The Nonlinear Library EA - My experience founding what will hopefully be a high-impact for-profit by PV
Jun 28, 2024
17:30
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My experience founding what will hopefully be a high-impact for-profit, published by PV on June 28, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
In this post, I reflect on my journey with
Tälist and our platform
AltProtein.Jobs. I share my experience with and insights into the strategic decision-making process, misconceptions around our financial model, work-life balance as a founder, and other aspects, hoping they help others in their career decisions and entrepreneurial endeavors in high-impact sectors.
TL:DR
Product-market fit is Hard: Finding the right organizational structure and intervention (=service/product) has been an iterative process of learning new things, re-evaluating, and pivoting. It might seem obvious in retrospect why an organization ends up doing things a certain way, but the experience of getting to the right place feels like several consecutive steps with uncertainty and junctures along the way.
Pivoting to Meet Demand: The growing talent demand in the Alt. Protein industry demands efficient and scalable solutions. We pivoted to a matchmaking platform after starting as an industry-specific recruitment service and a comprehensive intervention comparison.
Communicating Our For-Profit Model: We're a for-profit company. This has been leading to misconceptions in the EA community and beyond, and we're working to get better at communicating why we chose this organizational structure. One of the main reasons is that it allows us to generate revenue and qualify for public innovation grants rather than relying completely on philanthropic money via funds.
Reframing Entrepreneurship for Work-Life Balance: I assume there are great people who avoid founding organizations or initiatives because they equate being a founder/entrepreneur with a hustle culture that wouldn't allow them to have a fulfilling and sustainable work-life balance. It helped me to reframe my role as "a regular job where I do entrepreneurial stuff."
About Alternative Proteins
Alternative Proteins is an umbrella term for various alternatives to animal products, from milk/dairy to fish & seafood to meat or just single components like fat or protein. Innovative techniques are used to create plant-based, cultivated, or precision-fermented products (as well as hybrids between these three "verticals" or latest developments like plant molecular farming).
Widespread adoption of alternative proteins is expected to play a crucial role in ending industrial animal agriculture, mitigating the environmental impact of our food system, reducing animal suffering, and decreasing the risk of pandemics from zoonotic disease.
The industry is growing, and so is the
demand for talent, which continues to outpace its supply. While talent and skill gaps are a bottleneck in many industries, the Alt. Protein sector faces additional industry-specific challenges (e.g. the requirement of very scientific and technical skills or that this niche industry and its career opportunities are still widely unknown to many promising candidates). This situation is pushing the date for when Alt. Proteins can scale to start displacing industrial animal agriculture.
Talent solutions within the Alt. Protein industry are an important intervention to address a key bottleneck and accelerate the industry and its expected impact.
Becoming a founder
The years before
I came across EA in 2016, when I was working as a consultant & project manager in the private sector, starting an extra-occupational MBA in General Management. Through my work and MBA, I discovered my interest in entrepreneurship. In 2017, I founded EA Dresden with my now-husband. Still, it took me a couple of years to fully embrace the thought of changing my career to maximize my impact.
In parallel, I also became more and more intrigued about the impact potential of the Alt. Protein i...
In this post, I reflect on my journey with
Tälist and our platform
AltProtein.Jobs. I share my experience with and insights into the strategic decision-making process, misconceptions around our financial model, work-life balance as a founder, and other aspects, hoping they help others in their career decisions and entrepreneurial endeavors in high-impact sectors.
TL:DR
Product-market fit is Hard: Finding the right organizational structure and intervention (=service/product) has been an iterative process of learning new things, re-evaluating, and pivoting. It might seem obvious in retrospect why an organization ends up doing things a certain way, but the experience of getting to the right place feels like several consecutive steps with uncertainty and junctures along the way.
Pivoting to Meet Demand: The growing talent demand in the Alt. Protein industry demands efficient and scalable solutions. We pivoted to a matchmaking platform after starting as an industry-specific recruitment service and a comprehensive intervention comparison.
Communicating Our For-Profit Model: We're a for-profit company. This has been leading to misconceptions in the EA community and beyond, and we're working to get better at communicating why we chose this organizational structure. One of the main reasons is that it allows us to generate revenue and qualify for public innovation grants rather than relying completely on philanthropic money via funds.
Reframing Entrepreneurship for Work-Life Balance: I assume there are great people who avoid founding organizations or initiatives because they equate being a founder/entrepreneur with a hustle culture that wouldn't allow them to have a fulfilling and sustainable work-life balance. It helped me to reframe my role as "a regular job where I do entrepreneurial stuff."
About Alternative Proteins
Alternative Proteins is an umbrella term for various alternatives to animal products, from milk/dairy to fish & seafood to meat or just single components like fat or protein. Innovative techniques are used to create plant-based, cultivated, or precision-fermented products (as well as hybrids between these three "verticals" or latest developments like plant molecular farming).
Widespread adoption of alternative proteins is expected to play a crucial role in ending industrial animal agriculture, mitigating the environmental impact of our food system, reducing animal suffering, and decreasing the risk of pandemics from zoonotic disease.
The industry is growing, and so is the
demand for talent, which continues to outpace its supply. While talent and skill gaps are a bottleneck in many industries, the Alt. Protein sector faces additional industry-specific challenges (e.g. the requirement of very scientific and technical skills or that this niche industry and its career opportunities are still widely unknown to many promising candidates). This situation is pushing the date for when Alt. Proteins can scale to start displacing industrial animal agriculture.
Talent solutions within the Alt. Protein industry are an important intervention to address a key bottleneck and accelerate the industry and its expected impact.
Becoming a founder
The years before
I came across EA in 2016, when I was working as a consultant & project manager in the private sector, starting an extra-occupational MBA in General Management. Through my work and MBA, I discovered my interest in entrepreneurship. In 2017, I founded EA Dresden with my now-husband. Still, it took me a couple of years to fully embrace the thought of changing my career to maximize my impact.
In parallel, I also became more and more intrigued about the impact potential of the Alt. Protein i...