How lab-grown meat company SciFi Foods failed - and why many others may soon follow

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It wasn’t long ago that lab-grown meat was booming. Startups raised billions of dollars. Investors boldly predicted the large scale slaughter of cows, chickens and fish would soon end. Then it all went pear-shaped. This week Joshua March and Kasia Gora come on to talk about how their startup, SciFi Foods, failed after raising more than $40 million on how the market turned against their company and the industry broadly (3:30), being affected by the downturn in plant-based meat (7:30), the Gamechangers documentary (10:30), being transparent with staff (15:10), the importance of failing well (19:30), the progress they made (27:30), Big Meat’s lobbying efforts (30:45), whether they would do it again (32:45), the Silicon Valley machine (37:00), venture debt (40:30), and the next thing (42:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.5	We did a really nice final lunch with everyone.
0:07.9	With your own burgers?
0:09.6	You know, I think we'd all need enough burgers at that point.
0:13.6	Yeah, it's a restaurant.
0:14.8	Yeah, we did a nice little closing ceremony with the whole team which is great.
0:34.8	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley. We have another special episode for you this week.
0:39.1	We have a story of failure, which is important because, you know, Silicon Valley is predicated on repeated and massive failures, punctuated every once in a while by unlikely massive success.
0:55.0	That is the model.
0:55.8	Most startups blow up or die.
0:58.4	They don't work.
0:59.2	They wither because starting something from scratch is really hard.
1:03.9	But people don't often like to talk about those failures,
1:07.1	save for a few brave, honest souls.
1:11.8	And we have two on the show today.
1:15.1	Josh March and Kasha Gora are the founders of sci-fi foods.
1:21.6	You may recall we had them on the pod some years ago when the world was very excited about lab grown meat. Sci-fi was taking an
1:30.9	interesting approach growing beef in a lab and then combining it with plant-based meats to give a mixed
1:35.8	hybrid product that was an alternative to just, you know, slaughtering a cow. And the result was a very
1:42.7	tasty burger, far better than just your kind of
1:45.3	your plant-based stuff on the market. And I should know because I did a taste test. It's very good.
	...

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