Congratulations on the new baby Drew, how beautiful!! And of course, congrats on the new role as well :') I find these mid-career transition stories really lovely, it makes me a bit emotional. It's just nice to hear all the different ways people engage with EA and all the effort and time that goes into finding a role.
Thanks! It's a lot of big exciting changes at once, when it rains it pours :)
I'm glad my story resonated, and I hope you can keep posting about mid-career transitions as you come across them. They are really inspiring.
Hi Drew, just wanted to drop by and wish you congratulations both on becoming a parent (I've got two - life's on fire) and your role at FarmKind. I was also in that round, so hats off to you, and I'm looking forward to seeing how FarmKind progresses with accomplished people like you on board!
Thank you very much! Best of luck on the job hunt, it can be such a grind. I hope you find something great soon.
I missed @frances_lorenz's call for mid-career transition stories as I was off having my first baby, so I decided to write up my own story before career week has run its course. (Her series is great, check it out!)
I graduated from college in 2009 and have spent the majority of my time since then working for various tech startups. I started out in content marketing roles but quickly found I had a knack for sales. For the last 10+ years I've been selling SaaS software while working remotely, and I've mostly enjoyed it. I have never come close to hitting the equity jackpot, but I've done well for myself and I'm grateful to have worked with nice people.
Still, selling online meeting software to engineering managers is not exactly my passion. Ever since going vegan about 5 years ago, I've been looking for ways to do direct, high-impact work helping animals. I started applying to a lot of jobs right around when the alt-protein movement was picking up steam in 2020. I was hoping to land a sales role at Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods. I had no such luck, not with them or anyone else. I did make it to a second round interview with the Good Food Institute, which was thrilling. I poured my heart and soul into a work project about fish welfare, only to never hear back from the hiring manager. Hey, maybe they are still reviewing applications? Fingers crossed! 🙃 (no hard feelings GFI, I get that hiring is hard and things fall through the cracks)
During this period I also started reaching out to a lot of people in the animal welfare movement to ask for career transition advice. I talked to people in my network and sent cold emails. One person who responded to my cold outreach was Lewis Bollard. We ended up having a call. He was great to speak to, so full of energy, optimism, and ideas. He was also confident I'd find a way to use my sales skills for good, which gave me hope. He thought they'd be useful in a fundraising capacity, which turned out to be prescient.
Despite making some interesting progress on the networking front, I bailed out of my search for a job in animal welfare in 2021 after getting nowhere with dozens of applications. I decided to try again later. In the meantime, I focused on donations and doing a lot of animal welfare-focused writing. My review of Matthew Scully's book Dominion was chosen as a finalist in the Astral Codex Ten Book review contest in 2024. I also started a Substack called Expanding Circle. Seeing it make it on to the Farm Animal Welfare Substack's recommended reading list was immensely gratifying.
By the time 2025 rolled around, I was no longer blasting my resume out, but I still had my eyes open. I interviewed for a role with a really interesting company called Innovate Animal Ag, but didn't make the cut. (They just scored a huge win by getting eggs from in-ovo sexed hens to the US market, btw!). At that point, I didn't see much of a shot of finding the type of job I wanted. I was 38 years old and had done exactly zero direct EA work.
Then I got an email out of the blue from Lewis Bollard introducing me to a couple of charity founders. They were both looking to hire someone with a strong sales background. I am impressed Lewis even remembered I was in sales, as we connected so long ago. Talk about a super connector!
One of the people he connected me with was Aidan Alexander from FarmKind. I happened to already be a FarmKind donor because I wanted to offset my non-vegan baby's future meat consumption, so I didn't need to be sold on their awesome mission. The FarmKind team put me through a challenging multi-stage interview process. In the end, I was offered a role as Head of Community Engagement, starting in the middle of next month. I am excited and still a little bit stunned that I finally get to work at a thriving organization directly working to improve the living conditions for trillions of farmed animals.
My takeaway from all this is you never know when your particular skills will become in-demand. I thought my sales background was mostly unimportant when it came to EA roles, and then all of a sudden it was a great way to get my foot in the door for several different opportunities. If you're willing to play the long game, reach out to people for advice, and find ways to contribute to the movement on the side, you might find your once-overlooked resume will become the shiny one on the top of the stack.
Hey Drew, thanks a lot for writing this post. I found it quite inspiring for a few reasons:
You're welcome, I'm glad it resonated with you!
I think people definitely underestimate how often a cold email will get a response. I had a great call with Paul Shapiro from The Better Meat Co. after a cold email as well. He told me to start a plant based lobster company. That felt like a stretch for me, haha, but I loved his enthusiasm.