I’m an operations generalist and serial entrepreneur with about 20 years of experience building businesses from the ground up, mostly at small companies and through my own ventures. My work has spanned consumer goods, DTC, e-commerce, and web, with a focus on the practical side of taking ideas from concept to market.
I’ve been plant-based for 26 years, lived a vegan lifestyle for several of those years, and reducing animal suffering has been a core part of how I live and think for a long time. I’m now making a deliberate shift to align my professional work with those values, moving toward animal advocacy nonprofits and the alternative protein space. It feels like the right next chapter.
I’ve followed effective altruism closely for several years, and it has shaped a lot of how I think about impact and where to focus energy. Becoming an active member of the forum and community is a newer step for me, and one I’m taking seriously. I’m showing up genuinely curious, hoping to connect with people doing this work, and to find where my background might be useful.
I’ve struggled with the same question. I care deeply about reducing animal suffering, but I often find myself more drawn to solutions that create viable alternatives than those that rely primarily on changing people’s minds.
I also mostly agree with your point about advocacy. While I think advocacy and awareness-building matter, I’m skeptical they can achieve the scale of change we need on their own. My intuition is that giving the world’s meat eaters better alternatives is likely to have a much larger long-term impact.
That said, I think corporate campaigns have demonstrated real impact, and getting governments and regulators on board will be crucial as well. These approaches seem complementary rather than competing.
I also have a tremendous amount of respect for activists doing this work. Immersing myself in footage from factory farms and the often-hostile reactions to it has had a real impact on my mental health. I’ve found it difficult to engage with that content day after day. For me, it’s easier to stay engaged through cultivated meat and alternative proteins, where I feel a greater sense of hope. But I deeply appreciate the people willing to do the difficult work of confronting animal suffering directly and asking the rest of us to pay attention.
That’s one reason I’m so interested in cultivated meat. I think it may be one of the few paths with the potential to reduce animal slaughter on a truly massive scale. If the largest meat companies eventually make the transition, I suspect it will be driven less by concern for animals and more by lower costs, less disease risk, greater supply chain stability, and better economics. At some point, it may simply become the better business decision.
I’ve been a monthly donor to GiveDirectly for years and recently considered moving those donations entirely to GFI. In the end, I decided to do both.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
P.S. I also thought the recent Peter Singer, Lives Well Lived podcast/Youtube episode with Bruce Friedrich from GFI was a great listen and worth checking out.