YouSaid · the spoken record

Pat Brown

lines on the record: 73
first: 2020-05-11
most recent: 2020-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I looked at this problem, I saw that nobody was seriously taking it on, and I basically decided I'm going to take responsibility for solving this problem. Not because I was exceptionally capable of solving it, but basically because I decided to do it. I think that's the most important thing. And I feel like it's the one thing that keeps a lot of valuable things from happening is people feel like, you know, someone else must be this is someone else's job to solve. You know, why would I be the person to do this? I'm so unqualified. Well, the answer is someone's got to do it. And I feel like a lot of good things would happen if people were more willing to just say, I'm going to take responsibility to solve this problem. And so I think that's the main attribute. Enabled me to take this on.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the most important thing is, I feel like there are a lot of people Who are as smarter, smarter than me in terms of the kind of problem-solving skills, were entirely capable of doing this. So what I think is important that I contributed is the initiative and the determination to do it. It's basically the critical thing that I provided was that”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would probably make my life worse. Yeah. I'm going to tell you, I'm serious. I'm serious because I know a lot of people who are super rich. And I would say, by and large, they're not as happy as I am. Their kids are much more likely to be miserable than my kids are. It sounds like such a stupid thing, but once you have your basic needs met, I think more money adds very little value. And if you're trading, if you're talking about something that's as incredibly valuable and motivating to me as the mission of this company and so forth, and so important to the world, of course I wouldn't trade that for money.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm not motivated. I mean, first of all, I live in a nice place, same place I've lived in for 30 X years. I have enough money to take care of my needs and so forth. And if I didn't, I'd probably be spending a lot of my time thinking about money and where do I get and so forth. But the situation I'm in right now is not going to be improved a bit by more money. If you”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely, we have to operate differently. I mean, I think the workspace, our workspace is deliberately designed to be effectively one large space where people are in visual contact with a lot of their colleagues. It's very interactive environment. So it's quite compromising to a lot of the things that are important to us. And of course our R&D labs, the ability to do actual wet lab work, you can't do because even though it's essential to the future of the planet, it's not immediately essential to data-day life for us to be operating. So the R&D operations basically, you know, the people are still getting work done, planning experiments, analyzing data, stuff like that, but it's compromise manufacturing. Yeah, it's complicated.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just the capital investment in building a manufacturing facility and all that capacity. And that's a big part of it, is that, and the thing is that you have to invest ahead of growth and betting on your success, basically. So if we're going to increase our volume by several fold this year and several fold the next year, well, we need to be building capacity right now that's like 10x what we're selling it's very different from if we were building an app or something like that where It's just you're just paying for coders basically.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say a large fraction of the expense. So we have an RD team that's probably 120 people, really just as good a group of scientists as any company pretty much ever in history. But the work they do isn't insanely expensive. But we have to scale up production of a physical product that we sell on the scale of tens of millions of pounds a year. We had to build a supply chain for our heme protein. And those things are relatively expensive.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because they know this is coming, and it's just a matter of time when we get the economies of scale that they have and when we've expanded our suite of products and so forth, that it's going to be game over for them. And I think that's why even before we had our first product, I know from a direct source that a representative of that industry actually reached out to a lobbyist and basically said to ask the lobbyist to get Congress or the USDA to shut us down.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, I think that most of the bills that have been proposed to restrict our labeling have not passed in the state legislatures. And those that have, I'd say the smart money is that they're not going to pass a constitutional test. But even in the hypothetical case where someone tells us we can't call it meat, well. Whatever. The point is that consumers will figure out what it is and we'll call it whatever we need to call it”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want a kale salad, please go buy a kale salad. If you want a burger, you're better off buying our burger than the cow version.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say from a health and nutrition standpoint, we have been extremely deliberate and conscientious to make a product that we believe is substantially better for the consumer than what it replaces. And it has the same protein bioavailability, the same bioavailable iron. People make a big deal about the fact that the sodium content is higher, but you could say, yeah, and the sodium content of a pear is higher than a peach. But the fact is that the sodium content in four ounce impossible burger is, I think, one sixth of the sodium allowance in a sodium restricted diet. So this is not a kale salad. It's a burger, and it's targeted at someone who would otherwise be buying the animal version Want to make it the healthiest, most nutritious product we can possibly make. Still have it be a burger”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a big part of our fundraising is that it's exactly this, betting on our success. We have to be building capacity On the premise that the demand will be manyfold greater than current sales and have to keep doing that to stay ahead of the demand. What happened a year and a half ago was we were planning on building capacity, but we weren't prepared for this surge in demand that happened over a very short period of time that happened so fast that then we, you know, basically we were playing catch up because this is a problem of being in a business that produces stuff it's a big investment to build capacity. It takes time and you're guessing you're doing something that's never been done before where there's no roadmap and we have to say, okay, what's demand going to be in two years?”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, that's one of those numbers I think I'm not supposed to talk about, but I can just tell you. Lots, many millions of pounds.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. It's just, even though she knows Course, everything that's in is nothing from the animal. It's just like a visceral thing. People have very visceral reactions that are, it's not your frontal lobe calling the shots.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, let's say I've outgrown my craving for meat a long time ago, but I do like impossible burgers. In fact, my sister, who's been vegetarian as long as I have, can't bring herself to eat one.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The raw forum, which you can actually eat at raw, which I wouldn't recommend for the covers, the flavor is completely different from the cooked version. And that's unlike any plant-derived food before. And it tastes bloody.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plus heme as a catalyst. And that's most of what's behind the flavor. We don't put spices in. There's no meat flavorance in there. It's pretty straightforward. The way that we approach the problem was we basically asked the question, how does meat do it? How does meat from a cow produce that flavor? Because if meat from a cow can produce that flavor with the biomolecules that it contains, which we knew at the time were extremely similar in composition to the things that are found in plant cells, if we can figure out how meat does it, then we don't have to fake the flavors. We can build in the exact same flavor chemistry into our product so that it does the same thing. And it literally creates the flavor in real time when you cook it.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How you get that taste? It's not spices at all. I mean, and it's actually the ingredients are relatively few. I mean, the flavor is almost entirely from simple small molecules like amino acids, vitamins, sugars, things that you can find in vegetables, animals, whatever. Same simple, you know, ubiquitous biomolecules.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And the thing about chefs is that what they want is something new, something challenging. And the thing that's different about our product than any plant based product is that it has the magic of meat that only a chef can see. And there's never been a plant-based product because of the heme primarily that does the magical thing that meat does when you cook it, which is it transforms completely, you can tune the flavor profile by whether you cook it rare or well done and stuff like that. And I think for a chef, having the creative possibilities that that opens up just makes it exciting for them. So I think that's part of why we were so fortunate to be able to work with these great chefs. It was something new for them to put their artistic skills to use on.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the subsequent restaurants relaunched initially, again, they're not high volume, but they were high credibility restaurants because they were run by uncompromising chefs who are known primarily for their meat.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With because The main value we would get from launching our product at the time when we had very limited production capacity, the amount of money we could bring in from sales was irrelevant. The value of a sale to us is awareness and brand building. And the single most important message that we needed to deliver to consumers who never heard of us is delicious meat doesn't have to come from animals. And Dave Chang is such a hardcore meat guy that he wants banished all vegetarian items from his menu Principle. Okay. And there's no more sincere and valuable endorsement than to put our product on a menu for a chef to put it on the menu because Chef puts a dish on the menu. They're putting their livelihood and their reputation on the line.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was something that was pretty obvious under the circumstances. So we had been in contact with a number of chefs that we would give samples of our product to... To get feedback because, again, the thing is we were not interested in launching a veggie burger. If it didn't satisfy a very hardcore meat lover, it wasn't going to move the needle on our mission. So we were setting a high bar for ourselves. So we were giving samples to chefs to get their feedback and had been doing that for quite some time. And my CFO at the time, current CFO too, David Lee belonged to some Korean American organization that Dave Cheng also belonged to, and he was going to that event in New York, and he brought a sample in case he could see Dave Chang to have him test it out. Kitchen restaurant and he cooked it on his stove. And then just like immediately started tweeting like, my mind is blown. And the point is that Dave Chang is exactly the kind of person we want to launch.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The mission is to eliminate the need for animals as a food technology and by doing so to save the planet from an environmental catastrophe. Nobody cares as much about it as I do and my colleagues do. And I don't want to put the mission at risk by putting it in the hands of someone who's not as committed to it as we are. That's really what it comes down to.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh well, you know, I think Google is a great company and the people there are lots of super smart people there. This company Impossible Foods has a very simple, highly specific mission that we are completely 100% focused on achieving. Nobody else has that level of focus and commitment no matter how smart they are.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That certainly wasn't sufficient. This was not like a sequence of things, so we were working on scaling up the heme protein at the same time. We were working on figuring out the texture and the... The rest of the flavor, chemistry, and so forth.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, then basically you just grow giant fermenter tanks full of the yeast and break open the yeast cells and extract the legemoglobin and it's very scalable. The economics work well.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know how to achieve our mission. But, you know, the point is, we don't have a map to where we're going. It means we have to explore. We have to try things that we don't know for sure will work and some of them won't work. And if we're afraid to do that, then, you know, well, we shouldn't be scientists and we shouldn't be trying to do this. And I'm proud of it because that's the way we have to be.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Figure that out. We had half the company basically to some extent involved in this going out to soybean farms for the better part of a year. But this is the kind of thing you have to do when you're working on unsolved problem where you don't know the roots of the solution is you have to be not afraid to try things that may fail and accept that as part of the job. My feeling is this is not the last expensive failure we're going to have in our history by longshot. As of today, I can tell you for certain We are going to have more expensive failures in the future as we try to figure out”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leaves. It's a lot of work. That's a very good analogy. The seeming simplicity and the actual challenge of. Of doing it at scale. So it was in retrospect. Bad idea, which I'm 100% responsible for.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let's put it this way. It's totally doable. But the problem was that it was just a very difficult scaling problem. First of all, these root nodules are these little tiny balls. They're mixed in with the soil. You have to separate them out. You have to get rid of all the other stuff to get pure enough like hemoglobin that's food safe and all this sort of stuff.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we harvest a part of the soybean plant that nobody really cares about. Therefore, we felt like we could get practically for free and get this molecule that was going to be important for meat. Anyway, so when I had raised the money, one of the first projects we started was figuring out how to isolate leg hemoglobin from soy root nodules.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for soybeans, it's called soy like hemoglobin. And I suspected, so there's one obvious thing that Heme does, which is it gives the meat its red color. But what I suspected was it had a role in the flavor because heme is such a good catalyst. Anyway, I did some calculations and concluded that there is as much heme in the root nodules of the US soybean crop as there is in all the meat consumed in the US.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it gets warmer. It might get mushier. You get in the cooking process this real absolute explosion of aroma, that's, you know, this meat that in the raw form Has minimal odor, maybe a slight bloody odor in taste, suddenly becomes potently flavorful and generates this explosion of aroma. And I knew that there is a molecule in legumes The root nodules contained a lot of molecule called leg hemoglobin. That's a heme protein. It's actually very similar to myogoglog.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's another aspect of HEME, which is that it's one of the most potent catalysts in nature. And when you think about meat, when you cook meat, something really dramatic happens that doesn't happen when you cook broccoli. And that is it transforms, you know, if you cook broccoli or a veggie burger”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is pretty much a basic building block of life. So Him is a very obvious aspect of meat because it's what makes meat red or pink.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Myogen. It's closely related to hemoglobin. It's a heme protein. And Heme is what carries oxygen in your blood. It's what makes your blood red.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, before I founded the company, I had an idea. That particular molecule in meat myoglobin, which is a heme protein. And it's what makes meat red.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he had an MBA, and he was a very smart guy. So yeah, so that was taken care of. And then the rest was pretty much all scientists. And we were hiring people. Basically, who had a hardcore basic science background, sort of molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics. And they went to work basically studying meat in molecular terms the same way they would study a disease or something like that.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I literally was, you know, I would say the large majority of people in the US probably have more business savvy than I had when I started this company seriously, seriously. In fact, my wife mades all our finances, thank God she does. So we needed someone who actually knew what they were doing because there's obviously a lot of expert management required to run a business, even one that's not making money. So the very first person I hired was a guy who had just was about to graduate from Stanford Business School, very sharp guy. He had grown up on a dairy farm and had actually worked as an engineer at General Mills so he knew something about the food business. He understood the problem we were trying to solve.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It only works Hardcore meat lovers Prefer it. Prefer it to what comes from a cow. Because otherwise, we're not going to out compete the incumbent industry”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“20 names, and we say those all suck. Those are terrible. And then in the fourth round, one of the names they had was impossible. And as soon as I saw that one, I felt like, okay, we're done. It's perfect because we wanted something that was memorable, that actually looked good in type, that was an impactful word, a word that gets a little bit of an emotional response, and that captured some of the challenger spirit of the company. And a lot of our investors thought it was a bad name because they said, wow, possible, that's such a negative name.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I started the company first, we just had a placeholder name 2.0. And then when we decide we're going to launch a product, we felt like, okay, now we need a name that actually works as a brand name. And we engaged naming company as an advisor. And we were, they told us, by far the most difficult clients they ever had because they were give us”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was. No, the funny thing was it was extremely amateurish. Okay, from a business perspective because basically it was like mostly a lecture about how incredibly destructive the animal-based food industry is. And then practically my last slide was, oh, by the way, this is 1.5 at the time trillion dollar global market. In retrospect, that could probably have been my first and only slide, but I buried the lead. Yeah.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a bit of that. I mean, I looked at business and I feel like business is really important and it's not like it's some inferior thing to be doing, except that I just felt like going into business for the sake of going to business, I would hate it. Yeah. It would just be insanely boring. So I never had the slightest interest in that. I didn't think of it all as, oh, I'm going into the business world, it's that the only way to solve this problem involves competing in the marketplace. And that requires starting a for-profit business. And everybody expected me to come back very quickly. And in fact, you know, when I first started, I thought, well, maybe I'll just kick this into gear and then I'll just go back to my Stanford job. But what I realized very quickly is, no, this is not a hobby. I have to be all in.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people thought I was a little wacky. But I believed it was doable. To be a scientist, you almost have to be insanely optimistic because, you know, if you're doing science that matters, you're doing experiments that you don't know will work, but you have to be an inherently insanely optimistic person. So I was sure we'd figure out a way to make it work.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was all just thinking, but I just felt like, okay, of course this is doable. It's hard. That's for sure. It's going to be really, really hard. And the hard part is figuring out the deliciousness part of it. The rest is easy”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I would say with very high confidence, I believe it was doable. Because really, what it comes down to is the components that are in meat, you know, the amino acids, the other small molecules, lipids, many of the proteins are extremely conserved. They're found in plants as well as animals and so forth It seemed to me that if we could understand what were the salient characteristics of that kind of molecular composition, salient in the sense of the deliciousness aspect There's no reason why we couldn't find sources from plants of ingredients that we could assemble into something that from a sensory perspective was essentially indistinguishable from the animal product. Basically, meat made from plants. It's just like a camera is a camera, whether it's using film or digital imaging.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody wants that. So that basically means that it just comes down to a simple thing. Give meat lovers the things they do love about meat, which is the very particular kind of sensory experience and the sensory pleasures, the nutritional value protein and iron primarily are the micronutrients, and convenience and affordability, and you win.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was exactly the conclusion. And here's an interesting fact about meat consumers. Pretty much around the world and all across the US, they don't actually like the fact that it's made from the corpses of animals. That is not part of the value proposition of meat to pretty much anyone. They love it because they love the special kind of deliciousness they get from it. They like the high protein and iron and familiarity and convenience and so forth. They like it in spite of the way it's made. And it stands to reason. Why would anyone actually feel like, you know what I particularly like about this product isn't so much that it tastes good, it's that it's made from the corpse of a cow that had a miserable life.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the bottom line is that doesn't work. Public policy doesn't work, education doesn't work. When you go to an environmental conference where every single person knows how problematic this is, they're all having steak for dinner. So you need a more subversive solution. And the subversive solution is create products that compete successfully in the marketplace against the products that are produced by animal farming. And if you can do that, effectively eliminate the economic incentive for this ridiculous industry, you can solve the problem quickly.”
2020-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Impossible Foods: Pat Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT