S5. E16: Jennifer Stojkovic: Vegan Women Rule
“We're not even talking about the barriers of having a plant-based company. There are still so many countries that don't even support plant-based innovation. For every Israel and Singapore that’s making leaps and bounds, there's a France that's trying to push a meat diet. So, to be in an industry that is here to disrupt the mainstream and is here to disrupt a lot of what people hold dear, that’s a lonely journey.
We need to make the effort to drive the conversation in the direction that we want it to go because if we're not actually making the effort to build this path in this direction, it's going to default to the status quo, and we know what the status quo is. So, we need to push against that.”
– Jennifer Stojkovic
Jennifer Stojkovic is the founder of Vegan Women’s Summit (VWS).
Jennifer built her career as a community relations leader for the world’s largest tech companies in San Francisco. During her career in tech, Jennifer became increasingly interested in blending her passion for change in the food system with her experience and network in Silicon Valley. In early 2018, Jennifer launched a “Future of Food” series of partnerships bringing together CEOs and founders from leading tech brands, including WeWork and Airbnb, with emerging CEOs from the burgeoning food tech industry to establish food as the “Tech 2.0”.
Quickly, Jennifer became aware of the inequities facing female founders in the food tech industry — and the unfortunate parallels drawn from the same experiences she has combatted in her career as a woman at the intersection of tech and politics in the Valley.
Drawing on these experiences, Jennifer launched VWS in early 2020 with a sold-out global conference, the Vegan Women Summit. Focused on building equitable and diverse representation of women leaders from around the world, and partnering with major tech brands, VWS is the world’s first events and media organization dedicated to empowering, educating, and inspiring women to bring compassion to their careers. With a thriving, fast-growing community of energetic female leaders around the world, VWS features programmes with the world’s leading vegan CEOs, celebrities, investors, Olympians, and more.
In December, VWS launched VWS Pathfinder, the world’s first female founder summit and pitch competition dedicated exclusively to plant-based innovation.
Jennifer and VWS are changing the landscape for women and the future of food, fashion, and beauty. I hope that you are as inspired and excited as I am.
Learn More About Vegan Women’s Summit
Connect with VWS on Linkedin
Like VWS on Instagram
Follow VWS on Twitter
Like VWS on Facebook
Transcript:
Jenny: [00:00:00] We're not even talking about the barriers of having a plant based company, there's still so many countries that they don't even support plant based innovation. For every Israel and Singapore there is making leaps and bounds, there's France that's trying to push a meat diet. So to be in an industry that is here to disrupt the mainstream and it's here to disrupt a lot of what people hold dear. That's a lonely journey. We need to make the effort to drive the conversation and the direction that we want it to, because if we're not actually making this effort to build this path in this direction, it's going to default to the status quo. And we know what the status quo is, so we need to push against that.
Elizabeth: [00:00:49] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Jennifer Stojkovic. Jenny is the founder of the Vegan Women's Summit, or VWS. They are a global events and media organization created to empower female identifying change makers to bring compassion to their careers. Jenny, thank you so much for being on today. It is just awesome to have you here.
Jenny: [00:01:49] Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. You have interviewed some of my most favorite people in the entire world, of course, I think we're all kind of just like a bit of a vegan mafia, perhaps, you know, with the same like hundred people or so. It was so exciting to see some of the interesting stories that you were bringing to light of people that are building a kinder world. I'm glad and honored to be here.
Elizabeth: [00:02:13] Thank you. I want to talk all about the Vegan Women Summit, but I want to first talk about you and kind of go back a little bit to where you came from and how this started. You're Canadian, right?
Jenny: [00:02:24] I am. I grew up just outside of Toronto.
Elizabeth: [00:02:26] So growing up was any of this in your world like food, veganism, animals?
Jenny: [00:02:32] I have always been an animal lover for sure. I remember going back to my earliest memories, always spending my time with pets. Always spending my time outside playing around with the little animals that you'd find in the forest. I was very fortunate to grow up basically in what you would call the sticks. Growing up and being outside in nature was always a part of my life. I don't think I really kind of connected the two until a little bit later in life. My vegan journey started six years ago. It really came through some shifts and some really dramatic things that happen in my life. I went through some very, very, very big personal challenges, and veganism was a big piece of that as kind of a way forward form of catharsis and I'd get more into that if you want to hear about it.
Elizabeth: [00:03:19] Yeah, no, I would love to know. I'm so interested in what brought people to it and how it changed them.
Jenny: [00:03:26] My history starts back seven years ago or so when when things really started to change in my life, I had a close friend who was murdered. My husband's best friend was murdered. I was twenty two years old and it was not something that I think anybody in their entire life is prepared for. It was not something at 22 I was prepared for. We were newlyweds. It was our best man and that is the kind of thing that just totally changes who you are, it changes your path in life, it changes how you think about life, it changes your relationship with pain and suffering. One of the things that we realized was that in this moment of immense suffering, it was the kind of suffering that crushes you in a way that you don't even think a human can handle it and trying to cope with going through a murder trial, trying to cope with forgiveness for the person that did this. We really started to open up a new form of compassion. I think when you can say that you've literally forgiven a murderer, you just have this entirely new lens of compassion that you didn't think was possible. And in that, I've really started to think about, what am I doing on this planet? What is my impact on this planet? How am I living my life? Am I a compassionate person? How can I be better? And veganism was a really big outlet for me to say, you know what, I think I can be doing a lot better, and I really want to find a way to remove myself from causing suffering in the biggest ways possible. So, first and foremost, what you do on your three times a day, what your dinner plate looks like that is such an obvious place where you can just be a more compassionate person, where you can remove yourself from being part of pain and suffering that's being inflicted on others, whether they're humans or whether they're non-human animals. That was really where it came to me from the journey.
Elizabeth: [00:05:33] How incredible, though, like the connection that you made. I mean, of course, it makes all the sense in the world, but at the same time, it's not one that you ever really know. To be in that kind of pain and ask yourself, how can I be better? First of all, that says a lot about you because I don't think most people go there when they're in that kind of pain. I'm so sorry for what happened. I mean, obviously, it changed you.
Jenny: [00:06:03] It did. It changed my entire course of life. It just fundamentally changes you to the core when you go through an experience like that shakes you beyond recognition, when really what happens is your entire world gets flipped upside down and you've got to put it back together and you've got two choices. You can try to put it back together in the way that you were living it before, which doesn't work. Anybody that's been through this level of grief realizes that acting like things will go back to the way they were before is not going to work. Or you can put it back together and arrange the pieces in a better way. To me, just finding a way to let go of some of the things that weren't serving me, finding a way to think more deeply about these actions, about who I was, my impact on the world is, yeah. My husband refers to it as the best, worst thing that ever happened to me.
Elizabeth: [00:07:00] Did it change him as well?
Jenny: [00:07:01] When you go through these types of tragedies, this is kind of a make or break you, they say. There's like trauma bonding. So we ended up both deciding. All right, that's it. We got to flip the whole script like we're going to change everything that we were planning and so we both went vegan. It's been six years now. We've both really, really changed the way we are as people, and a lot of lifestyle changes a lot, a lot of lifestyle changes. I share this story openly to people because I want them to realize that they can make veganism a part of the healing for them. There's so many people suffering right now. I think particularly in the pandemic, so many people are losing loved ones in just such tragic ways right now. I really think that veganism and finding compassion for all living things can be a great outlet for them.
Elizabeth: [00:07:46] I often talk to people who do the opposite, like they'll go vegan for whatever reason, maybe it's ethical, maybe it's for health or environment. Then over time, it starts to change them kind of on a social level and their compassion starts to change. Then all of a sudden, they don't want to be doing what they're doing for work anymore. At the time, what were you doing work wise and life wise?
Jenny: [00:08:09] My husband's in tech and I was working at United Way, so I started at a charity and after all of this this kind of happened. The thing about a murder is there's also a trial. It's not just someone that passes, and then you can bury them and move on. It's a very long, drawn out process. After all of that was kind of buttoned up, we decided we gotta get out of here. We need to just totally like I said, flip the script. So we headed west, we packed our car, packed our dogs, packed whatever would fit and moved to San Francisco.
Elizabeth: [00:08:41] Is this when you started working in tech?
Jenny: [00:08:43] Yes. I've been in the tech industry for the last five years. Out in S.F. and it's been an extremely interesting experience. It brought me into rooms I didn't know existed and in conversations with people I never thought that I would meet. Increasingly over the last few years, I've really started thinking, OK, how do I bring my ethics into what I do on a daily basis? How can I blend the two and the emergence of food tech and starting to see this new tech industry with something that I found really, really curious. I started doing it a few years ago and now finally, with the launch of VWS, we're really working to empower women that are in that space and find a way that we can move the food tech industry forward without some of the pitfalls of the tech industry before it.
Elizabeth: [00:10:09] Meaning?
Jenny: [00:08:43] Meaning all white dudes and nobody of color, no women, just a very exclusionary industry, unfortunately. The famous story that has stuck with me for years and Facebook is actually one of the people that I work with. I work with the world's largest tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg pretty much hired all of his former camp classmates as the first 20 employees at Facebook. It's just such a profound example of what the networking gap looks like and how the rest of the country and the rest of the world can be excluded in the valley. I think we've kind of seen a little bit of that happening with food and the future of food.
Elizabeth: [00:10:09] We've seen a lot. I think there's a lot of white guys running the future of food right now.
Jenny: [00:10:13] There is a lot.
Elizabeth: [00:10:15] They're great guys. I'm really happy they exist, but it's a lot of white guys.
Jenny: [00:10:18] It is. It's also a lot of tech money, too. It's nontraditional. If you look at where a lot of that funding came from for the big three or four that most people refer to. It's a lot, a lot of money that came from tech people. It's almost like a bubble within a bubble and so I want to pop that thing. You know, we have got to make sure, that the thing is, if you're born in Atlanta, Georgia, you might as well be born in like Mumbai, India, because Palo Alto is not accessible to you. Like that is the reality. There are no through lines for a lot of these incredible women that we're meeting on a daily basis that have great ideas, great products, but they don't know investors.
Elizabeth: [00:10:59] What was the first step in this? You just launched, February, January of this year?
Jenny: [00:11:03] Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:11:05] And you've done an insane amount in that time.
Jenny: [00:11:07] Yeah, absolutely. So for those that aren't familiar with VWS, we're a media and events organization, and we are dedicated to empowering women to bring compassion to their careers. We support women in building a kinder, more sustainable world. What does that mean? That means that I want to find all of the top thinkers and all of the doers, and I want to bring them into the space and show them that there are women founders out there, that there are vegan women leaders out there and they are doing big, big, big things. We amplify the voices of women leaders. That's a huge piece. There's just not enough press coverage in both the food space, but as well as in advocacy, sports, celebrities, we've brought all kinds of different women out to really show what they are doing and how they do it in a compassionate lens. I started the organization in January. That was when, right after the new year, we announced our big global conference. We had a global conference in person this year. It was on February 1st. The entire world stopped. I think about three weeks later or so we sold out in about a week and a half. We had over two hundred and fifty women come from all over to join the summit.
Elizabeth: [00:12:16] So it's like the who's who in vegan women.
Jenny: [00:12:19] Yeah, well the who’s who to begin and then honestly, when the pandemic hit, we had this interesting choice of either we can pivot and try this virtual space or we can kind of go quiet for a little while and wait till we can go back in person and we decided to pivot. Then all of a sudden the who's who was not just the who's who of who can fly in, it was the who's who of, like, you know, available for the hour. So we were able to, now that we're in the virtual setting, we've connected with women all over the world. The Pathfinder summit that we just did on Saturday had forty six women founders and investors that joined from twenty countries to speak. One of my speakers reached out and said this was the first time in three years of being a founder that I was not the minority in the room.
Elizabeth: [00:13:02] Let's talk about this weekend, the Pathfinder Summit. Will you just like, set the whole thing up?
Jenny: [00:13:06] The goal of the event was, are you curious about the plant based industry? Are you curious about what's next? Maybe you want to start a company, join the summit. You can learn from so many people in this space and figure out if there's a way for you to be part of this movement. We also had a pitch competition in the afternoon where we had women that pitched from all over the world. We had over 800 applications to our pitch competition. We picked the top five, which were from five different countries as well, and they pitched live. So altogether we have forty six founders of CEOs and investors speak. We also, on the other side of things, wanted to put all of these women on the stage because so many of these women are doing incredible things, particularly the women that are not in North America or the EU, they don't get that same kind of coverage.
Elizabeth: [00:13:53] Talk about the winner from Saturday.
Jenny: [00:13:55] First, I want to tell you a little bit about the finalists, because this was not an easy decision, so we received over eight hundred applications and that alone was just like whoa.
Elizabeth: [00:14:05] Give me an idea of where they ranged.
Jenny: [00:14:08] So when you do a pitch competition.
Elizabeth: [00:14:10] You get a lot.
Jenny: [00:14:11] You get a lot. So I would say about 50 percent usually right away are kind of not going to move forward immediately from the get go for a number of reasons. That's the norm for any pitch competition out there. So once we remove that first half, I would say that we had about three hundred to four hundred fully filled out business proposal type things, and we had a lot of different things that were in that pool. We had lots of food, of course, a good amount of textiles and fashion and a lot of beauty. That's a space where I think that we're going to see a lot of change and we already have in the last few years in particular, because a lot of founders of color are coming into the space up until at least like a few years ago. If you went to the CVS or whatever your mainstream drugstore is and you were a couple of skin tones darker than J.Lo. There probably wasn't a lot in terms of products for you, unfortunately. That's been a huge, huge issue. So what that's opened up is so many new women coming into the space to serve these other demographics that were previously underserved, and it's really disrupting the mainstay cosmetic industry. These are the folks that are almost always white men that are running these kinds of bigger conglomerate cosmetic companies. So now we have all these amazing women that are starting products, and most of them are just starting vegan to begin with. It's now becoming the norm to start your cosmetics company as vegan because it's just seen as clean beauty. Especially with places like California that are now banning using certain chemicals in beauty. I think that we're going to see pretty much every new cosmetic or skincare company being vegan by default.
Elizabeth: [00:15:50] It would be really weird now to start a company and be like, Yeah, we're going to test on animals,
Jenny: [00:15:55] The cosmetics and beauty industry. It's very similar in a way to what we're dealing with with the meat industry, with this big, you know, these few corporations that own and run so much of the space and they've just been doing it this way for so long that, you know, it's just horrible practices and cosmetics are largely very similar. Most of these cosmetics all roll up into a few of these, like big juggernaut type corporations and you know, they haven't needed to change. But now new brands are coming out and just really forcing them to have to adapt. To bring it back to the conversation of the pitches. We did receive a ton of vegan beauty pitches. So of the pitches that made it forward, we had five. The first one was a plant based salmon company out of Canada. I was just excited to have Canada in the mix, of course.
Elizabeth: [00:16:44] What's the company called?
Jenny: [00:16:46] They're called Save da Sea Foods, and they are a vegan salmon lox. So obviously they're from B.C. So on the coast where there's fishing and salmon fishing has become a really, really unsustainable practice in those parts of Canada. Her company is just like such an amazing innovation of like, here's a great way forward. We can just start producing it this way. It's part of our culture, it's part of our industries. Let's shift to a plant based version. So, that was our first contestant and then we had, How Food of China. So How Food is a peanut protein based chicken replacement in China. So everybody that is listening from the U.S. is probably going, How on earth are you going to make peanut protein work? Everybody's allergic to it, but that is not the case in other markets. So that's the first question that everybody asked was, Wait, how is that going to work? But in Asia and other parts of the world, they don't have that same relationship with nuts. So that's really interesting and very novel use of protein. We also had Whipped, which is a soft serve ice cream company out of New York City. So they basically can make you a vegan blizzard or McFlurry, which none of us have seen yet. No fast food outlet in the U.S. at least has been able to master a plant based ice cream. Then our last one before our finalist was a mycelium based company. So mycelium is a new form of fermented fungi, essentially. So if anyone is familiar with Quorn, you know, corn with a Q, that product that's been around since the sixties, it was invented in the UK. It was actually invented by academics when the UK was doing a bunch of research to figure out how they could make a more sustainable food system.
Elizabeth: [00:18:28] It's been there forever. I don't know if I've even had it.
Jenny: [00:18:31] Yeah, it's just like everybody is like, Oh, that's corn with a Q just sitting there in the freezer section. Yeah, so quorn is kind of an early example of fungi, but we kind of stopped after that. There really weren't a lot of products for several decades, but now that's the big thing. Mycelium is like the new space. We had a really exciting product that was proposed that would do full fish filets and steak cuts.
Elizabeth: [00:19:00] Where are they out of?
Jenny: [00:19:02] Out of Berlin, Kinoko labs. That was our four and then our winner was AlgaLife out of Tel Aviv, Israel. They have algae based dyes and textiles that they are creating Renana Krebs, who is the founder. She worked in the fashion industry for like 15 years and just discovered how insane the way that we make products are in terms of the fashion industry and just how bad for the environment they are and the kinds of toxic chemicals we use. Her and her father co-founded AlgaLife a few years back, and they are creating an alternative and potentially this alternative could then turn into alternatives to wool and some of the pretty under-served spaces right now, because wool is one of the ones where we don't really have a good plant based alternative.
Elizabeth: [00:19:45] Wool is the only thing on the planet that I mean, I don't wear it, but like, it drives me crazy that there's no good wool. There really isn't. It sucks. Like vegan wool.
Jenny: [00:19:55] No, absolutely. I'm a diver, for instance, and I was diving a couple of years ago in Iceland and when you dive in Iceland, it's like 33 degrees or basically zero for those that use Celsius. So when you dive in that water, you need to wear wool underneath. Every diver outfits themselves in wool underneath their dry suit. So my husband and I, we just could not find any alternative. So we just kind of like layered 50 types of cotton on. But yeah, wool is just very, very untapped right now and of course, you know, wool is produced in a really horrific manner. There's a great business opportunity for people in the space, and I think we're going to see a lot in the fashion space in particular.
Elizabeth: [00:20:38] It really does feel like this is it with fashion? It's like full force starting now. Let's hope that it's women changing it, right? They're buying it.
Jenny: [00:20:45] Absolutely. That's the thing, right? So many of these industries are woman dominated already. Most people don't realize that the country's first vegetarian restaurant in the eighteen hundreds was run by women, and this was at a time before women were even allowed to work.
Elizabeth: [00:21:00] Are you serious? Where was this?
Jenny: [00:21:03] I want to say I think it was up on the East Coast. I think it was about 1990, five or so, and you can look it up. But yeah, and then the other thing that's really interesting is that in the early nineteen hundreds, the restaurant space and the food space, twenty five percent of all black women that were working in America were in that space too. Again before largely women were working. We've really been a part of food, particularly the veg movement, since the beginning. How have we not been the one leading the way?
Elizabeth: [00:21:34] Talk about how much money is going into the plant based space and how little of it is going to these women, especially this year since the pandemic started. It just feels like it's blowing up.
Jenny: [00:21:44] Absolutely. So if it feels like it's blowing up, that's because it is right. So since the pandemic, over one point five billion dollars has been invested in alternative protein and the plant based space. When the pandemic first said there was coverage about the food system and alternative foods for, I'd say, every single day in the mainstream news, and it was really, really exciting. But there was coverage for the same few companies over and over again, you know, and so Impossible raised record rounds and Oatly raised a bunch and you heard a lot about Just. Unfortunately, in the background, we spoke to a lot of founders while these newspaper headlines were going out on a daily basis and we had women that were not able to raise record rounds, we had women that were not able to raise emergency bridge rounds. The story that we were hearing in the background was just totally, totally different. It seems to be getting a little bit better for sure, but it is still very lopsided overall of all the capital that's invested worldwide. Only three percent goes towards women founders, and less than one percent goes towards founders of color. The stats are just absolutely staggering. This is also against the backdrop of the fact that women make better founders. We know statistically that women make better founders. Women exit with higher valuations. Women provide much better value for your dollars invested.
Jenny: [00:23:06] Women are just really, really amazing founders. Yet they are not given the same level of investment that male founders are, and they still continue to face quite a bit of bias and discrimination in the fundraising process. We did a founder survey over the summer to collect data on this before we launched Pathfinders, so we spoke to one hundred and sixty founders and CEOs across six continents. All women, founders in the plant and cell based space. We received a lot of data on this and it was unfortunately exactly as we suspected. More than half of the founders we spoke to have experienced bias of those that have experienced bias. Seventy five percent had gender bias in particular from investors, and half of our founders of color experienced racism from investors. So many founders were just telling me, you know, we had women that remarked things like I've had investors try to jump in my Uber and go back to my hotel room with me, all the way to Hey ladies, my best piece of advice is learn about golf because you're going to put yourself into all of these old white guy situations for the next few years if you want to raise money so you better figure out how to adjust. Some of the feedback we heard from these women was just insane.
Elizabeth: [00:24:18] What are the reactions to that? Is it easy to just shut down and quit? How do they keep going when it's so difficult and the barriers are so large?
Jenny: [00:24:28] One thing that's really interesting about women is we tend to be very mission driven. When you are mission driven, especially if you're doing something in the future of food or fashion or beauty, any way that you're removing animals from the systems in which we exploit them, you've got a little bit greater purpose. The majority of women we spoke to believed that ethics was their guiding principle for running their company. Women are just much more likely to start companies for reasons other than economic gain. That's a big piece of how these women are able to push forward because they know in their heart that this is what they want to do. So when they just get hit with this type of adversity, they just look inside themselves to push back on it. Some of them have been doing it for years. We had women that experience age discrimination on both ends of the spectrum. I had women that were told, You're too little, you're a little girl. You'll never make it onto the grocery store shelves. Then we had women that were told, you're too old to start a company that's never going to work. It's like Goldilocks, right? Where can women be the proper women founders? What are you looking for?
Elizabeth: [00:25:35] I mean, this is what women deal with every day on just a regular daily level anyway. This kind of stuff happens to women. We're so used to it I think that it becomes like part of the package, which is absolutely insane.
Jenny: [00:25:47] Absolutely, that's exactly it. About half of the women we spoke to our mothers, too. And of those that are mothers, the majority were the primary caregiver. So a lot of these women were speaking to us from the double duty of both being the majority caregiver this year and also running a company and also dealing with the fact that we're in a pandemic that could effectively completely destroy your business operations, which it did for many women. Many women had to pivot this year. There's a lot of stories that have come out in the news. Christie Lagally of Rebellious, had to do a complete pivot for rebellious foods because they were going to be servicing cafeterias and schools and things like that. Then all of a sudden the pandemic hits and all those things close up shop. Well, I guess we're suddenly going to the grocery store, better flip the script as they say, I completely do something new. But they did yeah, they did it and a lot of them did it with a baby on their lap too.
Elizabeth: [00:26:41] Aren’t a lot more women than men vegan.
Jenny: [00:26:44] That's totally right. So they estimate about 80 percent of vegans are women like we are the majority.
Elizabeth: [00:26:49] More than I thought.
Jenny: [00:26:50] Yeah, we are the majority. We also more than 90 percent of consumer purchasing decisions are made by women. Women buy stuff. That's just the reality. We are the ones that buy stuff. We make the majority of purchasing decisions in a household and it is very disappointing that when you are supporting this market and you are making these purchasing decisions, you can't support someone that looks like you or is from the same place as you. That's raw, right? Because every time we buy something, we're voting with our dollar and we want to be able to support people like us, particularly for founders of color. There's just so few that get investment that it is just so hard for women to be able to get that kind of support and to be able to give that kind of support. The other thing that's really interesting is that the fastest growing vegan demographic right now in the U.S. in particular is black women. Yet there's still so few black founders that are getting investments, so we really need to make a concerted effort to ensure that there is proper representation in terms of these businesses and these founders.
Elizabeth: [00:27:57] Will you talk about some of the founders and some of the companies and some of the things that these women are doing?
Jenny: [00:28:03] So of the summit, there's some really interesting emerging themes. Cell based alternatives are very interesting because the mainstream big meats that started years ago, like your Memphis meats and Most meats and all of them, was predominantly led by men. But now there's so many new types of cell based products like the sky's the limit. There's cell based fabrics now that are coming out leathers to replace leather from a cow. There's two companies that are doing cell based breast milk that one has such tremendous possibility to change the entire world because so many women are not able to breastfeed either because they don't produce or because they are thrust back into the working world and they're not able to be home with their baby and sufficiently do that. So there's two different companies, one in Singapore, one in North Carolina, that are both working to get cell based breast milk so that women can be empowered and be able to feed their child.
Elizabeth: [00:29:00] And are they both women owned?
Jenny: [00:29:01] Of course they are. Yes, they are.
Elizabeth: [00:29:00] Well, it's Turtle Tree.
Jenny: [00:29:05] Yes. Turtle Tree labs. Fengru Lynn, she's amazing. We actually had her speak at the summit and Michelle Egger of Wyoming. She just made the Forbes 30 under 30 as well. The breast milk thing is incredible. I think we're going to see a lot of themes in particular around pregnancy. We had Daniela Monet, who joined on Saturday, and for those of you who are unfamiliar with Danielle. She's a Nickelodeon actress, but she's also turned into a founder. So she co-founded Kinder Beauty. But she's now founded Sprouted. It's a diaper company. It's the first vegan diaper. Diapers aren't vegan.
Elizabeth: [00:29:38] What's in them?
Jenny: [00:29:40] They have the glues and stuff that they use are animal derived.
Elizabeth: [00:29:42] Oh, shoot. I had no idea.
Jenny: [00:29:45] Exactly. She didn't, either until she had her first child. Then she learned, Oh my God, there's no vegan diapers in America. How is that possible? I mean, there's cloth and things like that, of course. But diapers at the store are not vegan, so she's created this whole company for vegan diapers. Then we have people like Betsy Fore, who have created one of the first readymade plant based baby food companies. What they're working to do is to introduce savory foods to children when they're still in their infancy, when they can start to eat solid foods. They go savory first instead of sugar first. So the traditional standard American diet, you start to get fruits and things like that when you start to first eat foods and so what that can do is that can overdevelop your sugar taste buds, and that can make you predisposition to eat more sugary foods in life, therefore making you at risk of type two diabetes, heart disease, all those things. That is largely because American children and children in the West are given sugar from an early age, so she's working to totally reverse that and give children savory foods from an early age. Then they're going to be more likely to eat healthy, whole Foods, plant based diets as they grow up because their taste buds are actually engineered to do it.
Elizabeth: [00:29:54] What's her company called?
Jenny: [00:29:45] Tiny Organics. She's supported by Michelle Obama, you know, because they think about even just like the health care costs alone, if we can start to prevent the types of things that lead to people suffering from type two diabetes and things like that later on in life, if we can just start as an infant and get these people on the path to a healthier life their entire life, just think about how revolutionary a product like that is. I had no idea your taste buds developed that early on, and I definitely was one of the ones that ate sugar. I can tell you that for sure. I picked that my entire life, and I had wished that I'd never got it as a baby. So just like a lot of that mom space in particular is one that I see women really, really owning. Whether it's the pregnancy stuff, whether it's the breast milk, whether it's the baby food, and it's a real indicator of just what VCs were investing it right. When you have predominantly male VCs, they're not going to know much about pregnancy. Now that we have more women that are investing in this space, we're seeing a lot more women that are coming out for products for, you know, the other 50 percent of the planet. It's just wild that it took this long.
Elizabeth: [00:32:03] The fact that now you have all these women kind of meeting each other and, you know, knowing each other exists.
Jenny: [00:32:10] There is so much potential for what we can do if we grow as a global ecosystem. We had over 800 people registered for the summit from all across the world. I'm just so heartened to see that we have received so much positive feedback from women that just didn't know there are so many other women out there that are like them, and the founder journey is already really lonely. It is so lonely to be an entrepreneur and to be an entrepreneur with so many barriers. We're not even talking about the barriers of having a plant based company. There's still so many countries that they don't even support plant based innovation for every Israel and Singapore there is making leaps and bounds. There's a France that's trying to push a meat diet. So to be in an industry that is here to disrupt the mainstream and it's here to disrupt a lot of what people hold dear, people are very, very sensitive about their food choices. So you're already that person that's coming to kick up the dust in the room. Then on top of that, if you're a woman, on top of that, if you're a woman of color, on top of that, if you have the networking gap, you know you're a mom already. So sorry, I can't do seven p.m. meetings because I'm at home with my kid. That's a lonely journey.
Elizabeth: [00:33:26] That's tough.
Jenny: [00:33:27] We need to make the effort to drive the conversation in the direction that we want it to, because if we're not actually making this effort to build this path in this direction, it's going to default to the status quo and we know what the status quo is, so we need to push against that.
Elizabeth: [00:33:39] I heard you on something. I can't remember what it was and you were talking about the lack versus abundance mentality. What you're doing is kind of showing everyone what abundance mentality does and how it really changes things in your life period, no matter who you are and what you do. Will you talk about that a little bit and about, kind of what you're doing that is really shifting that?
Jenny: [00:34:00] So the scarcity mindset is exactly what you think it is. It's you're operating with limited resources. So if you take resources, you're taking it away from somebody else. If somebody else takes resources, they're taking it away from you, potentially. Unfortunately, in a lot of industries, women tend to be put in a position where they feel like there can only be a woman, right? There's a woman at the table. If you walk into a room and you see a crowd of all men sitting there and there's the woman at the table, you may think to yourself, Oh, well, they've already got their woman here. So that's what a scarcity mindset is. An abundance mindset is there's enough for everybody. We do not need to cut up the pie. We can all work together. So that's where you pull the chair up to the table and you sit down yourself because there's not a role for a woman. Women just belong there and that's something that is both, unfortunately, I think, to some degree self impost. If we're going to be honest, I think a lot of women just operate under that, and that's also imposed by the society that we unfortunately operate in. Same thing goes for people of color in particular. There's just so much tokenism that's out there and so many of the founders that we spoke to, they often feel like they're only brought into the room because they're going to share their experience and talk about their blackness, so to speak. That's something I've heard from a lot of founders. They're so excited when we're able to sit down and have a conversation that revolves around their work or their expertise or something like that because they feel like they're just often brought in just to be that voice in the room. Unfortunately, women still kind of in general operate in a lot of industries in that way.
Elizabeth: [00:35:39] What's been the feedback you've gotten from the founders? What are they saying about what you're doing and this kind of hub now for them all to congregate and learn about each other and raise money?
Jenny: [00:35:51] They are so excited to see somebody putting the effort into threading that all together. We had a lot of investors that supported this event as well and attended from all over the world, and that's the other piece we need to make sure that investors are putting themselves fully into into this space, too, because in the study that we did over the summer and we know this also from other data, when you receive investment as a woman from a fund that has a woman investor in the round, you perform much better. That's an actual fact. So the barriers that face women founders just overall in the entire industry are basically eradicated and women founders perform at the same level as male founders or better when there's at least the presence of one female investor in the round. We had the backup as well in our specific survey where women showed very, very similar experiences. We had one woman that said that she got pregnant and because she had a woman investor that was in the round, the woman investor helped bridge and fundraise for her while she was having the baby.
Elizabeth: [00:36:55] That's cool, as can be.
Jenny: [00:36:56] Right? That is why you need people that come from the place that you were from because they understand the world you're in.
Elizabeth: [00:37:00] Yeah. What does twenty twenty one look like for the Vegan Women Summit? What's in the books?
Jenny: [00:37:05] We're going to go back to an in-person format, ideally by the end of the year, I'm hoping. We have a lot of interesting content to come out following up from Pathfinder. We want to continue providing these resources and just growing this huge community of women that are building a more compassionate world, either from the founders side or from just the side of the vegan community. There are a lot of women that are jumping into the space that perhaps aren't vegan yet themselves, but they create vegan companies.
Elizabeth: [00:37:32] Why is that?
Jenny: [00:37:33] There's a few reasons. One of them is for the beauty and cosmetic thing that we talked about earlier. It's just become default to create vegan companies, which is amazing and awesome. A lot of the mom pioneers, as we call them. By the way, I'm still not sure if I want to use the term mom pioneers. So if anyone has any less strong opinions on that, I'm using it because I don't have a better one yet. So a lot of the founders that are in the space that's either serving children or something related to that, they're just creating allergen free products. So when you create a top 14 allergen free product, you'll default make a vegan product most of the time, right? So that's just like, it's becoming the default to start vegan companies, even if that wasn't the ethos that you began with.
Elizabeth: [00:38:18] They do. They start these vegan companies and then they start to chain like they themselves start to become vegan.
Jenny: [00:38:24] Yes, we found that about a third of all founders we spoke to moved to a more plant based diet after founding their company, I fully believe that we need to do our best to mainstream this opportunity. If there is a way that we can bring founders into this space to create plant based products, whether or not they've yet made the change themselves. That way, we're welcoming them with open arms and they know that this is a space that they can grow and flourish in. So we've really made a concerted effort to make women that have plant based products know that. We are here for you. We are here to buy your stuff. We are here to be your cheerleaders because you're providing solutions, you're providing products that are going to replace things that would otherwise be animal derived. That's a massive impact.
Elizabeth: [00:39:08] Every single thing you're doing is insanely exciting. This is like, this is the whole new world where we're going. I love it. Jenny, thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing and thank you for today. I'm really, really happy you exist and VWS exists.
Jenny: [00:39:23] Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:39:36] To learn more about Jenny and the Vegan Women's Summit, go to our website at Species Unite. We will have links to everything we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, its patron.com/SpeciesUnite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santino Polky, Gabriela Sibilska and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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