EVCA Newsletter: University Edition | June 2021
what’s hot🔥: alternative meats
🌱 What’s the origin story behind plant-based foods?
Some of the first plant-based products were soy-and wheat based, such as India’s Nutrela or UK-based Quorn. As these products became mainstream, a need for better textures and more “meat-like” products led researchers to turn to cell-based alternatives or hyper-realistic plant-based products.
Early pioneers in the space such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods began using advanced techniques, such as extrusion machines and ingredients like carrot fiber, to create more “meat-like” products.
Brands like Upside Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) began growing meat directly from animal cells, in order to provide some of the environmental benefits of fully plant-based products with a more sustainable manufacturing process.
🌱 What’s the unique value proposition of alternative meat products?
The primary driver behind the development of plant-based alternatives was the popularity of vegan and vegetarian diets several decades ago, but as research has progressed, environmental and social concerns have become a driving force for innovation in this space.
Large-scale indicators such as human mortality and aggregate greenhouse gas emissions benefit dramatically from decreasing meat consumption.
Additionally, trillions of dollars of health care costs could be saved by the year 2050 if humans continue to adopt plant-based diets at the current rate.
🌱 What are some ways these foods are making their way into the mainstream?
With options that look more and more like real meat, even consumers without a fully plant-based diet are more eager to include alternatives in their diets.
Perhaps the most well-known examples are alternative products being offered at large food chains, such as Burger King’s Impossible Burger.
However, more recently, even fine dining has moved towards plant-based menus. NYC’s famed Eleven Madison Park restaurant recently announced that it would eliminate all animal products from its menu immediately.
Large meat corporations have picked up on the demand for less meat in consumer diets, and have pivoted as a result to new offerings, such as Tyson Chicken’s meat-free line.
🌱 What are some brands to watch in the plant-based space?
Gaining traction on TikTok, Nuggs is a “chicken nugget simulation” intended to taste just like the real deal. Alexis Ohanian recently led a $50M investment in SIMULATE, the parent company.
Gathered Foods, maker of Good Catch plant-based seafood, recently raised $26.4M in Series B-2 funding round earlier this year. Sustainable seafood has become a hot-button issue of late — fueled by the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy, which highlights the threats of overfishing and plastic pollution from the fishing industry, as well as consumer products.
Apart from alternative meats, Helaina is developing a breastmilk alternative inspired by alternative milks to provide babies the natural benefits of breastfeeding that traditional formula can’t.
Alpine Roads is nutritionally enhancing plants to turn them into “bioreactors” that can completely eliminate animals from the food production supply chain.
🌱 What’s next? We asked Kathryn Weinmann, an investor at Norwest Venture Partners, for her perspective on current and future trends in alternative and plant-based foods. 👇🏼
On barriers to consumer adoption of a plant-based diet: “Adoption has been remarkable, and is distributed somewhat differently across generations...that said, many of the plant-based alternatives in the market today are highly processed and face increasing scrutiny around nutritional profiles. Plus, consumers want the real thing. AT Kearney projects that cell-cultured meat will reach 35% market share by 2040, with other plant based meats (which they call ‘novel vegan meat replacements’) holding 25% market share. It is remarkable to see the projected decline in the market share for conventional meat...Ultimately, alternatives to conventional meat production are needed in order to feed the next generation. We don’t have enough arable land and fresh water otherwise.”
On plant-based fine dining, such as Eleven Madison Park’s story: “Eleven Madison continues a trend we’ve seen in the market - Dominique Crenn eliminated land-based meat from her restaurants’ menus in 2019. These chefs are eliminating conventional meat from the menu largely because of environmental concerns. Plant-based meat and cell-cultured meat provide attractive alternatives that provide a lower environmental impact at scale than conventional production methods. In particular, cell-cultured meat allows consumers to eat the genuine animal meat they love while avoiding the need to raise and slaughter animals and with a significantly lower risk of food borne contamination. We expect a portion of consumers would be willing to pay a premium for these benefits.”
If you’re interested in getting more insights on this space, check out this AT Kearney report, Forward Fooding’s predictions on the meat market, or BCG’s growth trends on alternative proteins.
founder spotlight ✨👀
💡 featuring Stephanie Scribner of Fuzera Foods
The concepts behind Fuzera were based on Stephanie’s work and studies with the Alternative Meat Lab at UC Berkeley. The Company aims to bridge the gap between meat and plant-based diets by providing minimally processed hybrid meat products that are 50% meat - 50% veggie, and nearly identical in taste and texture to 100% meat products. Here are some main takeaways from our conversation with the team:
Be patient and experiment: “When working with products where consumers have set expectations about how it should taste, such as a burger or chicken nuggets, the R&D never stops! You really just have to roll up your sleeves and get in the kitchen to start experimenting. It took us about 5 months to get to this point, and we wouldn't have gotten here without the help of our network and sometimes from complete strangers.”
Don't be afraid to reach out!: “We reached out to several formulation experts in the food industry that we sometimes had very little/no connections to. What was most surprising is how kind and willing to help most people are! We had dozens of amazingly insightful meetings with experts who were so willing to share their knowledge.”
Share your idea with anyone and everyone: “You never know who can be helpful or who they might know. People are generally kind and willing to help. Definitely play the student card to get best response rates, and always remember you have access to some of the most brilliant professors in the world. Reach out to them even if you don't know them.”
community 👩🏻🧑🏼🧑🏾
☀️🍕 🏖 find out what’s going down this summer — events & communities to checkout!
🏙 Intern.club Summer Meetups: In cities across the US this summer, intern.club is hosting meetups for university students doing internships of all types to socialize, network, and create a career community.
💫 FirstMark Capital Talks:Join a community at the center of the design and product ecosystem and hear from design, UX, and product leaders at ongoing fireside chats
💚 Impact Fellows: For students interested in leading careers dedicated to social impact and good, this online community provides access to like-minded peers, social impact opportunities, and events.
👀 Community Spotlight: Co-Founder & Co-CEO Vitalize, Sanketh Andhavarapu
We sat down for a chat about life as a student founder with Sanketh Andhavarapu, current rising junior at the University of Maryland and EVCA fellow, and co-founder and co-CEO of Vitalize, the first healthcare app designed for the lived experiences of healthcare providers. Here were some of the main takeaways:
Get inspired by research: “I’m very interested in healthcare decision making, and was writing a paper for a class about implicit biases in healthcare and came across an article on how burnout in the healthcare industry leads to those biases. Being a healthcare professional is a high-demand work job, and when you’re burnt out, you’re more likely to succumb to those biases because it’s easier for your brain to make diagnoses...there are websites that recommend healthcare providers to download like ten to twenty different apps, but I thought that was absolutely absurd... So we thought: how can we design an app that’s tailored specifically for providers? And that was the inspiration for Vitalize.”
Meet a lot of people by getting involved in the entrepreneurship community on campus early on: “I met my cofounder in one of my university’s incubator spaces when I was a freshman. I founded STEPS, an education non-profit right before college started and my soon-to-be cofounder was also working on an education non-profit. He had a background in healthcare and preventative policy and I connected with him, told him about my idea, and we literally went straight to the whiteboard in the incubator space to start brainstorming stuff.”
Be proactive about sourcing people and building your team:
“Presenting at a lot of university startup fairs is a great way to get the word out to an audience. I’m personally a huge advocate for LinkedIn -- I send about 50-100 cold requests every week, whether it’s for team-building, networking, customer discovery. We actually found our CTO over LinkedIn, along with two other developers and a couple of designers. You definitely have to use it right, but if you do use it right, it yields high returns.”
“It’s all about being strategic and being scrappy and it’ll take time, as Jeff Bezos always says. He’d rather interview 50 people and reject everyone — no matter how urgent the position is, if no one is qualified. It’s about being patient because once you find the person who’s the right fit, your startup will be de-risked and have a much better future.”
Your best friends shouldn’t become your co-founders, but your co-founders should become your best friends: “A lot of times people make the costly mistake of choosing their friends as co-founders, which could be very difficult when trying to hold them accountable. Building a startup is hard, and people have to be willing to make sacrifices. Also, when you look only within your friend group, there may not be the diversity of skillsets you’re looking for to build your startup, but when you look at your co-founders, you notice that they end up becoming your best friends from how often you text them, have meetings with them, and figure out all these different aspects that are needed to be in order to run a startup.”
Delegating is key to balancing being a full-time student with being a full-time founder: “Our CTO managed a team of 5 designers to make the design a lot more impressive than if she did the design by herself -- the same goes for our development, content creation...Really stay true to the mission you’re aiming for and you’ll notice that people will naturally gravitate towards the work you’re aiming for, and then, if you can manage these people effectively and keep them all inspired in what you’re building, then not only will you have built a really strong community, but you will also have expanded the bandwidth for the amount of work you can do as a team overall.”
opportunities ⚡
👌 get the latest scoop of curated entrepreneurship opportunities
👀 Primary NYC Founders Fellowship: This is a six month, part-time program hosted by Primary Venture Partners, a seed-stage fund. Anyone with the “beginnings of an idea” interested in entrepreneurship can apply.
⚡️ Bessemer Internship Program: Bessemer Venture Partners, the investors behind companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitch, and more, recently opened up applications for their 2022 summer internship program.
😎 Harlem Capital Internship (Fall 2021): Harlem Capital (HCP) will offer the intern a valuable experience where they will learn the strategy of a new investment firm, get direct exposure to start-up founders, make investments, and tap into HCP’s network - apply by June 30th
🌊 General Atlantic Full-Time Analyst (Class of 2022): The Sourcing Analyst will work closely with the entire Technology team and have significant responsibility supporting new investment opportunities, conducting research and due diligence, and supporting feal execution across all of GA’s main sectors - apply by July 16th
7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ 776 Venture Capital Analyst: 776, Alexis Ohanian’s VC firm is hiring their first VC analyst!
💜 GenZ Designs Chief Strategy Officer:help bring Gen Z voices to the table and grow GenZ Designs into the world’s leading Gen Z consultancy.
💠 Rubrik SWE Internship (Fall 2021):work at a market leading cloud data management company in a remote software engineering internship role
🧡 Cambly SWE Internship (Fall 2021):join a fast growing startup that’s creating opportunities for students and tutors alike
💻 Anduril Industries SWE Internship (Fall 2021): work at a defense technology, solve problems that have real impact, and help build the future of defense.
🚙 Lucid Motors Autonomous Driving SWE Internship (Fall 2021): join Lucid’s mission to inspire the adoption of sustainable energy by creating the most captivating luxury electric vehicles centered around the human experience.
🪁 Kyte Technical Product Management Internship (Summer 2021):help redefine the car rental experience and build out the Kyte experience of making getting a car surprisingly easy
plug yourself! 🤩
👀 are you a student founder or leader in your campus entrepreneurial scene? got a cool startup or entrepreneurship event you recently hosted?
Connect with us: EVCA, Courtney, Caitlyn, and Prianka
We’re looking to spotlight student entrepreneurship on college campuses in upcoming newsletters. Feel free to plug your startup or student organization for a potential feature in the next EVCA university newsletter, as well as any suggestions for how the newsletter can be most helpful to you here.