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Brian Spears
Seeking to make the world more beautiful
Brian Spears was the founder and CEO of New Age Eats, a cultivated meat startup that aimed to produce pork without animal slaughter.15 The company, founded in 2018 in Berkeley, California, developed technology to create meat from animal cells.6 Unfortunately, New Age Eats shut down in March 2023 due to funding difficulties and capital market turmoil.16
Prior to founding New Age Eats, Spears had experience in industrial automation.3 During his time at New Age Eats, the company raised approximately $32 million in funding, including a $25 million Series A round in 2021.5 The startup made progress in developing hybrid products combining plant-based ingredients and cultivated meat, and was in the process of building a pilot facility in Alameda, California.3
After the closure of New Age Eats, Spears emphasized that the company's failure was more related to capital market conditions than the viability of the cultivated meat industry itself.3 He remains passionate about the potential of cultivated meat to shift production away from industrialized animal agriculture.6
It's worth noting that there are other individuals named Brian Spears with different professional backgrounds, including one who works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory2 and another who is a lawyer and founder of a law firm.4 However, the Brian Spears associated with New Age Eats and the LinkedIn username bspears is the former CEO of the cultivated meat startup.
Highlights
I’ve been asked to do a few podcasts since we shut down New Age Eats, but haven’t until now.
I decided to record with Fabian Hediger because I know him personally. He’s an entrepreneur and investor who shares my focus for mission-driven startups. He also wanted to learn more about my experiences with founder mental health.
We discussed why we started the company, what we were trying to do, why we shut down, and what emotional challenges face startup founders.
My hope is that those inside and outside the startup ecosystem can feel safe to discuss lessons learned growing a startup. I especially want to destigmatize the discussion of mental health. Speaking openly about it is the best way I know how.
Enjoy!
#startup #founders #mentalhealth #startups #entrepreneur
Recently, we made the painful decision to shut down New Age Eats.
WHAT WE WERE DOING As a mission focused founder, I started this company to shift meat production from industrialized animal agriculture. Along the way, our incredible team developed technology to create meat without slaughter. While our company will no longer survive, multiple companies will pick up the baton and use our technology to further our shared mission. If interested, please contact me.
Creating the experience of meat without slaughter is extremely difficult. We start with biotech borrowed from human health applications designed for high cost, low volume products. We worked to flip to low cost, high volume products. That is expensive, takes time, and needs a lot of patient capital.
WHAT HAPPENED In our regulated industry, we can’t and won’t be able to sell for a while. Without revenue, we rely on other sources of capital. Investors proved to be the most efficient way to validate whether cultivated meat would be commercially viable. Unfortunately, with recent capital market turmoil, we have been unable to attract investment.
As the CEO, I take ultimate responsibility for this shutdown. When we started ~5 years ago, we had no blueprint to develop and commercialize cultivated meat. I am grateful to everyone who supported our brilliant, talented team as we learned along the way. To those who are hiring, many of these people are starting their job search!
WHAT NOW As for me, I will take time to sit and learn from the founder journey. It has been the best and worst thing I have ever done. I have an entirely new perspective on who I am, consciousness, meaning, suffering, happiness, and the stories that create our reality.
The toll on my mental heaIth to gain these perspectives over the years has been tremendous. I am encouraged that mental health – including of founders – is being more openly discussed.
I currently have 3 areas of interest. Influence flows from top to bottom like pools of water. At the top is how each human sees him/herself and how we integrate the parts of us into a whole self. The second is how we interact with other selves to organize the world through incentives and disincentives. The third is the result of that incentive system.
I have been drawn to fix the problems in the third pool for years. That pool will never get cleaned up as long as the first two pools create dirty runoff, so I believe my next chapter will focus on those.
GRATITUDE Lastly, I want to express profound gratitude to everyone who supported me and the team along the way. I’m also grateful to those who worked against us. Without them, I wouldn’t have learned what I did, that everything is one – no crest without trough, buyer without seller, villain without victim. My gratitude is for everything in this beautiful existence that we share. Ideally, my future work leads to broadly sharing that increased appreciation.
Please reach out for conversations about any of the above.
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