Transcript: Joe Heitzeberg - From Tech Whiz to Sustainable Meat Entrepreneur

Host: Hey Joe, welcome to the show.

Guest: Hey, nice. Nice. Uh, thanks for having me.

Host: Um, so I wanted to have you on the show and talk about, you know, your career, uh, bunch of interesting things that you did. Uh, talk about Crowdcow and, you know, issues around, uh, food in America in general.

Uh, and also some of the exciting things that you're doing around AI. Uh, but I think first to set the stage for the audience. Can you give a little bit, um, you know, insight into your early career, uh, you know, how did you get into technology?

Guest: Sure. How far back do you want to go?

Host: Yeah, as far as you want.

Guest: Sure. My, uh, my parents were computer people and so I grew up in the, uh, you know, in the, uh, 70s, the 80s, during the dawn of personal computing.

We had an Apple II at my house, a Lisa, you know, if you know what a Lisa is, had one of those my house. So that should be all you need to know about what my house was like.

So really in an era before personal computers was a thing and we had personal computers at my house to hack on and tinker with and play around with and learn programming and that kind of sort of thing.

So, you know, I learned basic programming when I was a little boy and I hacked tons through high school just on little experimental projects and things and of course, when I went to undergrad, I was a computer science major. So.

Host: Where did you go to?

Guest: University of Washington. Allen School.

Host: Got it. And then you started out as a software engineer?

Guest: Mhm. Yeah, started out as a software engineer right around in the late 90s when the internet was a thing coming around Netscape browser, etc.

And I joined actually a, um, a company that was owned by Paul Allen called Starwave, which was believe it or not, it started out as, I think as a CD ROM company. It was like the new media CD ROM.

And then when the internet was emerging it pivoted to online services and new media and it did these deals with ESPN and Disney for their brands.

And so it was really the internet services buying those brands and they have a lot of interactive sporting things and live draft and which I worked on and fantasy games and the early incarnation of espn.com, um, uh, types of those types of online services.

And I worked there. I dropped in there, um, right out of school, um, which is where I wanted to be. I wanted to be on the internet not like desktop software.

Host: What was it like you know, to be a software engineer back then because I feel like what it means to be a software engineer changes every five to six years. And like the tooling and the stack and the abstraction rules change.

Guest: Yeah, it's totally true. It was funny, when I was going through the department, of course, it's Linux when you're in school. Um, and then when you entered the industry, it's Windows. It was Windows at the time. And I grew up on Macs, okay?

So I grew up on Mac's mouse and cursor and programming and Supercard and these types of things and then layering and script on top. I was at school doing real programming but on Linux.

And I was very nervous because I thought in my first job I'm going to have to learn Windows. I have no idea how to do it. How to program on that stack. So a lot of it was that. In terms of programming languages at the time it was C++.

You know, Java was emerging. I actually, I actually installed the alpha version of Java at the UDub computer science computer lab. If you can believe that. Like Java wasn't on the lab until I installed it. And uh, you know, so that's I was.

I was kind of, I think I was young and I was realizing like because I wasn't raised on Windows and that whole stack or Linux. I needed to go when Java, when I saw Java I was like, that's my savior.

I can jump on the new thing and I could be just as good as, no one will have more years of experience than me. So I, I sort of jumped there.

And the reason I went to Starwave, to be honest with us, they had, I think at least two of the original Java team members had gone to work at Starwave. So I thought, well, this is great. Internet, Java, and they got the team members there.

This is like perfect. It's right here in Seattle. Or they were over in Bellevue near Factoria. I thought, I'm in. This is perfect. So I, I, I really, that was my number one job pick by far. I didn't want to work for Microsoft.

I thought I would just wouldn't survive. But in terms of the internet stack, there wasn't an internet stack, you know, at that time.

You know, if you were doing anything with the database back end it was Oracle and if you were deploying, you were racking servers, you know.

And anything to do with networking, you were writing it from scratch or working with really heinous software to install and debug and there was no templating languages for the webpage stuff.

You know, we had people in the company developing templating systems that were a little bit like what you have now in modern development, you know, for web development where you've got like a server and you're piping through a data format and you're rendering some interactivity.

Like we had a guy there, his name was Brian, he was building an entire JavaScript-based platform for interactive apps, you know, and trying internally to sell it for the different interactive apps to sort of standardize and use it and have these benefits.

Whenever your group was like writing their own thing from scratch. Open a socket up, pipe like your own data format through it and, and like, it was, it was very early.

Host: And then uh, at some point you decided to start your own company, Snapvine.

Guest: Yeah, that was, uh, trying to remember, after business school. So I'd, I'd started. I always had a lot of side projects and businesses. I had a import furniture company business that then I had a website for building, um, storefronts for it. And I was using.

Host: That's Wayfair and Shopify combined.

Guest: Kind of. It was so much earlier than that but it was like, it was an online furniture store. I had customers in New York and Florida. We used to ship antique furniture but they would order on our website. This is back in 1998.

Um, and so I tried to form a company around the idea of that, of that software and it ended up being a project within the larger entity in Disney. It was called go.com with a bunch of my colleagues. That gave me a taste of entrepreneurship.

Like you can build a new product and it could become a business and I also in that realized like I need to become well rounded and, you know, eventually I'd join a startup but, um, and uh, the dotcom crash happened.

And I thought, maybe I should go back to business school. Like the opportunity cost of going back to business school is the best it's ever going to be because the market just crashed. So if I can get into a good school, maybe I'll do that.

And I, and I did. So I went for two years to MIT Sloan, uh, met a bunch of great people. But I was dead set on getting back to entrepreneurship.

I was just in school to learn how to communicate and to learn business fundamentals and to meet people so that I could start a company.

So I went back, you know, within a year of graduating, I had recruited two co-founders and started a company and, and that was Snapvine, um, which we raised venture capital for and, you know, eventually sold the company right before the, the 2008 crash.

Host: What did the company do?

Guest: It was, you have to imagine back to 2005, you know, there's no iPhone. Um, there's no mobile internet.

There's a thing called WAP which was an idea of can you take the internet protocol stack and create a lightweight version of it that'll work on mobile devices that are so underpowered relative to desktop computers?

And they've got to fit inside the carrier network because the carriers have to provision service, right? So there was a whole stack around this and we had worked in that area just before I went to business school, um, at the startup.

Um, when I got out and I realized, um, and we'd all realized from that experience no one was using that stuff. It was too slow and cumbersome. But what people were using their phones for was voicemail and text message.

So we thought, uh, I kind of discovered that the voice over IP, which was coming around with Skype and so forth, those protocols were actually very open and you could program on them and, and so I created a little demo where, you know, we had a voice over IP stack running on a server and I could talk to it.

I could place phone calls, receive phone calls, text messages, etc.

And I had this demo where, you know, you could input five phone numbers in a webpage and click a button and they would all ring and everyone's now talking to each other at the same time.

And and at the time, right, this is 2005, people were like, what just happened? That's magic, you know? But so it was the nexus of Snapvine was, okay, mobile internet failed with the WAP stuff. People are using voicemail and text messages.

Um, everybody's got a cell phone now. Kids are very social and they're on coming on this thing called Myspace. But what do they do when they're at school? They've got their phone not their computer.

So how can we bridge the world of that world and their phone? So they can use it between classes and with friends and in a group setting.

So we built kind of a voice over IP based group messaging service and we, you know, built a widget that could plug into Myspace and that was the idea behind the company. We launched it and I think we had a million users in the within five weeks.

It totally went viral. And then we had celebrities using it, you know, like 50 Cent used it and um, a bunch of Disney stars that have that are still famous people now, were using it when they were kids.

Um, and that made it even more viral and it was just servers on fire, keep up with traffic. No business model.

Um, when we tried to monetize with ads, Myspace called us and said, we're going to turn you off, you know, and sue you, don't do that, you know.

So we had to sort of pivot and figure out how to build our own network with our own user switch is very difficult and things were slowing down for us by then and and the writing was on the wall with regard to those business models at the time.

So we were kind of staring down a bigger a bigger pivot. Um, and we decided uh, we had the opportunity to sell the company.

Kind of a team and technology acquisition that um ended up being really fortuitous timing given that a few months later the entire market, you know, with the financial crisis crashed. So I think we, we were lucky.

Host: Already into two crashes.

Guest: Mhm. Already in two crashes.

Host: And then you started Media Piston. Was this is after Snapvine?

Guest: Yeah, so Media Piston I, I worked for the acquirer of Snapvine for two years. Um, and during that time, uh, my, you know, my wife and I, she got pregnant.

We were having a baby on the way and, and I sort of timed it so that my two year mark at that acquirer, plus the day the baby was born, plus the day that I started on, on Media Piston was all kind of the same day. So it was actually really wonderful.

So Media Piston was a bootstrapped company. The idea was, um, people need to, uh, need high quality content and it's hard to get that.

If you go to these online marketplaces you get resumes and people bidding for your work, you know, so you have a work spec and then you put your job out and then people bid on it. Now you got to review all the bids and resumes.

Now you hire a few people. Now you've got to manage them. Yeah. And there's all this pain. And so Media Piston was flipping that.

It was like, what if there was a service where you could come with your credit card and your spec and we, Media Piston would manage that for you. But the of course, that sounds hard, right?

The way we'll do it though, is we implement a process quality control, a software-driven system that will handle all of the editorial review passes in an automated way and then have a marketplace of labor.

So that was the idea we were prototyping and got it working enough where it had revenue and customers and the quality was okay. And that's, that's what I decided to go and and pursue full-time.

Host: You you were essentially saving the time that it takes to find an actual freelancer and get your work done.

Guest: And manage them too because the problem too you'll get is you hire somebody and, and you look at the work, this is great and then you realize they stole it, you know, plagiarized or whatever. So we built plagiarism detection, automated.

And this would be like, it got sophisticated to the point where if you were on the supply side of the marketplace as a writer, you know, you would be automatically welcomed and trained and you can get your first assignments on a meter basis, so you couldn't cause too much damage if you were bad.

And if you were plagiarizing you would get, um, what's the word? um, you would get shadow banned, you know, uh, so that you wouldn't figure out you were banned until there was too much pain for you so that you would not just create another account and exploit us.

There was all that sophistication was in there as well as the other side, which is if you were really good, then you would earn more money. You would get promotions, bonuses. And there was a whole speedy delivery concept.

The client could pay more money, get a faster turnaround and all we would do is just route those to the very best uh, writers in the system.

And then we'd be able to skip steps to get the work done quickly because those people were proven high quality trustworthy individuals.

Host: This is still an unsolved problem, right? I mean, we still have like upwork and other marketplaces where it's still tedious job to, you know, find someone to do the work and manage it. It's still a problem. Uh, what happened to the company? I think you actually sold it, right?

Guest: I sold it to upwork. They were called Odesk at the time. but. And and the pitch and the pitch was, when I met them I said, hey, I, I was actually working on another startup idea and for that startup idea I needed content.

And so I went to upwork and Elance and I ran into all these problems. And it was incredible. Like I had, I think $5,000 I wanted to spend on content for a project. And it was just incredible to me that like how difficult it was to spend $5,000.

I mean, I know exactly what I want as a result, work quality-wise, and I have $5,000. And, and yet it's going to be potentially impossible to get my quality and not go crazy, you know? So that when I discovered that, I was, that's the startup.

If I can solve that and it just so happened that I thought with a process quality control system, you know, with automated scoring and so really focused on that one problem, the general horizontal marketplaces don't have that focus.

They're focused on other friction but not the work itself. So I thought if I focus on the work itself, I can build something viable.

When I got the company to around 60,000 a month in revenue, I went to them and went to the Bay Area and I met a bunch of people just to sort of get customers because I said, this is working now.

And I went to them saying, I'd like this to be on your radar. I started this company because the horizontal marketplace didn't work for me. This is one of your categories.

And I started it because it didn't work for me as a customer and now I'm serving it as a as a business. And here's my revenue, here's some of my customers. Now I'm going to grow it. You know, but maybe we can partner.

Maybe there's a way in the future where we can, you know, power part of that vertical for you. It's a better customer experience. You know? Um, and they and their competitor was uh, called um, so there was Elance and Odesk. I met with both of them.

And both of them within the first two meetings, wanted to just buy the company. They were, they were like, well, you've bootstrapped this, you have no investors, it's going well. Why don't we buy you? Like it's win-win, you know.

So I kind of had that choice of like, do I put a couple of years into this or do I sell it now? You know, so just put the different thing. Bird in hand.

But at the time, you know, there's details there where like I bootstrapped so I put my own money in and I was, you know, I think I'd, I was $200,000 of my own money in.

I wanted to climb the mountain myself with no oxygen, you know, so completely bootstrap. Uh, but I my, one of my uh, mentors told me, you, you have raised money. You raised money from your kids' college fund.

So, oh, when you put it like that, I guess you're right, you know. Either way it's the same. It's just money and risk and upside. Um, I think you wrote somewhere it's like, you know, it was the wrong move, right?

I was while doing research for this conversation. I think somebody wrote that this might not have been the right move for you. Well, it's impossible.

I mean, at the time Google was making pretty aggressive moves with their algorithm to sort of punish SEO people and content farms. There were a couple of very big content farm businesses that were just publishers, you know, doing content farm stuff.

And when they made those changes, those businesses got killed, you know. And so I was selling to smaller businesses that were using us for legitimate purposes but ultimately, SEO was a huge component of it.

So I thought, you know, this could go sideways or I need to fundamentally pivot. This is not going to be an easy road necessarily.

If somebody wants to buy it right now and then I get the bigger entity marketplace that I can plug into and grow and I can have upside through that as well. Maybe that's not a bad idea, you know. Um, so I ended up choosing to do that.

It could have been, you know, if you grow something from 60,000 revenue to 600,000 a month revenue and you look at the SAS multiples on that. Of course that could have been amazing, life-changing, much better if I'd been patient. Mm.

Host: So then you uh, exited that company. Did you, do you happen to work there for a while or what was the exit time?

Guest: I did. It was the, the idea was to integrate it into the vertical and so forth. Um, they had other ideas after the acquisition around their own core business slowing down at the time.

So they, they, they kind of had a, this was not known to me but pretty much immediately after the acquisition at the board exec team level it was like it was like alarm, you know, we have all hands on deck, fix our core growth problem.

That means no, no new projects, no distractions. We need to fix the core. And it was like this Media Piston thing we should not spend time on at all.

So they kind of left us as like, hey Joe, you can move to California and, you know, help us on that or you can keep running Media Piston but it'll be totally a separate entity.

Um, and so I was like for me to be part of that is not what I sold the company for. I'll enjoy working on this. I'm not going to get to integrate and see the upside of that, but I don't want to move to California and take, take a job.

Um, so I hung out for a while running Media Piston as an independent wholly-owned entity. It was silly.

Host: And then you moved to Madrona Venture Labs?

Guest: Yeah, I started at Madrona as an EIR, um, and, and hanging out. Greg Gottesman had an idea, had the idea for Madrona Venture Labs.

Um, I think grown out of his experience with startup weekend and Rover where it's fun to start companies and maybe orchestrate the founding team and funding and he's good at that and the people part of it and so forth.

So he's like, why don't we kind of do the rover thing but as a thing, as an entity, you know, Madrona Venture Labs. Madrona will get some money in. Let's prove the concept out, spend a couple companies.

And so by that time I didn't have an idea for what my next company would be. I was an EIR just sort of exploring things. I thought, well, that's kind of an interesting vehicle to, to explore and build and do. Let's do it.

So we got a little bit of money and grew a small team and spun some companies out.

Host: And then at what point did you decided to start Crowdcow?

Guest: Well, I realized, um, without going into like the business model, there's a hypothesis around any business.

And a venture incubator business, there's a hypothesis around we can create a company, we can justify our equity stake and we can, you know, present a better opportunity cost for a founder that we're pulling out of a bigger company and whatever and then we get a fun and there's there's a reason to believe that that model can be good for everyone.

Without going into that, that was part of the equation. Uh, but my main decision sort of for moving on was I, I learned that about myself is I'd rather be all in on something.

And incubating a company working on it for the first three to six months and then handing it over to some other team to go run with and just being like an advisor or just, you know, helping from a distance is not ultimately where I can get satisfaction.

I get satisfaction when it's like you fully are on the hook and it's also like you, I don't know how much how the like the compensation incentive structure works but um, like do you get incentivized if the company becomes big?

Guest: As a person working in the labs?

Host: Yeah.

Guest: Absolutely.

Host: And is that a significant one or compared to like being a co-founder?

Guest: No, not not as much as being a co-founder, but it could be, let's say you over pick two years you spin out 10 companies. You have much smaller stake in each of those 10 companies. But rather than have all your eggs in one basket, you've got.

Host: So you have a portfolio of companies now.

Guest: Yeah, and so that may be worth it, right? Yeah. Otherwise as a founder you go start something you could easily sink years into it and come up with a zero. That's actually a common case, right?

At every stage from idea to seed to, you know, A to B, at every stage there's like what a 90% fail rate. Yeah.

So, and each time you double down, you're all or nothing style, doubling, you know, down and and putting more years and couple more years at each juncture.

So, as a founder, yeah, there's tremendous upside but it's, it's an all or nothing bet, you know. You got to have a lot of luck in there and um, along the way to make it economically work out.

And I think, I think the big problem with, with startups at least until this downturn, which I'm so happy there's a downturn in a way, but prior to the downturn, you know, the Fang company industries salaries got to the point where in a risk adjusted way you have to look at it like, I don't know, there may be better upside in that than starting a company.

Uh, you know.

Host: I definitely looked at that and that's one of the reasons I didn't do an MBA because the opportunity cost for me was too high for doing an MBA. So like it was the opposite in your case. but for me it was like there's too much opportunity cost I'm losing on two years.

Guest: Whether if you can believe it, you know, a person like me with, I mean, I have a technical background with, with success as a technology person, I would say, um, back to an MBA, now I've got a dual combo, MBA plus tech.

I'm coming back, you know, I and I looked at some of the the Fang types of companies of that era job offers.

If you can believe it or not, right out of MIT Sloan, which is a top MBA and have a good resume, tech and business together with relevant, the job offers were less money than I was making before I went to the MBA.

So I think that's the case now, I hope, but but it was like for me it was like, of course I'm going to start a company.

Like, I'll be able to get more funding for my idea and more upside in every sense of it, more quickly than if I was working for one of these big companies. It's a no-brainer. And I don't think that's the case now, necessarily. Yeah.

Host: Um, yeah. And so how did you pick the idea of Crowdcow and you know, why did you pick that specific idea?

Guest: Yeah, a few reasons. Um, I wanted to have a co-founder again. I did, didn't have one for Media Piston. I definitely, it's worth having a good co-founder.

Uh, my co-founder Ethan and I have been friends for years and we worked at the startup that I mentioned way back the mobile thing. Um, so we had a good rapport friendship and trust.

Um, we had been talking, I had been talking about I want to start something and I want a co-founder. He said, yes, I'm ready again too. He's he had a company before. Uh, Urban Spoon. Um, and we just went through and, and started going.

We committed to do something together and let's explore what. So we had, you know, ideas that we were testing. We actually were prototyping and doing like, you know, um, painted door tests of ideas on the internet.

Like, and we had a spreadsheet, you know, with your idea of, uh, passion, you know, market size, whatever, ranking and discussing. We were doing this every other day and sort of iterating. Crowdcow came about completely independent of that process.

We had a mutual friend that had worked for him and, and me separately, uh, who had done this thing where you go to a uh, directly to a farm to buy a whole cow worth of meat. And he just, had randomly told me, oh, I'm getting my cow on Friday.

I was like, what, you're getting a cow on Friday? He's like, oh, we get the meat of a whole cow. What, tell me more.

And he was telling me about this farm on Whidbey Island and how it's more about the, the, the grass and the farming than the raising the animal. That's important too.

If you treat each animal with care and no stress, the meat tastes better, it's healthier, it's better for the environment. I really enjoy supporting this family.

Oh, by the way, where they live on the island was because they were, their family three generations ago came over on the boat that settled the island.

So they got to pick of the best farmland and again, the quality of the grass is what, you know, makes the better meat. I was like, what are you talking about? This is incredible. Can I have some? He's like, oh, sorry.

It's I, it's allocated because I have a couple family friends and we split it. I was like, well, can you introduce the farmer to me? He said, uh, they only slaughter once a year. You're too late, you know.

And then I realized like, uh, he's, I can't have that. I want that. So again, it was one of those things. I have money in my hand. I can't have it. The friction to get it.

I gotta go meet farmers, drive out there with a truck, I gotta have a meat freezer. So this is insane to me. I'll just go to the grocery store where they can't tell you what country the meat came from. They don't tell you to cook it.

They don't know anything about it. It's a commodity. It's ridiculous. In fact, when you walk through the grocery store past the beer aisle or chocolate and cheese and wine, you can realize if you're old enough that those used to be commodities too.

But somehow for some reason they've transformed in our lifetime to offer choices, varieties, quality, taste, sustainability and connection to the source, which the meat world just does not have. So as we looked into that, we were talking about this.

Um, Ethan had the stroke of brilliance to say, well, what if we created a website where you can meet the farmer virtually with like a video and we would sell a cow one at a time.

And as we were riffing on it, we were like, yeah, could be like crowdfunding a cow. So what do you want? Take the friction out. Tap your phone and it shows up. Not a whole cow in a freezer. 5 lbs, 5 to 10 pounds of meat.

So we were kind of listing these things and came up with the idea of crowd fund a cow, 50 shares and you rally your friends to each buy a share and when all the shares are sold, the cow tips and you become a stakeholder, which is cute, it makes you smile.

And there's an interesting thing about that, which is that it's clear to see that that is important. Like support a small farmer, no, it's healthier, it tastes better.

But the fact that you're tipping a cow becoming a cow owner, a stakeholder is cute, it makes you smile. And that's just sort of a and it's, it's a magic alchemy that I think makes the idea very compelling.

So we looked at it like, hey, let's validate this idea as a business. Uh, we literally, you know, marched down to a Starbucks, talked to strangers, said, hey, we are product designers. Um, we're working on a business concept.

We'd like to get your feedback, you know, do you eat meat? Yes. Well, here's the idea. And many of those people actually said like, what is the URL? I want to, I want to check it out. So we thought that's a buying signal.

And then we spent like a week or two kind of mocking up the website making it look real so that actually you could take a credit card but it wouldn't do anything. There was no back end. We had no idea how to ship product or anything.

But we thought, let's launch it with our friends and see if they'll not only tell us that it's a good idea but they'll actually put their credit card in and prepay, you know, essentially. And they did. It was, it was very, very quick actually.

We had customers in the first 24 hours from that weren't part of that original 100 person email list. They were in, you know, other states. They weren't just in Seattle. We had people from Chicago, uh, New York and Florida and that we didn't know.

They were strangers. We thought this is great. Total strangers putting their money in, you know, this is, let's do it. So we kind of took that as the initial spark of we have a good idea enough to like let's go do our real homework.

Like how do you actually is there, where do you get the supply? How are we going to scale this? Uh, how do we ship orders? How does, you know, farmers produce animals not steaks.

How what is the supply chain going to look like and where does it evolve to? And just started working on it. And sometime while working on it in that first six months or so, you know, we did another cow and another cow.

And something happened where it was just such a fresh and cool like idea, it attracted lots of attention. There were lots of lot to, like lots of press articles and too much attention. We couldn't keep up with demand.

So for our next, you know, year and a half or so, it was just an all hands on deck, keep up with demand, block and tackle, grow the business and learn more about how to, how to scale it.

Followed by followed by six or seven more years like that, basically.

Host: And so you mentioned, you know, walking it on the grocery store and this is one of the frustrating parts, you know, about eating meat in America is how fucked up it is. Um, can you talk a little bit more about why it is like that?

Guest: Yeah, I'll give you like an anecdotal thing. I've I've talked to a number of people who are from like other countries.

And even like second and third world countries and they'll say something like the chicken in my home country just tastes way better. And why? And you have to ask why is that? And it actually comes down to a very simple thing.

When a chicken is just allowed to wander around openly and freely and be healthy and eat, you know, healthy food and peck bugs and have fresh air and sunshine and a beautiful life, that meat will taste better. Actually. It'll taste a lot better.

And people don't get that connection but when the animal is treated well and lives a natural life, the meat will be, will taste better and be healthier for you.

Host: I think the US chicken is optimized to go grow really fast within six weeks ready to slaughter.

Guest: No, it's scientists are doing breeding programs over many generations to optimize for the breast meat grows really fast. And so these chickens barely can walk because they've been selectively bred to a point where they're physically weird.

And and not only that and then the food is similarly chemically uh mass produced to maximize yield of meat.

Again, you they get paid because it's a commodity on like they want the lower cost going in, that's the food and they want the highest volume of weighty material protein coming out. That's value. Yeah. It's priced per pound.

They're not optimizing for health of the animal, they're not optimizing for flavor, they're not optimizing for you nutrition. They're optimizing for all that other stuff I just mentioned because it's sold as a commodity.

Now, if it wasn't sold as a commodity, if it was sold for flavor and origin, then you could start to create a capitalist feedback loop that would incentivize those other things and ultimately that would be better for for many consumers, most consumers.

Consumers who care about the environment, who care about animal welfare, who care about what they're putting in their bodies and their children's bodies, and who care about flavor, will be delighted to know that a pasture-raised chicken tastes better and it's, and you'll, you'll be spoiled.

I, I in my life cannot eat chicken ever at basically any restaurant. I feel like I'm throwing my money away. And that chicken may cost half the amount of money of a Crowdcow chicken, but what's the point? Win and throwing away my money.

Like if you paid 10 bucks for something that's worthless, you've wasted $10. If you pay $20 for something that's supporting a farmer that's committed to the environment and the product tastes better and is healthy for you, that's $20 well spent.

Host: So how did you make sure that because what what the average customer thinks is he's going to Whole Foods or, you know, Krogers and he's thinking there are a bunch of these green labels, organic and he's thinking that he's buying an actual, you know, good-tasting, well-grown chicken, but in 99

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