Science is making MOOOOOOOves to eliminate cow farming!
At the FF event in Scotland last autumn, we spoke with Dan Widmaier the CEO and co-founder of Bolt Threads about his ‘crazy’ idea for the future.
Dan originally trained as a scientist at UCSF where he holds a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology. With that degree, he went on to create Bolt Threads, a sustainable material solutions company. He and his co-founder, David Breslauer, grew Bolt Threads from a couple of scientists and a box full of live spiders to a category-leading biomaterials platform company that has commercialised two materials, Mylo™ and b-silk™, with greater than $1B in addressable market each.
From spiders to cows, Dan’s crazy idea for the future is that we will no longer be farming cows in 20 years. Due to advancements in agriculture and science such as the work Bolt Threads is doing, the cost of cow by-products such as leather, meat and dairy will become more expensive than their vegan counterparts making the sustainable options more popular.
00:00:00:10 - 00:00:25:22
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Crazy Intel. It's not a podcast about big ideas. I'm your host, Michael Stothard, an investor of first minute Capital. This is a bite sized episode recorded at a Founders Forum event up in Scotland. And I'm speaking to Dan Widmaier, the founder and CEO of Bolt Threads, which is using biotechnology to create the next generation of materials.
00:00:26:24 - 00:00:32:11
Speaker 1
I start by asking him, what is his one big crazy prediction for the future?
00:00:32:24 - 00:00:44:14
Speaker 2
My crazy prediction for the future. That sounds crazy. I admit that today, but it's not going to be in 20 years. 20 years from now, we won't be farming cows. You won't find them out there in the world.
00:00:45:03 - 00:00:51:15
Speaker 3
So there'll be no one. There will be cows, but they'll be. I'll make those. What? There must be $2 billion or something.
00:00:51:15 - 00:01:01:24
Speaker 2
In the world. Yeah, there's about a billion cows. A little over a billion cows. Today we spend 300 million a year to the slaughterhouse. I think that will be effectively none.
00:01:02:24 - 00:01:05:21
Speaker 3
So there'll be effectively be no cows in 20 years.
00:01:05:24 - 00:01:06:09
Speaker 2
Correct.
00:01:06:17 - 00:01:08:04
Speaker 3
And why is that?
00:01:08:15 - 00:01:33:00
Speaker 2
There's a lot of factors that are driving that. But the my nerdy answer, the second law of thermodynamics, makes it prohibitively expensive on a energetics perspective to raise cows, that the better answer. Everything that comes with cows are going to cost too much, whether that's the meat, the dairy. Because when you factor in the land, use the deforestation, the externalities like carbon and methane emissions.
00:01:34:07 - 00:01:38:05
Speaker 2
It's not going to make any sense. It already doesn't make sense, but it's not going to make sense really quickly.
00:01:38:22 - 00:01:44:06
Speaker 3
So what's going to replace what's going to be the cheaper versions of towels?
00:01:44:22 - 00:02:10:17
Speaker 2
So you got to in this future, there's two ways this goes, and they're not mutually exclusive. One, you have amazing companies who are building the products that replace all of the streams from a cow, the milk, the cheese, the meat, the leather. You know, they're all here at foundries for them, like, you know, you know, these companies, they're the ones who are going to create viable products that do that.
00:02:11:00 - 00:02:30:21
Speaker 2
And then what often gets forgotten in a world where microeconomics dominates all of our decisions is cost of living rises. As the price of meat goes up, the price of dairy goes up. There is a workable, cheaper alternative that exists today. We just choose not to use it and it's being vegetarian. Or for you choosing plant based alternatives that are already scaled and of reasonable enough quality.
00:02:31:03 - 00:02:37:11
Speaker 2
My belief is that between those two, the technological and the economic, we're going to reach a tipping point where it is not going to make sense.
00:02:38:03 - 00:02:48:17
Speaker 3
And and and you guys are part of this, right, in that you can create materials of today that are as good, if not much better than leather.
00:02:48:22 - 00:03:07:17
Speaker 2
Yeah. And if you think about how materials are made today, what Bolt does, this is technology at the core. Over time, we're constantly getting better. This is like a canonical disruption theory S-curve, right? You have a new technology. You're putting a lot of effort. It's not getting much better. It then explodes upwards for how many new features you get.
00:03:08:10 - 00:03:31:03
Speaker 2
If leather is here and our product Milo is here, leather is kind of gone on its S-curve. Cows aren't getting much better. We've got all this headroom of cool things we can do, cool things we can make with materials. And in our in our estimation, we do a bunch of spreadsheet jockeying and model building behind the scenes animal derived materials and products are some of the most environmentally harmful out there.
00:03:31:05 - 00:03:41:22
Speaker 2
Generally speaking, there's a couple of exceptions because you're growing food and land to feed to an animal that you grow again. So that double growing is not a good deal.
00:03:42:16 - 00:03:45:22
Speaker 3
And what's the cost of Milo compared to leather now?
00:03:46:05 - 00:04:00:21
Speaker 2
So today it's about the price of premium calf, which is kind of the high end, but still within the range. Not off, but two years ago. Off the charts. Two years from now, I think we will be less expensive to produce than leather.
00:04:01:17 - 00:04:06:19
Speaker 3
Fantastic wool from 1 billion cows to nothing and probably be good for our world.
00:04:06:24 - 00:04:22:21
Speaker 2
It will be much better for our world. And we're going to have a lot more forests, a lot more biodiversity. It's the thing that gets lost in this that raising cows is the primary driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss on our planet. And if you see it, it horrifies you.
00:04:23:04 - 00:04:26:09
Speaker 3
Fantastic. All right. Well, let's hope that that happens. Yeah. Thank you very much.
00:04:26:10 - 00:04:28:16
Speaker 2
Thank you.