do is we don't use mushrooms we use microscopic fungi that are called mycelium it's like the root like structure underneath what you would see in the fungi's body so the mushroom is like a fruiting body like an apple on a tree and then the mycelium is more like the root structure underneath it to use an analogy to the plant kingdom and so what we do is we run a fermentation where we feed our microscopic fungi potatoes and just in the same way that a cow eats grass and converts it into a steak our little microscopic fungi consume potatoes and change it into something that looks like meat although unlike a cow who takes more than a year of feeding her before you slaughter her our little fungi are harvested in less than a single day so we're going from a potato which is only 1% protein into a meat like product that's about 45% protein all in less than a single day that is the efficiency when you remove animals from the equation we can do this much faster in a product that is much healthier so unlike meat it doesn't have any cholesterol or saturated fat but it does have fiber which meat does not have so you know animals have skeletons that's what's holds us up well plants don't have skeletons and fungi don't have skeletons they have fiber that's what holds them up and nearly everybody you've ever met Scott is fiber deficient more than 9 out 10 Americans don't get the fiber RDA that is recommended for us to consume and fiber deficiency is really serious it's not just that you'll have constipation which is bad enough but it also is correlated with colon cancer and all these other really serious ailments so our meat so to speak okay and protein in fact it's higher in protein than eggs but at the same time it's also really high in fiber it has more iron than beef more potassium than bananas and because it's a product of microbial fermentation it contains vitamin B12 which plant foods do not so this is like a real superfood that we are producing in a matter of mere hours and I believe it's going to be the future of meat because it's a far more meat like texture and meaty experience than having to use extruded plant-preaching isolates which is what's currently used in the plant-based meat industry so the shorter the short summation to along answer your questions Scott is there some people are taking plants and turning them into things like look at the animal flesh other companies are using actual animal cells and just making animal flesh that way without raising whole whole animals what we're doing is using microscopic fungi to create a meat experience for people that is way more makes a lot of sense very interesting so I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode express VPN now I know most of you are probably thinking why don't I just go incognito mode well let me tell you something incognito mode does not hide your activity doesn't matter what mode you use or how many times you delete your browsing history your internet service provider can still see every single website you've ever visited that's why even when I'm at home I never go online without express VPN and it doesn't matter who your internet service provider is ISPs in the US can 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of sense it's very interesting so the the obviously that the plant the plant base and I'm going to simplify because I'm so you your fungi based plant base then there's obviously just true meat base so the meat base is just regular meat there's no value added nutrition in it it's just regular meat yeah you could you could so you could either create meat this identical to the meat that's out there today or you could make it even better so for example what if you could make the meat without the cholesterol or what if you could make it you know instead of saturated fat it has a mega three fatty acid so instead of a burger that causes heart attacks maybe it's one that prevents them you know there's all types of improvements you could do but you don't have to but so the so follow question is the follow question is which which one is the quote unquote healthiest right yeah I think I think the the first thing people say is not not oh I don't want to eat you know a meat alternative or protein alternative because it's approaching alternative like people may have like a little bit of a psychological aversion to certain ways of producing it but that can probably be rectified in time if they just try it once and they like it and then of course like the taste profile textures all important when you're eating the food but then they look and they see well I've heard this is like anecdotal but this is like not like you know first first first first experience but they see like all these extra ingredients added in and like well how could this be healthy when I see all these other things in that ingredient profile so is that is that something that was more with the tofurkeys or is that still a concern with certain types of protein alternatives that would turn people off sure yeah great question so you know first and foremost I agree with the premise of your question which is that I think if people enjoy the taste that's going to you know trump everything else essentially people you know taste is still as king prices queen and then you know whether food is convenient to consume is like prince really the other factors that you're talking about I do think some people are concerned about it but you know most people are you know going to fast food restaurants and just buying you know food that you know is maybe not the most healthy now at the same time you know I do think like some of the plant-based meats today do have maybe between like 15 to 20 ingredients in them but I do think it's a mistake to conclude that means it's not healthy because a lot of these are you know minor ingredients they might you know have lots of different spices in them and so on like the number of ingredients really doesn't tell you much about whether or something is healthy or not but to answer your question you know our products from the better meco are short label because our micro protein is so functional and so good that you don't need a lot of other ingredients it's really such a wonderful product but you just don't have to add a lot else to actually make it into something that tastes like meat so I would say the bigger concerns would be looking at things like saturated fat and things like that and yeah like some products do have coconut oil added to them and that's a contributor to saturated fat but not all them do and are certainly don't and so you know I'm a fan of the space because I think that what it's replacing is so different right so we are trying to replace meat we're not trying to replace a kale salad or trust me you know if you walk into Burger King and you are getting an impossible whopper or a regular whopper and you're thinking oh well the impossible whopper is the health food you know it's not as good as a kale salad right it's not as good as lentil soup but it's better than conventional whopper you're going to be zero cholesterol and more so there's there are benefits to alternative meats today over conventional meat even if they aren't necessarily like always as healthy as you know going to the sour bar very interesting okay I want to I also want to I want to keep some just some business insights and some entrepreneurial insights so walk me through like the the market because you do have some competitors but when you were taking this product to market did you have pushback did you have issues how did you distribute it how do you do something like this in a market that's probably evolving as you're as you're trying to build out your company yes you're you're absolutely right so we are very deep on scientific expertise and figuring out how to run fermentations where we the lack is like you know we don't really have a team of marketing and sales people right like that's just not our forte and so it's been tough now admittedly we're a B2B ingredients company right but we're not trying to make a CPG branded product here where we want to offer the alternative meat makers today a better ingredient to make their products with and there aren't that many competitors for us in that sense there are people who are selling things like pea protein or soy protein etc but for my co protein there's not a lot of B2B marketing of that ingredient so we don't have that many competitors on that front but we will need them you know this is a huge opportunity a huge space the world is big enough for McDonald's Burger King and Wendy's even though they're all so infasude burger and fries there'll be room for many different micro protein ingredients companies so we're not the only company that is interested in using the fun guy fermentation to mimic the meat experience I think we're the most advanced in terms of the early stage startups in this space but you know there's other good ones out there and I'm rooting for their success too to be out of that will help that'll help you too that'll that'll help shape the industry right yeah I think it's like rising tide lift all birds but honestly man I mean I'm a fan of the space because of the promise that it holds to solve a really serious problem so I don't think we can do it by ourselves and you know even if it didn't help us I still would be rooting for this success honestly yeah I get it again but I think that I do think that we are the most advanced in that space in terms of like the earlier stage and and I just want to like I just want to like call it out like if if I don't I don't know meat alternatives that well I'm I still eat a lot of meat so I think we should have done like a like a live taste test or something it should have done like a fine taste that's fun but come come to Sacramento man I'd love to have you here it would be great for you to know because I think that I'm just I was looking at your site as we're talking right I'm just looking at like man like some of those pictures those look like it's making me hungry so I want to just see I want to see that like taste as good as as as it looks but like it doesn't look it doesn't look like anything different I don't know how to put it like that's right yeah that yeah that's the goal you know that's the goal is we want to do is to give you that experience it's kind of Scott like we're clicking a light switch on in a room right so you know you walk into a room you flick a light switch what you're after is the experience of light you want an illuminated room right you're not sitting there thinking oh is this coming from renewable energy is it coming from coal is it coming from oil you don't even think about it you just want light well people just want meat right I don't think that people when they eat meat are thinking that oh I'm so glad in animals right they don't think about it right and right and and if they did think about it they might actually prefer that an animal not be slaughtered for it if they had their preference so I want to mimic the meat experience for people so they don't even have to think about it so when you are you know flicking your light switch on you know it's maybe coming from solar energy and you don't even contemplate it that's what we want is so when you look at it when you taste it when you chew it that it is the same and you just can't tell a difference that's when if we can mimic that experience for a cheaper price we will win I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode peloton peloton is pushing you further with so much new on the peloton bike and peloton bike plus new classes new music new ways to keep your workouts motivating and exciting and if you're going to commit to a healthy lifestyle you have to make it part of your lifestyle it cannot just be a one-off so any way to make sure that it's fun and fresh that's how you stick with it now there's a few new additions for the new year that peloton is bringing boxing new artist series music selections and more daily workout variety with their boxing whether or not you've boxed before or you've never stepped into the ring you can now discover a fast 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that eats me i'm just curious because that would be the ultimate litmus test right if you can if somebody can't tell the difference uh we we do it all the time actually so we have regular focus groups that are blind and we do various iterations and uh we do routinely if people say oh i i wouldn't know i wouldn't know really yeah wow so it's gotten to that point i'm ignorant i don't know i i don't know has i i'm glad we have the conversation because i had no idea how far it's coming i guess uh i've seen it all but i still i i guess i've had like a like an apprehension towards is there too much in some of these and that's why i just haven't wanting to go to a fast food you just i just order what i already know and that's another thing too i just order what i already know i just default to like the the status quo it's true it's true but i mean you know go look at the ingredient deck on chicken nuggets and fast food restaurants i mean there's lots of ingredients to me lots of ingredients there's just lots of ingredients so and and that just in an all fairness like lots of ingredients does not necessarily mean that if you get a vegetable soup it might have 20 ingredients in there right but it doesn't mean that that's bad just because there are numerous ingredients now if you start seeing ingredients on there like you know trans fats or other things i think that's a problem but i i like to just look at the nutritional panel right yeah like you know is it packed with sodium and saturated fat and cholesterol or not uh those are the things that i would be concerned about and you know if you are looking for protein you're going to be happy with all these products you know mostly these things mostly these burgers in the old protein space are packing like 20 grams of protein our micro protein that we we uh grow here through fermentation is a complete protein complete amino acid profile and for those of you who are concerned about protein digestibility and you actually know what PD cast means it's like the digestibility score for various foods and for various proteins ours is a .96 which uh 1.0 is the highest you can get so it's pretty near perfect um so you know there's just a lot of benefits to getting your protein without all the baggage associated with animal products no i i i appreciate that i also wanted to just um because you you evangelize a lot uh regarding just we you're you're you have a podcast so i i always give people the opportunity to drop their stuff but i just wanted to speak about your podcast in particular because it's called business for good podcast so you evangelize a lot of good ethical practices just for business in general so what are what are some things that like get you excited not just about your industry but just about ethical social socially responsible business some things that maybe you highlight on your show or things that the average person just doesn't know and should potentially look into more or or get behind that's something that you know is a is something that we really have to address in the world of business sure so i was very kind of he's got to bring it up so i host the business for good podcast and we spotlight companies that are making a do that not a matter of like you know companies that just have like good practices its companies where the very core of their business is to solve a serious problem so for example we feature companies that are creating alternatives to plastic that can be substituted so you know things like fermentation based plastic alternatives so that they're they'll buy it a grade or other companies that are for example dealing with ways to neutralize and store nuclear waste or one of my favorite episodes is one that we just did which looks at the death industry and so right now you know most most people are getting cremated these days and that's like one final act of pollution right it's a lot of air pollution a lot of greenhouse gases in order to cremate yourself well you could then also just get buried in a casket but that's a big problem too because they're cut down trees to make all these coffins and they put a concrete liner in there they hermetically seal you off from the rest of the world down there which is not you know not not what you want you want to recycle your nutrients back into nature so one company run by a woman named Katrina Spade her company's called recompose and what they've done is invented and panted a method of actual human composting and they've created a center in Seattle where you can basically just like you pre-order a plot in a cemetery you pre-order your own composting and they've changed laws now in Washington Oregon and Colorado to allow for this real human composting method and they have done scores upon scores of human compost where it's really cool where they can create rich soil that you can either then you know put in your garden if you're a surviving family member or you can you know put it in a national park to give better soil there and so on but so these are basically companies that are actually solving some serious problem to make the world a better place whether environmentally or maybe from animal welfare perspective or a public health perspective or more and it's been a fun ride for me we've done about 75 episodes to date where we're recording this in September of 2021 to see just how many entrepreneurs are out there trying to use innovation to solve serious problems it's really inspirational for me to be able to do it it is inspirational and and I'm putting on on the spot here so if you if you don't have a resource that's totally okay but do you have a resource or a group or a place that people who care about socially responsible companies can go and find out more about just like obviously you can check out your podcast but I mean like is there is there councils or is there organizations that support these types of efforts in particular yeah absolutely Scott so especially in the alternative protein space there's a great nonprofit organization that provides extensive resources for free it's called the Good Food Institute their website is gfi.org and they have enormous numbers of resources so they've got guides on how to start your own company they have databases of all the investors in this space so you can figure out who's interested in what they have an entire spreadsheet just on potential co-founders so people with looking for other co-founders to start companies with and you can see they're linked in and what their specialty and their interests are so they can find somebody who's you know complimentary to you if you for example of a business background you need a technical scientific co-founder you're in there and find that so again the Good Food Institute is really good resources for entrepreneurs who want to get involved in the alternative protein space. Amazing okay and then I'm going to do some rapid fire to pull some career insights out of you but before we pivot was there anything we didn't touch on that you wanted to speak about and also I got to get all your socials website so drop that as well. The only thing I'd say is that you know I've now been running a startup for the last three and a half years and you know they're saying that when you start your own company you'll sleep like a baby because you're going to wake up every two hours and cry and so I've never heard that once before you know I kind of feel it right there's always challenges there's always hurdles like every day you know I come home my wife asked me what are the best and the worst things that happened today and usually they're but pretty pretty substantial so you know it's a lot of it's a lot of challenges but the thing that I would really recommend for those who want to take the entrepreneurial plunge is simply to start don't become paralyzed by analyzing things don't try to read all the books like I'm not against that but you know if you want to learn how to play soccer nobody's going to take you hey go read some books on how to play soccer they tell you to go get on the field and start practicing so if you want to learn about startups and entrepreneurialism either maybe join a startup or start your own and actually start practicing on the field the problems out of the planet and humanity are facing are very severe they're very urgent they're in need of rectification and very very rapidly and so we understand of time we know the luxury to wait around for you to solve these problems so I'd encourage you to get in the game and and start shooting the ball I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now it's hard to build a business hard to make your dreams a reality when it feels like you're spending all your time working on your CRM working on mundane admin tasks but the HubSpot CRM platform is purpose built for scaling with your business and those big dreams of yours so it's impossible to grow now HubSpot has intuitive visual workflows it has bought builders the HubSpot CRM platform can automate campaigns across your website email social media digital ads and chat for clear communication across all your channels zero mixed messages with the HubSpot team's feature you can organize your account by teams and segment leads sort through content and easily view team performance reports and KPI dashboards and thanks to sequences you can create flows that automate sales outreach follow up timed personalized email so you can scale your customer relationships like never before the HubSpot CRM platform is easy to implement and ready to scale so dream big learn more about the HubSpot CRM platform and how it can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com amazing and then also where do people reach out connect with you social website all of that and also also for better meet cool yeah i'd love to hear from you our website is better meet.co again better meet.co and if you're interested in my book clean meet you can buy it anywhere books are sold or you can go to the books official website which is just cleanmeat.com again cleanmeat.com and you can get in touch with me through any of those websites okay perfect okay so we'll do some rapid fire and feel free to you know extrapolate or keep it as short as you'd like it's totally okay whatever you want biggest challenge you've overcome in your own personal life what was that? you know i'm very grateful to have a wife who is like extremely supportive and a wonderful person and we i wonder how i ever survived without her and without being married so that that was a challenge in and of itself i can assure you for many reasons but i'm very grateful to have survived that period and going on to being in a marriage which i'm very happy about amazing and that now you're going to answer two questions at once because the next question is who was a person who was really impactful in your life and what did they teach you? yeah well i won't give the easy answer and say my wife instead i'm actually going to mention a guy named Paul Schwartz so Paul Schwartz is a retired entrepreneur is now in his 70s and he did some really cool companies and did very well for himself and my wife and i were living in his in his house we were renting from him when i decided to start this company and he really took me under his wing and helped to not only become an initial investor in the company but also to really help guide the business oriented aspects of the company and teach me about that which i knew very little if if anything about it all and even to this day three and a half years later he still acts essentially as a pro bono CFO to our company so Paul Schwartz who at our company my name is Paul Shapiro he's Paul Schwartz so we call him Paul Sr. and me Paul Jr. and he's been a great mentor amazing you have a book or podcast or some sort of resource you recommend people go check out that's helped you um yeah there there are so many that it's hard to i know it's hard to like be on a only pick one but i will say that um i have uh learned from listening to masters of scale which is of course read often's podcast which is really useful he's the founder of length and of co-founder of Lincoln brother and uh i've learned from it and really enjoyed it very good um if you could tell your oh and oh and one book i tell you shoe dog was really inspiration oh shoe dog till night yeah yeah that's a good one that's a very good one oh he's he's he had a massive a massive company like he had a massive a story but it was good yeah yeah so feel nice the founder of Nike and you know he basically tells about all the near death experiences they had and all the problems that they had and like it's amazing they overcame all of them so i was inspired by that story because you know i always like to read stories about people who have succeeded in spite of like tremendous adversity because that gives me like when people fail it makes them not only more human but it also makes them more relatable for me that way when i'm thinking oh you know i fell down i can get up just like they did and so just hearing about success like you know you think about like you know people were like oh oh i do is win like i don't really want to hear that you know because that's not me i can't relate to it i want to hear about people who lost people who failed and they got back up and moved don't kept moving forward you know it's kind of like the the great philosopher Rocky Bobo of course uh who said you know in life it's not about how hard you can hit it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward and that is how winning is done those are the stories that i want to hear people have got hit people who fell down and they got back up and so if you like that type of a story go read shoe dog it's really good amen good yeah that's a good recommendation um if you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing what would it be oh god there's so many things god we don't have time time i know i know there may not be officially a time limit here but there's so much but you know one of the things i would have thought about back then that i wish i would have thought about was whether the non-profit route could do as much good for the problem that i'm trying to solve which is feeding humanity sustainably without destroying the planet in the process um or whether we just need more technological innovation like maybe instead of doing what i did uh maybe i would have been better off actually studying things like microbiology or maybe i would have been better off becoming an entrepreneur two decades earlier so i don't know you know you can't go back and and redo the game unfortunately um and i'm proud of what i accomplished in my career in the non-profit space uh i worked with some phenomenal people who i i'm so grateful for those experiences but i do think like if i could go back and do it over i might have started trying to commercialize animal-free meats two decades earlier and maybe we be in a different boat now if we had done that yeah interesting um and then last question what does success mean to you i want to make the world a better place by as defined as saying there's less suffering and more happiness in the world because i had lived right so and every one of us is causing suffering every day so we're creating pollution we're hurting people's feelings and inadvertently like all these things that we do that are just creating a trail of suffering but we can also try to alleviate suffering on the planet and i really believe that one of the greatest causes of suffering is raising animals for food it's a huge cause of animal suffering that's a huge cause of human suffering climate change and more and so what i'm trying to do is to alleviate more suffering than i caused so that i can realistically believe at the end of my life that there was less suffering on the planet because i had existed than if i had never been born that's what i want to accomplish and that's what success would look like for me