The Secret Sauce FoodHack | Global Community for Food Innovators

Neeraj Berry (@neerajberry), founder & general partner of Tet Ventures, joins Arman Anaturk (@armananaturk) to discuss his journey from scrappy entrepreneurial kid in silicon valley, to founder of Sprig ($60M raised) to joining the world of VC. He also shares more on how to leverage cold emails to get what you want, the ingredients behind successful founders and a peak into his portfolio and what's next in foodtech.

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Discussion: ‍

🇮🇳 Growing up as an immigrant kid in Silicon Valley.
💸 His first ever side hustle - and how they made $50k.
📧 Cold emailing Mark Cuban for an $100k investment.
🚐 Founding Sprig and delivering meals in his mom's minivan.
📈 Hyper growth: From 3 to 1200 people in two years.
📉 Why Sprig failed and what happened when they shut.
🛫 Why he moved from Silicon Valley (USA) to Berlin (Germany)
🌱 Why he switched to venture capital
💸 How VC make money

By FoodHack
In a fast changing industry, it's good to know how to get ahead. The Secret Sauce is a business podcast where host, Arman Anaturk, co-founder of FoodHack, speaks with disruptive entrepreneurs and innovators from across the foodtech industry to learn more about the businesses they’ve built and what's next in foodtech.

Hosted by: Arman Anatürk

Edited by: Annabelle Buckland

Discover how Scottish entrepreneur Ross Mackay, Co-Founder and CEO of Daring Foods is working to remove chicken from our food system with great tasting plant-based alternatives - and how he's picked up . 

In the episode

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿The early days growing as a kid in Glasgow

🏃‍♂️ Going from an out of shape teenager to obsessed by health and fitness

🌱Why he switched to plant-based and how it affects his athletics

👕 His earliest venture - a clothing label based in Dubai

❤️ The need for genuine passion for long term success of a startup

💸How to raise funding for your plant-based startup

🛫Why he moved from Glasgow (Scotland) to LA (USA)

📈A look into hyper growth: From 2 to 30+ people

Host Arman Anaturk (@ArmanAnaturk) has Sorosh Tavakoli (@soroshtavakoli) on the pod this week:

Sorosh is the classic immigrant entrepreneur story.
- His family had to leave his home country of Iran due to the Iran/Iraq war at the time.
- Moves to a smallish town in Sweden (Uppsala) and tries to fit in
- Gets really into software / tech at the height of the dot com boom
- Builds and sells his first website (a fan page for Method Man) at age 14
- Goes on to study media technology where his classmates include soon to be founders of Spotify, SoundCloud & Prezi
- Decides he never wants to work for anyone
- Gets the idea for a media advertising company whilst in the shower
- Builds the business to 100 people across 8 cities
- Sells this business for an estimated $75M
- Makes his family proud
- Moves to NYTakes some time to learn about impact businesses & climate change
- Tries launching a duckweed business. Fails
- Now is creating the future of great tasting plant-based cheese together with his co-founder Anja and their team of scientist at Stockeld Dreamery


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Editing thanks to Annabelle Buckland

Today's guest at The Secret Sauce is David Benzaquen, consultant and investor for plant-based food companies. David Benzaquen is one of the world’s leading experts in the plant-based food industry, and the founder of Mission: Plant, a holding company which aims to advance the plant-based foods industry with stratetgc investments and consulting services.

Prior to founding Mission: Plant, David spent nearly a decade leading a corporate strategy consulting firm for plant-based consumer products and founded one of the first plant-based seafood companies. David invests in, and advises, early-stage, plant-based, FMCG businesses.

He and his companies have been profiled in The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, Wired, Inc, CNN and more.

Today's guest at The Secret Sauce is Daniel Skavén Ruben, consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation Food team, advisor and investor to multiple startups across Europe, Africa and the US and writer of the food tech weekly newsletter. We chat about Daniel's unplanned path into the foodtech industry, why he's so excited about the future of this space, his prediction on what's going to be big in 2021 and beyond, as well as his ethos to being an advisor and investor. 

Discussion


From law to freelance journalist, the entertainment industry to the Trade council - Daniel's past before food and what he's learned along the way
How Daniel ended up at the Rockefeller food foundation
A brief history of our food system, progress and setbacks we've made in the past 100 years
The main challenges we need to tackle to make a more nutritious, sustainable food system for all
The businesses across food and Ag that Daniels hopeful on
Companies in Daniels investment/advisory portfolio
Being an advisor and what that means
What startups should look for in an advisor and when

Mentioned in the podcast:


Daniels LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielskavenruben/
Daniels foodtech weekly newsletter: http://tinyletter.com/foodtechweekly
Daniels interview on Warp news podcast: https://www.warpnews.org/food-tech/food-tech-with-daniel-s-ruben/

Today's guest at the Secret Sauce is Leif Langenskiöld, founder & CEO of the vitamin water company Focus Water.