In this post, I reflect on my journey with Tälist and our platform AltProtein.Jobs. I share my experience with and insights into the strategic decision-making process, misconceptions around our financial model, work-life balance as a founder, and other aspects, hoping they help others in their career decisions and entrepreneurial endeavors in high-impact sectors.
TL:DR
- Product-market fit is Hard: Finding the right organizational structure and intervention (=service/product) has been an iterative process of learning new things, re-evaluating, and pivoting. It might seem obvious in retrospect why an organization ends up doing things a certain way, but the experience of getting to the right place feels like several consecutive steps with uncertainty and junctures along the way.
- Pivoting to Meet Demand: The growing talent demand in the Alt. Protein industry demands efficient and scalable solutions. We pivoted to a matchmaking platform after starting as an industry-specific recruitment service and a comprehensive intervention comparison.
- Communicating Our For-Profit Model: We’re a for-profit company. This has been leading to misconceptions in the EA community and beyond, and we’re working to get better at communicating why we chose this organizational structure. One of the main reasons is that it allows us to generate revenue and qualify for public innovation grants rather than relying completely on philanthropic money via funds.
- Reframing Entrepreneurship for Work-Life Balance: I assume there are great people who avoid founding organizations or initiatives because they equate being a founder/entrepreneur with a hustle culture that wouldn’t allow them to have a fulfilling and sustainable work-life balance. It helped me to reframe my role as “a regular job where I do entrepreneurial stuff.”
About Alternative Proteins
Alternative Proteins is an umbrella term for various alternatives to animal products, from milk/dairy to fish & seafood to meat or just single components like fat or protein. Innovative techniques are used to create plant-based, cultivated, or precision-fermented products (as well as hybrids between these three “verticals” or latest developments like plant molecular farming). Widespread adoption of alternative proteins is expected to play a crucial role in ending industrial animal agriculture, mitigating the environmental impact of our food system, reducing animal suffering, and decreasing the risk of pandemics from zoonotic disease.
The industry is growing, and so is the demand for talent, which continues to outpace its supply. While talent and skill gaps are a bottleneck in many industries, the Alt. Protein sector faces additional industry-specific challenges (e.g. the requirement of very scientific and technical skills or that this niche industry and its career opportunities are still widely unknown to many promising candidates). This situation is pushing the date for when Alt. Proteins can scale to start displacing industrial animal agriculture. Talent solutions within the Alt. Protein industry are an important intervention to address a key bottleneck and accelerate the industry and its expected impact.
Becoming a founder
The years before
I came across EA in 2016, when I was working as a consultant & project manager in the private sector, starting an extra-occupational MBA in General Management. Through my work and MBA, I discovered my interest in entrepreneurship. In 2017, I founded EA Dresden with my now-husband. Still, it took me a couple of years to fully embrace the thought of changing my career to maximize my impact.
In parallel, I also became more and more intrigued about the impact potential of the Alt. Protein industry, particularly as it tackles several large-scale problems associated with industrial animal farming (such as animal suffering, environmental degradation, or global health risks) and makes use of economic dynamics such as consumer demand instead of trying to convince people to change their behavior for moral reasons.
Founding during parental leave
Jump into 2021: I was pregnant with our second child, and I made the conscious decision to use my parental leave as an opportunity to change my career (I live in Germany, which has pretty generous parental leave policies compared to most other countries). I co-founded the non-profit Cellular Agriculture Germany in 2021, and my experiences there (particularly the challenges of hiring experts in this niche field) would later play a role in founding Tälist. I was also accepted for and went through Charity Entrepreneurship’s (CE, now AIM) incubation program that same year. When two of my fellow cohort members founded the CE project I was most intrigued by, I decided to move ahead with founding an impact-focused for-profit project within the AltProtein sector.
Impact and personal fit
If I maximized for impact only, there are probably options that could allow me to have an even higher impact. Still, in my career-related decisions, factors like personal fit and motivation have been strong considerations for me. With my academic background in work and industrial psychology and management, as well as work experience in executive search, employer branding, and training, I felt a particularly strong fit for talent solutions and working in the for-profit sector.
I'm intrigued by for-profits with flow-through effects. In the best case, they have more impact than many non-profits will ever achieve while generating profit instead of depending on philanthropic funding, potentially even qualifying founders for earning to give. (As a reference, please see AIM's latest program, Founding to Give.)
Lastly, Alternative Proteins involve a theory of change where most of the uncertainty revolves around the psychology of change. Even if they face legal challenges and campaigns to smear products as “ultra-processed” or “unnatural”, these are known problems for which it is already possible to strategize, and so I see a path ahead that I am motivated to follow.
Path to product market fit
At the very early stages of the founding phase, it wasn’t yet clear what exactly I would do. I was mostly determined to work on one of the many whitespaces in the Alt. protein industry as described by the Good Food Institute.
During the founding phase of what later became Tälist, I collaborated with Lauren Mee, who had already been running Animal Advocacy Careers for roughly two years and was a mentor and good friend of mine. She mostly helped with research, strategy, and fundraising and later joined Tälist as a strategic advisor.
I considered a range of business models, including setting up a business-to-business (B2B) platform for exporting and importing Alt. Protein products. However, the sweet spot was the high demand for talent, the lack of efficient and impactful solutions, and the fact that addressing the problem seemed highly feasible with my existing skill set. So, I narrowed down the focus to providing talent solutions, but I still wasn’t exactly sure. As I interviewed 30 industry stakeholders about the talent bottleneck, a lot of them expressed that having industry-specific recruiters was their ideal solution.
I founded Tälist in May 2022 as a for-profit, supported by a philanthropic grant (which I believe is more of an exception than the rule within EA). We started out providing industry-specific executive search and HR consultation but soon experienced some limitations concerning the impact & effectiveness of this solution:
- Hiring a recruitment service to carry out a tailored search isn’t a financial possibility for all companies - especially not for early-stage startups and many companies in the global south!
- It’s hard to find really good recruiters that would do a significantly better job compared to other existing recruitment firms. This was a serious threat or limitation to the business model, as it meant we’d be facing a talent bottleneck ourselves.
- While hiring the right person in key roles might be impactful, recruitment is not a scalable solution, limiting the possible impact of this intervention.
As a side note: Even though we had customers and started making revenue, not a single one of the people I interviewed later hired us for our recruitment and executive search service. This was a lesson in marketing (or market validation) and a harsh reminder that you shouldn’t rely too much on asking customers/users directly what they want. (Apparently, Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)
Pivoting and scaling
Compared to other EA-related sectors, the talent demand in the Alt. Protein community is quite comprehensive (to give a reference: on average, we have approximately 3000 job listings on our platform just for the first half of 2024), and it’s expected to grow in the next couple of years and decades. Moving forward, one of my main assumptions was “Scalable probably means technical.” In researching scalable talent solutions, I came across successful matchmaking platforms in other, more established industries. I was very intrigued by this business model, as it saves both candidates and employers a lot of time (and money) and makes hiring/job searching a more efficient, convenient, and less frustrating experience.
At the same time, I knew that building technical solutions wasn’t something I could do myself. My skill set is more of an entrepreneurial generalist, and while I acknowledge the importance of technology, I’m just not a technical person. So at the end of 2022, I decided to start searching for a co-founder in the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I published a co-founder job ad on multiple channels (including my network), and got a couple of interesting candidates. I met Oliver Boldt through a non-EA-related founder network, although he was already EA-aligned at that time. It only took 2-3 months after I decided to look for a co-founder until he joined Tälist. There was a good amount of luck involved, to be honest!
When Oliver joined Tälist in February 2023, we already had a first prototype of the Alt. Protein job board. This was sparked by conversations with GFI and set up with the help of some EAs: Credit goes to Jaime and Victor from SEADS, and Markus from Altruistic Agency.
At that point, it wasn’t clear that the matchmaking platform was the most promising path forward, it was more like a promising idea that seemed worth further exploring. I wanted to conduct a more thorough evaluation and waited until my new co-founder joined Tälist to ensure a robust fit between our skill sets as a founder duo and the intervention. So, when I met Oliver and considered hiring him as CTO, I made it his work trial to collaborate with me on a comprehensive intervention comparison analysis. For that, we used a weighted factor model with 10+ ideas and almost 20 criteria. The inputs to the comparison analysis were a mix of self-evaluations in terms of whether we had expertise or transferable skills to build from and research, always trying to quantify and estimate our qualitative impressions. We played around with weightings, but tweaking them didn’t change the priority much, so the differences in score between the interventions seemed quite robust. At the end of this process, the matchmaking platform was the most promising way to move forward.
Since then, we’ve set up the world’s largest Alt. Protein job board with approximately 3000 jobs every month, industry-specific filters, and unique features like the impact benchmarking. We also have a talent database with more than 2000 candidates, aiming for a 10-15% growth every month (we’ve been within this range so far). We recently launched the matchmaking functionality, using AI to provide precise and efficient matches between candidates and jobs. Additionally, we offer monthly events, career coaching, and other career resources on our website.
Uncertainties
At Tälist, we are committed to continuous monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to ensure our strategies remain effective and impactful. Luckily, running a platform business gives us access to a lot of data, which we can use for our M&E. However, the further down the ToC (Theory of Change) we go, the more challenging it gets to track our progress and impact.
What's interesting is that having data and finding some answers usually brings up new questions. I assume there will always be some level of uncertainty, so we often need to make informed guesses and rely on proxies. I also see the risk of “paralysis through analysis”, so I think it’s important to strike a balance and not be afraid to take action and experiment to move our mission forward.
Sustainable Growth: Beyond Philanthropy
Exploring Financial Models
Our initial “pre-seed funding” came from a grant by the Animal Welfare Fund in 2022. Still, Tälist's goal is to establish a business model that allows us to be financially self-sustaining and not rely on limited philanthropic funding. We’ve adopted a mixed revenue approach where we combine free services for candidates with premium services for employers. Additionally, being a for-profit entity enabled us to acquire public start-up funding. In total, we received two philanthropic grants and three public grants. This means we have already saved funding that we would have relied on as a non-profit. While we’re not yet at a point where we are financially self-sustaining or profitable (sharing the fate of many start-ups), we think there are strong arguments to aim for running Tälist as a for-profit. (If you’re interested in this topic, you might also enjoy my presentation about high-impact for-profit entrepreneurs at EAGxBerlin 2022)
Transparency in Financial Strategy
While it was a strategic decision to run Tälist as a high-impact for-profit to become more ‘cost-effective’ (compared to the philanthropic grants we received), I occasionally encounter some confusion and misconceptions about our financial model and ‘intentions’ in the EA community and beyond. As part of the story I tell about how the organization got started, I mention that I went through the CE incubation program (just as I do in this article). This might be a reason why people sometimes assume we’re a non-profit. In other cases, people assume we’re optimizing for profit rather than impact/mission when they learn that we’re “for-profit”. As stated above, I don’t think that profit and impact are opposites; in fact, there are very encouraging examples that sometimes you can achieve both. At the same time, there are situations where conflicts between the for-profit model and aiming for impact occur. For instance, most for-profit job board services limit access to the job board to registered users for marketing purposes. In contrast, our job board has been publicly accessible from the beginning as we want to minimize unnecessary barriers for job seekers. This example hopefully shows how sometimes there is a trade-off between profit and impact and that we usually put the impact and profit sides at least on equal footing.
A third category of misconceptions seems to be around our ability to pay. Most EA organizations I know run on a much bigger budget than we do and are able to pay more generous salaries - including to their founders & management staff. Still, I have often found that it’s simply assumed that as a for-profit, we should pay (or pay more) for things that are granted for free to non-profits, despite the actual ability to pay. While it might be a helpful heuristic to assume most for-profit organizations focus only on maximizing profit and thus don't need the same special consideration as non-profits, I believe more flexibility and open-mindedness would be beneficial for cases like ours.
The Personal Dimension of Entrepreneurship
Balancing the demanding life of startup founders with personal responsibilities has been a continuous learning process. In this section, I want to share some of my takeaways and things that have worked well for me.
Balancing Professional and Personal Responsibilities
At CE, I learned to set yearly goals based on our theory of change and break them into quarterly targets. I think in this process, it’s crucial to set realistic goals —they might actually work better than very ambitious goals if you want to stay motivated and healthy and aim for long-term impact rather than short-term wins. While hustling might work for some people (at least for a while), I have certain reservations about the start-up hustle culture. More often than not, it makes people focus too much on the hours and intensity of their work instead of the value they create. This regularly leads to burnout among founders, and the image of the stereotypical hustling founder might discourage people from pursuing entrepreneurship when they would have made great founders.
I’ve found it helpful to reframe things by treating entrepreneurship like a regular job, except that during work hours, I “do entrepreneurial stuff”! While it has certainly been challenging, I make a conscious effort to keep a sustainable work-life-balance: I’ve started taking Wednesdays entirely off from Tälist-related work to balance out the extra hours during evenings or weekends and the many moments when I think about Tälist in my non-work time. This is important to me not only for my own health reasons but also because I feel I owe it to my husband and kids to be available and present in their lives.
I organize my day-to-day work with to-do lists (based on the quarterly goals mentioned above), and strict prioritization. My co-founder and I do weekly check-ins for accountability but also to self-reflect and provide each other with feedback. Even though you have to wear many hats as a founder, we try to play to our strengths and delegate other tasks as much as we can.
Conclusion
Navigating the complexities of building a high-impact for-profit has been a steep learning curve for both my professional and personal life. It’s challenging, without any doubt. My daily activities are often very abstract as I don’t work directly with the ultimate beneficiaries of our work (e.g. factory-farmed animals). But compared to past jobs, I now have a very clear understanding of the theory of change and impact potential of what I’m doing—and that’s what keeps me going. I deeply care about animals, our planet, and global health, and I believe in the power of the Alt. Protein industry to address critical global issues. I also believe in the potential of profits-for-purpose and look forward to seeing more of them in the wider EA community.
While this blog post reflects my personal perspective, I want to underscore that Tälist and any of our achievements or successes are truly a collective effort. Along the way, I've had numerous conversations as well as supporters, enablers, mentors, and advisors who have contributed invaluable insights and guidance. Even in writing this article, I got help and feedback from several people. I want to emphasize that Tälist is really built on the expertise, advice, and collaborative work of many outstanding people and organizations!
Please feel free to share your thoughts and begin a discussion here in the forum. For specific questions, feedback, or ideas for collaborations directed at me, please reach out via email: [email protected]
I really liked this section :)
I think this idea of a hustling co-founder means I sometimes have a hard time communicating how "chill" my life often looks day-to-day
Thanks for sharing, Aaron, and I'm glad to hear you have a "chill" work life, while founding and running such an awesome organisation!!! I shrimply love it (is this joke still a thing in 2024?)