 This is Start of the Storefront. On some level, we're probably all familiar with life changing events. You never know when or where they'll take place, nor can you predict how you'll emerge from the ordeal. But we can all look back at our lives and pick out at least one point where our trajectories were forever altered. For Jennifer Storkovic, one such moment came when a close friend was murdered. As she wrestled with the suffering that comes in the wake of such a tragedy, she set out to erase what suffering she could in this world. She became vegan. But to truly make an impact, changing her own dietary regimen wouldn't cut it. She needed to create something far bigger than herself. And thus, the vegan women summit was born. But you know by now that there's always more to the story, so listen in to recover everything from how lab grown meat is changing what it means to be vegan, why women generally don't invest, and why vegans don't all fit into the same box. Now, on to the episode. Alright, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Jenny, the founder of Vegan Women Summit, and an author of a new book. What's your new book? The Future of Food is Female. Love it. The conference is coming up. Tell us every, like what made you want to start a conference? Let's start with that. So I never in my life planned to start a conference, I've got to be honest. I really just wanted to create a space where women could come together to talk about the future of food. So when we launched in 2020, nobody was doing that. Even honestly, the future of food was not a mainstream conversation. It's changed a lot since the pandemic. And so the goal of Vegan Women Summit was really how can we create a conference for professionals to come together and intersect and catalyze in a way that we are leapfrogging the industry in a way that women are in a position of leadership. I built my career in tech in a place where I was predominantly surrounded by male leadership. And so I want to turn the curve and make sure that women are leading for this new industry. And that was in San Francisco, right? Yeah, our very first one was 250 women in a room in San Francisco. We are now 40,000 plus women professionals across six continents. So it grew fast in two years. Yeah, that's unbelievable. So when it comes to doing a conference, you also have some big names coming in a couple weeks. We have Alicia Silverstone. Yep, Alicia is coming. We have, of course, you know, the top CEOs in the space like Mioko Schinner, actress Emily Deschanel. We've got some Olympians coming. We really kind of do a cross-sector approach to women that are leading in their industries. And we want to show women that no matter what you do, you can contribute to bringing compassion to your career. What made you want to do this? What was the thing that was like, this is so personal to me. Maybe it's the food journey. Maybe it's the founder journey. Maybe it's the hybrid. It's both. So I went vegan myself seven years ago. I went vegan after a personal episode, actually a tragedy that happened to me, and it completely shook my entire view of the world. And it was a murder of one of my very close friends. And when going through such like a life-changing event, I just took inventory of everything I was doing on the planet. And so it became a natural kind of next step for me to figure out how I could be more impactful, how I could be more thoughtful, how I could bring compassion to my life. And so in that healing journey, I decided to go vegan. It's a very atypical story. You usually hear, you know, my doctor said like my cholesterol was crazy. So I quit meat or, you know, you hear a lot of different origin stories for why people decided to adopt a plant-based diet. Mine was very much for healing of my spirit. And I decided a few years ago I was going to bring it to my professional life. Was your friend active in this space? Or were you doing this for their memory? Like, because for example, my friend in 2010 was killed on a motorcycle. And I was not a motorcycle rider or a Fischinato by any means necessary, but I wanted to do something in his memory, in his name. So I started a safety foundation for motorcycle safety. Never having been a part of that community before was your journey at all like that, like your friend active in the vegan space, is this something that you just discovered on your own? So first off, that's awesome. Kudos to you for taking a very difficult situation and making something impactful out of it. For me, it's a little bit more personal than that. So a murder is a very difficult thing to deal with. I speak about it openly because I don't think people do speak about going through these episodes enough in public because it's a jarring thing. And I decided that if I was, you know, going to truly learn something from this that I would have to heal and part of that healing means forgiveness. So my husband, I actually forgave the murderer, like, you know, went to the prison and forgave him. And we're still to this day the only people that were part of the trial that did. Everybody else did not and they've chosen not to. And so part of that piece of compassion meant, you know, if I can forgive a murderer for murdering my best friend, how can I bring compassion to other aspects of my daily life? The logical next step is, you know, what do you do three times a day? Was it more of a philosophical view that like where you wanted your own little journey? For example, there's a lot of people that have near-death experiences or in this case deal with death and what they come to realize is, and I think this leads them to the road of forgiveness, but what they come to realize is nobody is coming from a place of wanting to hurt. They're coming from a place of their hurting. And they don't know how to deal with that. And it's this like, right, very awful reality that atrocious things can happen, but it's more of like they're trying to solve some problem. Yeah. And this is something we're dealing with collectively. We're living in a very traumatizing past like a couple of years and even, you know, past few weeks, an entirely different type of trauma. If you don't deal with that and what it does to your spirit very often, you'll sink or swim. For me, we were newlyweds. My husband and I, when this happened, it was the best man at our wedding. And it was like, you know, it could have split our marriage into two or it forges you together for life, right? And that's a very real thing, trauma bonding. So for me, it was just, it was a philosophical thing. It was, you know, if I'm going to heal my spirit and I'm going to put it back together, I'd like to put it back together better than how it was before. I was very young, very selfish, very, you know, I was in my early 20s. I was what the rest of us were then, you know, you only think about yourself. You're thinking about like your career. You're going out every Friday and Saturday night. Like everything is just like a party. And in many ways it just felt like the record screeching stop. And you're like, oh my gosh, now I got to take inventory of who I am. And life's so fragile. Yeah. You forgive the person. That's unbelievable. We had Arno on the podcast. He was part of, he like started hate groups. And then he led himself on a journey of one asking for forgiveness from a lot of the groups that he decided to oppress and do really awful stuff too. And then two, I still think he struggles with actually forgiving himself. He does. But his whole life journey, his whole mission today is to spread why he existed, why he let it take hold of him. And then, yeah. In his words, he wages peace because peace is not something that you can just sit back and idly do. You have to actively be engaged in creating peace in the universe. So that's something that he does just to kind of keep the demons at bay. Like he's pursuing something noble and that's enough for him. Yeah, absolutely. So then, okay. So then it comes to like your life starts changing. You realize the fragility of everything and then food. Was it a function of just like, and I know this is kind of just moving off, but is it just a function of ingestion of everything? Or was it food? Like was it like, what am I watching on TV? What am I consuming? What am I reading? And then ultimately like what food am I putting in my body? What energy sources are going to give me, you know, where I want to, like lead me to a place I want to go. When does this start happening for you? Post psychedelics probably. But, you know, so I started, I did end up on that journey, but that was not the start of the journey. I didn't take that approach of like, what am I putting into my body? It was more about, actually it was very external. It was, I felt very acutely aware of suffering and it started to turn up that ability to feel suffering more and then I thought about, oh my gosh, like, you know, factory farming is by far and large the biggest form of suffering that is going on in the world. So that was why I changed it. I was not healthy. I was not doing any of those practices, but as I ventured into this journey, I did start to pick up a lot of those practices. So, you know, to this day, like I don't drink alcohol. I eat a plant-based diet every day. You know, I don't, there's a lot of vice, I don't have a TV in my house. Like there's a lot of vices that I did end up with the years removing because they just seem like a distraction. I'm very much one of those people that likes to bring things into my life that amplify reality, not depress and numb it. Do you share the story a lot? Sometimes. I actually usually ask before the podcaster, you know, they say, oh, we want to talk about your journey. And I said, do you want the short one or you want the long one? Because the long one can be heavy, but it's very impactful, but not every audience is prepared to hear something like that. Right. I feel like you can tell a lot about the podcast itself, whether they want the short version or the long version. Yeah. We're more of a long version people. I lost my father when I was young. And so for me, I think that was the moment I understood. He was assassinated. And I think as a kid, you grew up with this anger. Yeah. And then I can't remember when this happened, but for me, it just like, it became like I didn't fault the human anymore. Just like computers have software and today those are just Apple and Microsoft and you have two choices. Some humans are actually quite the same, right? Where it's like you wake up, everything you've ingested from TV or social media has a way of making you fit into a box. And so what I mean by that is like, if you're a VC, I know exactly the furniture in your home. And it's like so, like it's so obvious. I know what magazine you look at and just like Facebook can do that to you. The media and television has a way of doing that to you too. And it just people in boxes. And so for me, it was like, okay, if we just take that and throw an extreme on it. Right. Then we're all really just kind of doing the best we can. But at the end of the day, we're being programmed or not. And so in developing countries, this is a pretty, I was born in Peru and so it's pretty normal that you can buy votes with giving people rice. You can convince them of anything. You know, you tell someone you can give them a $10 day. That's enough for you to do some crazy things. And so in that there's a, as long as there's a logic, even if it doesn't make any sense, right? As long as someone has, oh, I put these dots together and it led me to do this atrocious thing. A part of me doesn't fault them, but it was a weird thing to get to that point. I get it. I totally 100% know what you're saying. And it's very hard to explain to people that haven't been through this. That was part of this forgiveness of the murderer for us. Our best friend was from Ecuador and his friend that, it was actually his friend that killed him, was from Columbia. And he just grew up, you know, it's macho, bravado, that kind of like BS over there. He grew up in an environment that was designed to make him that angry man that wants to argue and just like show off like machismo, whatever, you know, you want to call it. It's all programming. And, you know, when you realize that that was what he was acting from, he was acting from the toolbox that he had. Like those were the tools that were in his kit. Unfortunately, it was in a state where a lot of people carry guns. And when you combine like that type of personality, you combined access to weapons, these things happen. And they're, they happen all the time. And they happen in developing parts of the world too, quite a bit. And this was very unfortunate because his parents, they both of them, they're immigrants and they both, their parents gave up everything to bring them to America for a safer life. And, you know, the sad irony of it coming true here was just, it was horrible, but you can only really forgive. It's useless to dwell. It's useless to try to exact revenge because it's not real. I also try to look at it like the other way. Like I just try to go, okay, cool, something happened to me. It's up to me how I view that every morning now, right? And so for me, it's like, do we talk about this all the time? Like my time on this planet is short. And what that means is I have zero patience if you're not willing to be your best today. And that means there's like being my wife isn't always that fun, right? Because I have that. I know like all of this meaningless stuff that we talk about could be over tomorrow. And so because of that, I want to make today the best shit ever. And it's like, who's on board? And then that's, imagine that all the time. It's kind of a lot. Kind of a lot. But at the same time, it's like, that's, I think these are the things that happen. And so we try to like, even with the podcast, we're just trying to inspire entrepreneurship through truth so that everyone listening can just go out and everyone at your conference can like be a CEO, create change, put your little dent in the world, right? It's like just do the thing that's going to motivate you to wake up every day and crush and just do that. And just do something. Just do something. There's so many people that don't get off the starting line. Yeah. So, so many people, right? And like, what is it that we can do to make that difference to show people we can sit here forever and talk and talk and talk. Let's talk about how we're going to save the planet. Let's talk about, you know, how we're going to make a better food system. Let's talk about social impact, all of that. And it's just talk. It's cheap. And there's so, so few people that actually do something about it. And they don't always do it correct. A lot of people are learning out loud. That's what's happening in the food space. A lot of people are critical of, you know, founders doing this and that. And we're seeing it in the tech space. We're seeing what happens when it manifests, you know, when people, they tried to make products. They didn't think them through. And, you know, now we're dealing with the circumstances of it. And it's a difficult conversation to have. But I think if we're thoughtful in inspiring people and we're showing people that there is a path for them, I tell women all the time that there's still your place amongst the giants. It's a nascent brand new industry. Like it's, it's still evolving every day. You can be one of those big names. You can be in the history books. When you look at the industry, what are like the segments you put things in, right? And so we have maybe like farming or getting rid of the factory farming. So we have that. Like how do you view it when you break it down into the different verticals that are changing? So it depends on. Okay. So it depends on your, your viewpoint of, are you talking about like the different product categories? Are you talking about the impacts because. Let's go with the impact. Okay. So certainly animal agriculture and removing animal agriculture is a huge, it's the silver bullet if we're going to stop climate change just because of the, you know, massive amounts of greenhouse gases that are generated from animal egg. So the, the different lenses in which people usually take a look at it are the reduction of suffering and things like that. There's also a lot of folks that look at the sustainability and environmental lens. A lot of like climate ESG investing that are now going into the space. A lot of health investing. A lot of people that are more interested in personal health and wellness. And then the last piece is kind of like the human rights and exploitation piece as well. There's a tremendous amount of breaks that are in the system right now that as we know from COVID, we saw some of those stories come out with like Tyson in places like that. Like the system is really broken and fucked up for humans too. The term vegan comes with a lot of connotations with, with like you said, the animal rights, the ending of the suffering and the whole ecosystem. Whereas I've seen a new term evolve in the past five years, which is like a plant based. They don't even acknowledge the word vegan. Is there a rift forming between the two that you see? So that is a big question and one that I talk about a lot. So it really depends when, okay, first off, vegan as a term does not necessarily mean the same thing as plant based in the new paradigm of the future of food. What I mean by that is vegan means a product that didn't exploit or kill an animal. Okay. Plant based products up until now were the only solution for that. We now live in a new world of technology where there are products that meet the criteria of never slaughtering or exploiting an animal, but are animal products, right? So then we get into things like precision fermentation. So for folks that aren't familiar, Brave Robot you've probably seen at your stores. So that's a new technology that's been created and is now to market. It's real. It's happening right now. And that creates an animal protein without an animal ever being involved. Cell based meat, you know, or lab grown meat as well. There's a lot of debate. Like is that vegan? Outside of bucketing it, is it, I would imagine it's directionally correct on the sustainability, right? It checks the sustainability box. Yep. And so are you pro or is it something like where you're just like, no, this is directionally correct. So I'm a fan. I am absolutely wholeheartedly going forward with cell based future, whether it's cell based meats, cell based breast milk is an area that I am deeply passionate about. Cell based breast milk represents a tremendous opportunity to just completely turn the curve for the future of infant nutrition and women's empowerment. Some of the solutions that we're now seeing through this quote unquote, you know, lab grown space are not possible in a plant based space. So we need to, we need to think about when we say the word vegan, what are we trying to accomplish? You know, it's like reading the constitution from like a few hundred years ago. Like you're reading like what, you're interpreting the spirit of it. Vegan's a very old word. It's the same, you know, it's the same thing. It's a really good metaphor. Right? You know, we have to think about what is the spirit of it, right? When it was created nearly a hundred years ago, might I add, it was a term where if you ate an animal, then you had to have heard it. That is not the case anymore. Oh, interesting. So that's changed fundamentally. Of course it's changed, right? Cell based meat, it doesn't, you can eat meat and it never involved an animal. Right. And I think like that's very important conversation that we need to have because we're just hurting ourselves. The more that we kind of splinter and like dig our heels in, you have a lot of like natural foods type folks that they're, they're not down. They're anti. They're anti, yeah. So there's like a war going on within the space. There is. Yeah. That's so fascinating. So natural products, so Expo West, right? Tomorrow. Happening now. They have decided to approve experimentation products. So Brave Robot. There was a big, big backlash to that as to whether that can qualify as a natural product. What was the final consensus on that? Or is it the... It's almost like your abortion issue. This is turning into the abortion issue. It's incredible how polarizing it is. Yep. Even within the branch that is like, you know, you would think that everyone... That's such a bummer. Yes and no. It's normal though because we are changing, we're changing what was a binary before, right? You eat meat. You killed something. As we grew as a population, we kept eating more and more meat, so we had to kill more and more things. Now the environment is suffering as a result. So like there was logical connection. We now see how those actions have led to where we are today. But what if you could keep doing that thing that you like doing and it doesn't result in those, you know, catastrophic climate effects? So for me, when vegans go, well, that's not vegan. I'm like, well, shit, you're like the 1% that's not eating meat. We don't care about you. We care about the other 99% of folks, right? Oh, interesting. So that's what cell-based meat is for. It's not for vegans. It's for folks that want to continue eating meat, but they know that there's bad things that are happening with the meat. And most people agree that they don't want to contribute to climate change. They don't want to contribute to suffering. Yet, they'll still continue to be consumers of said products. Right. It seems like the way to go forward is to just have people reduce, at the very least, reduce their meat consumption, not only for the planet, but for their own health as well. Cardiac disease is one of the biggest problems in this country. And that can be cut in half by just reducing your meat consumption in half. You're right. That's the market that everyone should be trying to corral is that market who aren't the 1% who are not eating or touching any meat products. It's the ones who are consuming most of the meat products. Do you pick sides at your conference? Do you tackle this issue head-on? Do you say, you know, this is evolving? This is evolving to a point where it's moving in this direction and we all need to get on board? Or how do you address it? Right now, I think probably the only platform of its kind that focuses on threading together the plant-based and biotechnology space. So there's, you know, think tanks like GFI or Good Food Institute for folks that aren't familiar and we work a lot with them, but in general, nobody is really kind of threading the two industries. And I have full-heartedly, I'm throwing everything I've got at Animal Free Innovation. So I don't care how you're doing it, unnecessary for us to have that debate. I also think it's unnecessary for us to start, you know, attacking certain plant-based products because, oh, they're not necessarily healthier for you. Well, there's multiple bashings in which that can stand, right? You can be way better for the climate. You can be better for living creatures. You can be better for health. Like, why is two out of three not good enough? It's good enough for every other industry. We have low-carbon beef is now coming out. That's a new marketing term that came out a few months ago. So we're eating low-carbon beef. How do they achieve that? They plant trees. No, I mean, that is actually part of it. It's like a new marketing ploy. It's unbelievable, right? It's a new marketing ploy to convince folks that they're making a positive impact on the environment. And you can measure it. Yeah. Of course. And it's the same as 10 years ago when everyone got really into free-range beef and they thought free-range beef was better for the environment. It was like 80% of people said they're interested in free-range beef in studies, but it was less than 1% of all beef sales. So they did not translate. Especially not a third de-forcing to get that free-range. If you were to create a product today, what boxes would it check and what kind of product would you make? So I'm really interested in women's wellness. You can invent anything, by the way. Anything. So you could even go, I've seen this little piece of technology and I think this is going to be here in three years and this is the thing. So I think that we can use cell-based innovation in many ways beyond just meat. Now we're seeing it with coffee and we're seeing it with other environmental products. So I honestly think cell-based breast milk, which is in kind of its early stages, so it is being created right now. But honestly, if you can have cell-based breast milk, you can have cell-based human milk in many other ways, too. So there is a couple companies that are starting to tackle this, but imagine this. Riddle me this, guys. We can theoretically consume human milk throughout our entire lifespan. We have no idea what it will do to the human population, but when they've done small studies, they've shown that there's immense health-contributing benefits, much like how we're now keeping the umbilical cord blood and things like that, like the placenta, all of that. We see that there's all this health. And you know bodybuilders have the black market breast milk thing going, right? We can theoretically now remove all the dairy crap that we've been eating or drinking, that is cow's milk, and replace it with human version that's mammalian-specific and it's bio-identical to what we would be consuming as mammals. So the argument for milk, though, is that beyond a certain point in our lives, we don't need it anymore, right? There's a reason why we wean off of breastfeeding at a certain age because we don't need the nutrients from it anymore. Are we trying to meet people where they are instead of just saying, hey, cut it out entirely. We're trying to offer them an alternative. Is that the idea behind this? So this is more in the health-promoting category because we're just scratching the surface of what can happen if you do consume milk after infancy. So yes, mammals, that's a hallmark of what it means to be a mammal as you wean off of your mom and you go into eating solid foods. But for folks with like IBS and there's certain conditions they're starting to do research on, which they're actually seeing that human milk, a.k.a. breast milk, as it's known right now, can actually help with healing benefits in the same way that the umbilical cord blood, we now are using that later in life in stem cells, but those, you know, if we hadn't used science to intervene, would not be available to us, but they're a benefit to us. So it's the same kind of logic. It's so fascinating. We just had the founder of Brainiac, the Brainiac Foods on, and for him he's like adding omega-3s from algae into like a yogurt. And so the, his whole argument is a lot of kids, one, very few get the breast milk they need. And so that's one issue, right? And then the second issue is, and then it stops. And so by the time they're like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, there's nothing like feeding the brain and they very rarely are getting that from the food because they're not eating the right foods. And so his whole thing is he's giving them the vitamins that they need in a really interesting way and it's all blended and it's algae, you know, omega-3s and blah, blah, blah. But in this scenario, this solves the whole problem. It does, yeah. And I take algae oil supplements every day too myself. Yeah. It's interesting because... You're on something. Well, here's the thing, right? The World Health Organization says you're supposed to breastfeed for three years. Three years? That's way longer than I would have guessed. Yes. Was I breastfed for three years? You were not. There's no way, right? Very few. I mean, perhaps it, well in developing parts of the world, especially like in places like Africa, they certainly do because it's expensive to buy formula, right? But in the West, nobody, like you barely get people to make it to six months. It's less than one quarter, I think, of black babies that make it to six months even of breastfeeding, right? And so there's just such key nutrition that is missed in these early, you know... This is so fast. The cognitive development, I worked early on in charity at United Way, so studied early childhood education quite extensively. And 85% of your cognitive development is done before the age of five. So if we... We see it with Nick. No, I'm just kidding. I mean, I wasn't breastfed. I should have been. Because my mom went back to work, right? Right. And if you're in the United States and you're not like an affluent, usually white woman tech professional, you probably don't have mat leave. And so that's part of, that's also contributing to, you know, you get into the entire thing like black babies, brown babies are way less likely to get the breast milk they need and then blah, blah, blah. And you can see how this can affect people their entire lives. So that's why breast milk in particular is such a huge kind of like linchpin piece to look at what we could do for future generations. We could get them on the right foot to begin with. And we can empower their mothers too, because there's a significant, there's a significant issue with like breastfeeding for moms that are, you know, three years. Like if you are trying to be a CEO and an entrepreneur, you can't have a kid latched on for three years. That's just not gonna work. And just in my friend group, there was one mother that lasted nine months and the other ones did not. And all the other moms were just giving her kudos. They were like, I got, it hurt. It's not fun. I have to go. I have a job. I want to get back into the office. And so I think this solves that multitude. What do you call it? What do you call the company? Give a name for it. So there is, there's a couple of companies that are focusing on this right now. So BioMilk's one that is focusing on it. And then there's Turtle Tree Labs. They're focusing on human milk. There's over 2,000 ingredients in milk. So they're focusing on, I think, lactoferrin and a couple of those specific ingredients right now. But I think that that's just scratching the surface of what we can do with the capabilities of human milk and what those ingredients can, where they can go in your yogurts, you know, in your prenatals, in your, you know, your athletes. Athletes already have a black market of trading breast milk, right? I was going to say, I can see that market being a very strong one just because I feel like if you tell an athlete that they're going to get a performance boost from something, they are, for better or for worse, more willing to try it than the average subset of the population. You can buy key tones, you can buy a lot of stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, and you can start doping and somehow, you know, make it to the Olympics, you know. Just to go back to the conference, is this one track of the conference? Yeah, so we do, so we do cell-based and plant-based innovation together. We thread them together because we think that they're both the future of food. So we talk about, we have Brave Robot, which is a precision fermentation company. We also have one that I'm really excited about, MellyBio, it's the world's first lab-grown honey. So it's bio-identical honey. It's everything that honey is, but it's made without the process of the bee doing it, which is pretty wild. Quick tangent, is honey vegan or no? Because I wouldn't consider bees to be harmed in the production of honey, but maybe I'm misinformed. So local APRs, you know, typically it's a pretty, you know, kind process. Commercialized honey, the stuff, the crap that you're getting at the store is not. So that's kind of the short of it. So, you know, there's some people that'll have local honey themselves, and I don't think it's, it's like the same as free-range eggs. Like I think that's neither here nor there. It's not really the point. That's not how 99.9% of food is made. Yeah. That's always the challenge. Once you go big-scale, it's hard. You cut corners. You speed up fermentation. You start doing additives, all that stuff. Biomilk and turtle labs? Turtle tree labs. Yeah, biomilk. There's Helena as well as kind of a third one. But, like, I just named three companies when it's just almost 7 billion people, you know, 8 billion people out there. And, you know, I tell people all the time, I say, the fact that we didn't have alternatives to infant formula until a couple years ago is a really good sign of gender bias and investing, because 100% of us were babies. Can you say that again? That's such a great point for people listening. That is such a great point. It's showing you the lack of, the lack of attention paid to, you know, pregnancy infant toddler space is a very clear indication of gender bias and investing. That's unbelievable. Is that changing, though? Because, like you said, like... She's on a mission. Right, right, right. But, like, are you seeing that change right now? I mean... In any meaningful way. So, here's the thing. Women were slowly inching up year after year, getting more and more venture capital until the pandemic, and they took a turn back down, right? So, women are now, it's like 2.7% of all venture capital last year went towards women founders, and that was a decrease from the year before. We were closer to, I think we were like 3.3 on the highest a few years ago. So, it's not great. It is unfortunate that the pandemic, basically they made, you know, investors bearish and they got scared, and they ended up just making safe bets. And if you are one of the 95% of male VCs, predominantly white male VCs, the markets you know the best are probably crypto and apps and things like that. And so, if somebody shows up with you, it's like, I've got this breast milk thing. You're probably like, okay, we're gonna pass, you know? And that's the reality of it, is when you have a homogenous group that's controlling the majority of the capital, then you have homogenous products that are created and there's entire underserved markets that just get left out of the conversation. Are there a bunch of VCs going to your events also? Yeah. So, in addition to, so the Vegan Women's Summit is our big in-person conference. We also do Pathfinder every fall, and that's our pitch competition. So, we do that virtually, and we actually keep that virtually forever because we get access to women founders literally all over. It's so cool. So, we've had over a thousand women founders apply from 31 countries since we launched it a year and a half ago. And are you incubator? We are not. We have thought about, yeah, we've kind of, we've toyed around with like where we kind of want to go with the community because we have a great pitch competition. The majority of our finalists certainly get investment because we have so many VCs that we work with. We give out a prize package. We're actually going to be showcasing our winner Sunfed Meets. She's going to actually be at the event at Vegan Women's Summit. So, we're really kind of taking our winners and being able to put them on our stage. So, that's really exciting. We looked at doing an accelerator. We thought about doing an incubator. And even like a mentorship program. But that is contrasted with the other idea of what I want to do because we're a four-person team so far. We're growing, but I'm really interested in the other side as well, empowering our community to become investors. I'll say quick tangent and then we'll go back to this. Everybody that I have out on the podcast at CPG, they all ask me for one thing and it's always the same because I'm a developer. They go, build me a facility where I can, one, it's got a little daycare center because it's important to have structure and the kids need to see us working and our house doesn't work. And then two, I can do all the whatever else I'm making so I can make cookie dough or whatever the thing is. And so it's like CPG makes daycare center meets a little area of offices for working. And this is like, ideally we want to do this in Nashville and LA, just create like a community that kind of scales with them also like additional warehouses and stuff. Have you ever thought about doing something like that where it's like, you have maybe an incubator, maybe you have a funding arm, maybe you have a little, right, your own little VC. So like a founder house? A founder house, something that helps people get the first step and then also like their initial investment. Yeah, we've thought about that. We actually, you know, we put together the pieces to do an accelerator last year and kind of, you know, built out what it would look like, talked to some funders on it. And we ultimately decided that it wasn't the right fit for us at the time. And I think that for us, I think we have a lot of VCs that want to fund the founders that we're getting. Really what we're creating is that access point and that like media arm for the VCs that they didn't really have. So we're kind of the magnet for that right now. And we've been able to kind of successfully turn them over to folks that can take them to the next level. But the piece that we haven't been able to tackle that I'm really kind of on with right now is how I take of those 40,000 women professionals. There's a lot of them that have a little bit of extra money lying around. And I really think that we have a tremendous opportunity to turn these women into investors. And, you know, maybe it's an angel syndicate to start, maybe, you know. Like Kismet. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's like impact fund like that. That's a big piece because women don't invest. They estimate that women leave about a million dollars on the table throughout their professional career. Why is that? Is it access? There's a huge education gap. Women don't invest. And so when I say a million dollars, I say, like, this is relating to literally having a portfolio of stocks, like everything. Women just generally speaking are much less likely to be investors in their male counterparts in every regard. And I think that is because culturally speaking, when you think of like Wolf of Wall Street, it's a bunch of dudes. Like it's historically investing has been a man's space. And, you know, I was having this conversation over brunch at the International Women's Day event I was with with a few other founders and they just said, like, I see guys and I see guys and guys and they all have this like ecosystem and network where they're telling each other what to invest in, but women just like don't have that most of the time, unfortunately. I mean, crypto's a really sad space too. Like 81% of crypto holders are men. Like women in crypto is so, so few. And it's getting it's getting more stratified too. It's getting like worse as well. We just had the nudie community. It's an all female lead NFT project. And so they run our podcast. And that's the one thing they say it's like 12% of everyone in the NFT space or 12% of the total is only female right now. And that's just not enough. And so they keep trying to bring the awareness and women in NFTs. And it's so fascinating because in that setting, right to your point, it's almost one you have to know tech. And so now it's like, let's play, let's play gender on that game. And it's like mostly men. And then okay. And then do you know anything about crypto or NFTs? The gender game wins again. And then it's like, cool, now let's launch a project. So it's like, you're like three steps removed from basically the male domination on that side of it. Fascinating. Yeah. And okay. Here I'll add another layer to it. Let's say you're not sitting in Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York. Right. Let's say you're sitting Kansas City or Baltimore or Atlanta. You might as well be in Manila or Mumbai at that point. We need more women at every level of this. And the piece we didn't even talk about, we also run job networking series. We have the only food tech job networking series in the world. We connected over 2,000 job seekers with like Impossible Foods and Beyond Mead and Miocos and all the top employers last year because that's the other piece to it is we don't have women in representation in, you know, the talent pipeline either. And that's everywhere from junior roles all the way up to the executive roles. You can take a look at the executive C-sweets of the largest food tech companies and you'll see not a lot of women. There's some, you know, some of the biggest plant-based companies in the world have like one or two C-suite officers, which is insane. And that's a big thing we have to tackle as well. What keeps you up at night? Is it this product, this problem? How to attack it? Yeah. I mean, that's certainly a big piece of it. Trying to figure out honestly like how we can get a mass like proliferation of plant-based products and future food products that will be big enough for us to get consumer adoption that stops us from warming 1.5 degrees, right? You know, I think most of us in this space and I think into the larger ESG space, we all have that 10-year mark in our head. I think we're all thinking of the 10-year countdown and that's what I think about most often. What do you think happens in five years? Do you think people are still drinking not milk as the milk you mentioned? If you ask some of the people with the tech, they'll say five years from now, they're going to be to market. I don't know if the commercialization will happen that quickly because of the regulatory fights. So one of the things that's interesting, we talked about Brave Robot earlier, which is perfect days technology, because it's not actually novel ingredients, it went to market right away faster than like the cell-based meats. So I think that we'll actually see that precision fermentation technology replicate and be much, much, much more prevalent in these next coming years. You'll see at Expo West this week, there's a ton of people that are going to be putting in perfect day technology into their products rolling out this year. So to answer your question, I think we'll see a lot more animal-free innovation in the next five years, but it won't necessarily be in the categories that we had once predicted it would be in. Think about like, what does a coffee shop look like? Where are the beans coming from? Yeah, I mean you can use... Where are the milks coming from? Yeah, you can use the cell-based technology for the milks, you can use it for the, you know, very, very resource-intensive. And when you get into the carbon footprint of coffee, it's not great, you know. Almonds aren't great. There's a lot of, a lot of like things like that that are not very great for the environment and they're not technically animal products either. And all these technologies can apply to them. Has COVID accelerated anything specifically when it comes to the plant-based vegan space? So, I mean, last year was a record year for all protein. It was like over three billion was invested. So it definitely skyrocketed and that was largely because we had food insecurity issues. We had entire countries like massive supply chain disruption that happened because of COVID. Singapore is a great example. They import 95% of their food. 95? 95. So they decided as a result of COVID that they would put in the 30 by 30, which is 30% of their food has to be produced in Singapore by 2030. And Singapore is a city nation, right? It's an island. They don't have space to farm. Yeah. What do you think they're putting all their money in? Lab grown? Yeah. Warehousing. The warehousing of food, the lab. Vertical farming, cell-based, I mean, it's all the protein, plant-based protein, cell-based protein. That's why Singapore is the first country in the world that regulated cell-based protein to be consumed by the public. They're using crypto to buy it. Well, yeah, we'll see. I mean, everybody's using crypto this last week and a half after all those bank runs, man. That's a real problem. We had three different nations that lost access to their bank accounts in the last month in totally different parts of the world for different reasons. It's insane. It's what the crypto people have been telling you this whole time is going to happen. Yeah. Are you not into crypto? Are you into crypto? I'm hard into Bitcoin. Hard into Bitcoin? Yeah. Okay. Good for you. I think that Bitcoin and crypto are two different things, right? And I also think that where they're going to take like the metaverse from like a capitalist perspective is very interesting. I honestly think that you're going to see Bitcoin become like you know, it's already like property. Yeah, exactly. And you're going to be able to like leverage your loans and all of that to get money off of it when you need it. Obviously, governments are starting to accept it. Logano, Switzerland, did you hear? Switzerland has now officially started accepting Bitcoin as legal tender. You can pay your taxes in it. It's only one city so far, but it's Switzerland. I mean, it's the banking capital of the world. So that's huge. So I think you're going to see people hold Bitcoin in the future. You know, I think there's going to be a move to like digital coins from like the US government. They're going to try to do like that US. You know, the thing they say they're going to roll. Yes. Yeah. Well, and then Tether's trying to do their version. But I think the US government is going to roll out their version. But then aside from that, you're going to just like see membership, like communities based on like entire like coins. Like Walmart's already going in on it. Walmart's going to start saying like, okay, get your like wall coins. And then before you know it, their employees can't legally be paid in wall coins. But they'll be like, okay, here's your pay. But like if you change your pay in, you get 20% more in wall coins or I see it going. It's kind of like what the mining companies used to do like 150 years ago. They used to pay and like the you know, you've ever heard of that concept. You go to the town store by the company and you pay the town store in money that only the company gives. And yeah. Doesn't that feel like a metaverse a little bit? It sounds a little bit dystopian to be honest. Yeah. So the capitalist perspective of the metaverse, I'm not excited about. I don't think that's that's too great. But I do think that Bitcoin is here to stay. Yeah, I agree. Will you talk about this at the conference too? Is this, I don't know, a session? So we do do the future of women in investing kind of. And you touch on this. Yeah. So we'll probably dive into like the different ways that women can be making money and things like that. So angel investing will probably get into a little bit of crypto. I don't want to start like pushing like crypto trading on people because you know that that's that shit's crazy in general. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's like day trading. Like you got to know what you're doing and I get these women all the time. It's like, yeah, I heard this like coins going to be great. What do you think? And I'm like, I don't know. Like, what are you talking about? Like, can you just buy Bitcoin like I told you to five years ago? Like, can you please keep it simple and stop like listening to Facebook for your news? Are you into any NFTs or what do you view the future as NFTs from your world lens? Okay. So I am not an NFT expert. So I have a lot of friends that are musicians like very well. It's like, you know, I've got one of my friends is in the Misfits. Like, I mean like very well established they make like shit a month. Like they make nothing a month off of Spotify because of the radical changes that have happened in the industry. Ractions of pennies. Yeah, it's just like .003. It's like .03 cents per thousand listens. Insulting. It's bad. Yeah. Yeah. My, if you guys remember Groot Shark back in the day. My husband's best friend founded that company actually. Nice. So we were, we were a Groot Shark early fam. So I am, oh, I'm anti Spotify. If you can't tell. But a lot of the musicians that I speak to like they rely on like Patreon and crap like that. Like the creator economy is the only way that they're making money, which is so unfortunate because you, and then in the last few years they haven't been able to tour. And so like, even though these are musicians, you would like, yeah, you would like notice on the street, like really well accomplished people. That's the world they're living in. And so in my opinion, like NFTs there make a lot of sense. Have you heard of Sting? It's like a new artist platform. So our lady piece, which is you guys know OLP. Yeah. Great. Okay. Well, I didn't know if they made it over the border. Okay. I'm from Canada. And whenever I say to some folks, they're like, they're like, what is that? So like the lead singer, Rain, he's started an NFT like platform called Sting. And it's like becoming a real company and they just release all the pieces like latest album as an NFT. And I feel like there's a really great future for places where you already have a built in membership sense in my opinion. Will all the digital arts stay? That's right. Yeah. Digital art is more of like just your membership card, essentially. Yeah. And everyone has their own unique one. I wonder if you could tokenize a conference because there's two things that work against you. One, you obviously want way more people. And so you can't, you don't want to limit the people. But if you tokenize it, you could do like super fun events. And then you have like a built in budget essentially. And then You could also just start a membership fee easier. You know, I guess in a lot of ways, like NFTs also kind of just replicate the value that you can get from preexisting systems in some ways. You know, you can make a membership, a fan club already. Right. But again, I think that for music in particular, especially where a lot of artists like Rain was sharing that his wife wrote the theme song for La La Land, you know, which won the Oscar and somebody like hacked her computer and stole the song. So that was actually how he got inspired because he wanted to start figuring out a way to like safely store their recordings. So that's where the whole thing came from, which I thought was very interesting. They sold before the movie premiered? Yeah, it was like there's like some, yeah, some like really bad hacking story there. I don't know all the details and then, you know, went into went on to be like a huge freaking movie too. Yeah. So there's some whole story. Please like look up the story if you're interested because I don't know all the details, but that was part of the impetus to protect the recordings. And then the distribution piece is where, you know, I think it's gone now. I know they're going to start to do it with like sneakers too. Yeah. So they'll blockchain sneakers, which makes a lot more sense. So in music main, I also heard that Kygo and Ryan Teter of One Republic are releasing music under the board ape banner because they both are buyers in the board ape yacht club. And so they're doing board ape music, I believe. And they're not the only ones that I've heard about doing NFT music releases. I've heard of other rappers are doing it as well. It's smart. Yeah. We'll do it. What else should we talk about in regards to your conference? What I'm really excited about is, I mean, first off, we've got 600 plus people flying in from all over the world, Russia debuting a number of brands that have never been in the U.S. in North America before. So we have like mycelium bacon. So that's basically mycelium bacon. Yeah. That's like super like mushroom future bacon. Really cool stuff coming from Spain. I've got the sal-based honey that I was talking about. We've got brands coming from Singapore, Hong Kong. So we're really trying to be kind of like in a way like a mini CES for the future of food. We also have some fashion and beauty brands. So I'm excited about that. You know, I probably about 40% of the folks that are coming are not in the vegan space and aren't vegan themselves more and more every single day. We have people who are just interested in the space that are coming into it. And that's my goal. My goal is to empower the nearly four billion women in this world to help make the world a kinder, more sustainable place in whatever way possible. Put your money in it, start a company. I don't really care. But I just want to show you that there's a path for you to come into the industry. I'm excited to get it. Check it out. It's going to be fun. It's going to be really fun. And then of course, you know, you get the celebrities come out and it just like ties together that I guess for me, and this is part of my book too, we just need more representation. Right. About 70% of our speakers are women of color in particular. There's just not enough representation. There's not enough representation of women as CEOs. There's not enough representation as investors as Olympians like whatever you name it, we just need to showcase that women can kick us in their space in regardless of, you know, regardless of where they come from of who they are. And that's part of the stories in my book, The Future of Food is Female. I spoke to 15 women around the world, CEOs, celebrities, investors, got a member of the European Parliament in there. And it was really focused upon I want every single person that picks up this book to connect to like one of these these stories. I want there to be that tail in there that resonates with you no matter who you are. So that you can see that you can become a leader in this space. That's really smart. There's a magazine behind you. I'm the whole magazine. I did a story. And the whole point of it is when I moved to this country, you look around and there is no Peruvian. Like you couldn't find one in the NBA or like my doctor wasn't or a doctor. I didn't know or an engineer or a lawyer or a famous person. And so for me, it became very personal that they don't exist. And so I have to be that person for my family. And I took that very personally. And so that's kind of led everything I've done. And what you're doing is amazing because you're sharing different versions of that story. So hopefully anyone who opens that book will connect with that. Yeah. So kudos. That's amazing. Totally. And that's so important. It really is the representation of it and seeing anyone seeing someone like that looks like you has achieved whatever it is. That connection is everything. It's so important. You know, you get a lot of flag people like, oh, it's like tokenism. Representation doesn't matter. It matters. It does. It really, really does. I was fortunate. I had a stay at home dad. So I was raised in like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I was raised like girls or like, you know, everything that boys are, I'm pretty sure is what he taught me. And just like, I didn't realize as I got older, unpacking what that meant for me and my personality and then comparing it to the other women that I grew up with and how it has now manifested now that they're older. I just, I feel like I have so much more and that largely is because they, they weren't really given that representation that I think I was from an early age. Yeah. That's super important too. Even something as simple as like a parent just telling their kids they can do anything. I mean, that's just the confidence alone is really important and somehow not enough. Yeah. It doesn't happen enough. Where can people get your book? Okay. So my book's coming out on April 5th. The future of food is female. It'll be on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the regular bookstores. They'll be doing a tour of the U.S. Then we'll hop up to Canada. So we're going to be doing really cool women founder events in all different ecosystems because the book's not just about me. The book is about, you know, all these women. So we're actually going to be having guest speakers at all the different spots all around the U.S. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We'll do Boulder, Austin, Miami Beach, Atlanta, Raleigh. I think then we'll head up Philly, D.C. New York. And then I've got a big one. We're planning in Toronto which is where I'm from that I'm excited about coming back to Canada since before the pandemic. Toronto is like totally great to visit. I would not want to be living there. Also, they had the longest lockdown. So it's just a bit rough over there. They frustrated a lot of people by going in and out and in and out. Yes. Yeah. The in and out was the real problem. It was just seven months long at one point. Right. So yeah, I'm excited to just like, it's a new day. Let's get people together and get them together in person. Yeah. 100%. Tell everyone where they are. If you are an investor that's listening, I have a really cool thing that you might be interested in. So we do Women Founder Wednesday. Women Founder Wednesday is the only newsletter that brings together the future of food, fashion, beauty and biotechnology. I curate 12 to 16 stories every single week of things that Women Founders are doing around the world in this space or rather my team does. And what's cool about that is if you want to keep your eye on how you can be investing in more women and women of colour I'm excited to get it into your inbox every single Wednesday. Also, if you have women in your portfolio that are in the plant-based space or the future of food, fashion, beauty, space send them my way and we'll plug them out to tens of thousands of people in the VWS community. So yeah, that's really cool. We're also on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, at Vegan Women's Summit, Twitter, at Veg Women's Summit. We're pretty much everywhere. And then if folks are interested in what I work on I actually have LinkedIn's top future of food creator account. That's a fun fact. I have a LinkedIn manager. Wow. Yeah, LinkedIn reached out in everything. They were like, what do you have to do? You have to create a piece of content a day or what's the... No, not as so. Here's, okay. Here's like your fun little bonus tip for the podcast. Okay. If you're really interested LinkedIn is a great platform to leverage. Like it seriously is the underdog right now. Everybody who's all on Instagram now we're all into TikTok but really LinkedIn is where it's at. There's a few reasons why. First off, the algorithm is that all the like, you know, meta owned companies are right now. So you can still get really good impressions. Like I can get over a million impressions on some of my posts just organically which is like unheard of in other social media platforms, right? So that's, you know, one tip why you should be on LinkedIn. The other thing I'll say is if you really want to get like good algorithm coverage on LinkedIn you actually want to post like max three times a week so you don't want to post every single day. It's not like other platforms. Some platforms reward like every two or three days is better. A solid tip. Yeah. Tell our team. This is like a legit tip for you guys and the reason is I never post on LinkedIn maybe once a week. I never go on LinkedIn. Our podcast account I think they do daily. Yeah. I think they're out daily right now. Maybe we should scale back. Sounds like three times the magic number. Well, LinkedIn is, yeah, I mean it's a little different for a company page, right? A company page and a personal page I think are a little different but the thing that's interesting about LinkedIn is that it's like a very professional audience and it's like a very highly professional audience with a lot of decision makers and things like that. So for the work that we do like that's how we find so many founders but it's also why we find so many investors. That's why we find so many women that are applying for jobs. Like, you know, they're like, we need PhD scientists. I'm like, oh, 10% of our community has a PhD. Here you go. It gets ridiculous but that's the access that you get on a platform like that and you're not going to get that on Instagram. Like Instagram is like consumer audience. It's not where you're going to make meaningful connections. Yeah, that's really true. Well, thank you, Jenny. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll see you at the conference. Yeah, see you there. Thanks for talking all things future of food. We hope you've enjoyed our conversation with Jenny, founder of Vegan Women's Summit. And since you've stuck around for the credits, please consider subscribing. Or, if you haven't already, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It's one of the best and easiest ways you can support us in the show. We are at Startup Storefront on every social media platform except for Twitter, where you can find us at STS Podcast LA. The team consists of Diego Torres Palma, Natalia Capolini, Lexi Jamison, Owen Capolini, and me, Nick Conrad. Our music is by DoubleTouch. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time.