Inc. Magazine – September 2019

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74 ● INC. ● SEPTEMBER 2019 ● ● ●● ● ●

Thomas Goetz

(@tgoetz) is an

entrepreneur

and journalist. He

successfully sold

his digital health

startup and now

serves as chief of

research at GoodRx.

THOMAS GOETZ  LAUNCHPAD

Pat Brown didn’t plan on creating Impossible Foods.

But the opportunity was too compelling to resist.

But he could tell potential investors, with complete conviction:

What I am proposing is going to make you even more obscenely

rich than you already are. “I didn’t say it in quite those words,”

he notes, “but I knew that this was something that was going to

be incredibly successful. And that worked.”

Oh, yeah. Starting with a $9 million round in 2011, Impos-

sible has raised nearly $750 million, including $300 million in

May. It is now valued at more than $2 billion.

To say Pat Brown is unconventional is to say that cows moo.

But it’s important to celebrate him, because, though few of us

are as smart, many of us are possessed of the same inspiration.

We just lack the conviction that we’re the entrepreneurial type.

Yet many of the best founders don’t have an MBA—what they

have is a sense of opportunity, a hunch that they’re on to some-

thing the rest of the world hasn’t quite spotted. Some thing they

can’t let pass by. I was inspired by Pat to take my own leap

away from a secure job and hatch my own startup.

Part of his success is that he’s honest about his capabilities.

He has hired well, including a terrific operations team and an

ace CFO whom he calls an “investor whisperer.” How did he

know he could survive moving from scientist to CEO? He

figured that, given the scope of the meat problem (massive and

global), few people would actually go about trying to solve it.

He’s not a guy who places limits on himself, and that’s his

message. “There’s a big phenomenon of people self-censoring,

worrying about the imposter syndrome,” Brown says. “They

say, ‘Someone has to do this, but I’m not the guy,’ or, ‘I’m not

qualified.’ People limit their own opportunities.”

He pauses to take a big bite of burger. “There’s no road map

for what we’re doing,” he continues. “But someone has to solve

this problem.” He figures it might as well be him.

at Brown isn’t an inventor

so much as a reinventor. He

sees something that works,

but not well, and figures out

how to do the same thing,

only a lot better. And, along

the way, he’s reinvented

himself into perhaps the

most unlikely entrepreneur

in Silicon Valley.

Brown trained as a pedia-

trician but, seeing that

genetics figure prominently

in diseases such as cancer,

repurposed himself as a scientific researcher. Within a few

years, he’d created something called the DNA microarray, a

technology that has allowed scientists to better study genetic

code. It was a breakthrough, and for most people that would be

a career peak. Not Pat. In 2001, frustrated by limited worldwide

access to scientific research, he co-founded the Public Library

of Science, a radical revision of academic publishing.

A decade later, he saw a vastly greater inefficiency: meat.

Raising and killing animals, he realized, is an environmentally

expensive way to produce protein, demanding tremendous

amounts of water, land, and energy. “There’s a $1.6 trillion

global meat and poultry market being served by prehistoric

technology,” he fumes. So Pat, then at Stanford, ditched

academics for startup life. Today, he’s the founder and CEO

of Impossible Foods, a company that’s reinventing meat.

Unlike entrepreneurs who tally their startups like animal

heads mounted in a man cave, Brown wasn’t looking to

add founder to his résumé. “I couldn’t have imagined myself

doing this,” he told me over a lunch of Impossible burgers in

Redwood City, California. “But the most powerful, subversive

tool on earth is the free market. If you can take a problem and

figure out a solution that involves making consumers happier,

you’re unstoppable.”

And so, in 2011, and nearing 60, he launched Impossible

Foods. First, he needed investors. “My actual pitch, if you

showed it to a business school class, would’ve had people

rolling in the aisles because it was so amateurish,” he admits.