"There are two pathways, right? You can go the traditional route: go to big companies that hold your hand, provide funding, and help you build up big plants that get you to economies of scale or you can try and do it yourself. And when you try and do it yourself, and you've got your back against the wall, you come up with creative ideas like doing the feed mill's job for them, at least for now, so you can access the market faster. And for us, the most important thing was accessing the market. We're a deep tech company that's been forced to monetize early. There's still so much about our technology to develop, but we, I mean, have new traction and repeat customers that tell you things that you can never learn in the lab. There aren't enough people taking risks of going to market with basically MVP stuff that you get taught in business school: go to market, stay lean, iterate. But it's really hard to do in biotech; it's hard to do in novel protein. But I think it's possible, and more founders should be trying it." - Felix Collins, Founder of Full Circle Biotech" - Felix Collins
"And I was left during COVID, 9 months in a condo, didn't know anyone here, didn't really speak the language, so it was just me and a computer. And I used that time to basically hypothesize a way to get other species into the system to do what black soldier flies do, but with fungi, with bacteria, and with loads and loads and loads of them. I had an ecosystem on paper. It made sense. So I raised a small amount of cash to try it out, and after the first year, instead of producing 3 kilos of protein for every 100 kilos of input, we were getting 20 kilos of protein. That immediately showed us that we had a way to make novel protein affordable just by increasing efficiencies." - Felix Collins, Founder of Full Circle Biotech" - Felix Collins
"The way I think about agritech is it's like an incredibly cheap Tesla or electric car. Think of how much money it takes to buy an electric car and look at the decarbonization impact of that. Agritech has the potential to create the impact of one electric car with one 1000th of the spend. I think that Southeast Asia specifically has the edge over Europe, it has the edge over America when it comes to implementing this technology. And because of that, I think Southeast Asia is going to be the center for the next industrial revolution in food." - Felix Collins, Founder of Full Circle Biotech" - Felix Collins
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks on 20 million black soldier fly farming, food waste insights, and a low carbon future.
Keywords: Felix Collins, Black Soldier Fly Farming, Food Waste Insights, Low Carbon Future, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Sustainability, Climate Tech, Founder Story
