My guest Jim Mellon is an accomplished investor, entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. His most recent book called “Moo’s Law” focuses on the investment opportunities in the field of cellular agriculture, which is a production of proteins and materials directly from stem cells.
Jim Mellon co-founded Agronomics to invest in a portfolio of leading companies in this sector, as he is its largest investor. In this conversation, we dig into this new area, we talk about the case for change, the challenges and opportunities, some of the people, and some of the nations that are driving and supporting these forward thinking cell-ag companies.
What We Cover:
- How Jim developed his interest in biotech, longevity and cellular agriculture
- Why industrial agriculture needs to change and what cell-ag offers to the world
- The concepts of ‘Moo’s Law and griddle parity
- Which different categories of industry cellular agriculture are disrupting and revolutionising
- The current state of cell-ag markets and products, and why Middle Eastern countries are faster to adopt this new industry
- What challenges are facing the ramp up of cell-ag
- The attractive characteristics of cell-ag companies for investors
- When we can expect cell-ag meat and fish to enter the European and US markets on larger scale
Key Learnings and Takeaways:
- Moo’s law suggests that as scale increases in the manufacture of foods in laboratory conditions, the efficiency will go up and the price will come down
- Food-insecure countries such as Middle Eastern countries which import most of their food, will provide a model for implementing cell-ag for larger markets, such as the UK, EU and USA
- The challenges facing cell-ag industry are performance of the stem cell lines on massive scale, using animals to continually provide more stem cells, and the execution of startup companies in this field
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Agronomics
- Juvenescence
- Moo’s Law: An Investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution by Jim Mellon
- Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity by Jim Mellon
- Cracking the Code: Understand and Profit from the Biotech Revolution That Will Transform Our Lives and Generate Fortunes by Jim Mellon
- Blue Nalu
- Ivy Farm Technologies
- Mohnish Pabrai: Cloning, Learning from Charlie Munger, 100 Baggers on OutsideVoices
- Joel Greenblatt: The Common Sense of Long-Term Investing on OutsideVoices