An Interview With Martita Mestey
When you do something new, it always seems that there are people who know exactly how to do it. The truth is, if you do something truly new, there are most likely no such people. There will be no one to give you a detailed plan of action, so there is no point in self-doubting and stagnating.
In many parts of the United States, there is a crisis of people having limited reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. As prices rise, this problem will likely become more acute. How can this problem be solved? Who are the leaders helping to address this crisis?
In this interview series, we are talking to leaders who are helping to address the increasing problem of food insecurity who can share the initiatives they are leading to address and solve this problem.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Arseniy Olkhovskiy
Arseniy is the founder and CEO of FlyFeed, an insect-farming tech startup. He is an entrepreneur with a strong business development and marketing background, a deep interest in business strategy, and proven leadership skills. Arseniy was always eager to solve problems that cause the most limitations for humanity with his developed skillset in fast-growing companies, wide network, and entrepreneurial background.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been interested in observing both the positive and negative ways the world is developing. My mission has always been to support the positive scenarios, do what I can to delay or reverse the negative ones and have fun while doing it.
In small fast-growing companies you have the best chance to develop faster as a specialist, that’s why I decided to be a part of early-stage businesses from the outset. I founded my first startup seven years ago while I was still a student. The company, OlymPeak, helped students prepare for educational competitions. Later, I became part of Exponea, the fastest-growing SaaS company in Europe in 2017, and after that, I joined Legionfarm Group, a platform backed by Silicon Valley Bank. The startup went through Y Combinator in 2020 and raised investments after the demo day.
While doing this, I have been lucky to meet colleagues, investors, partners, and, most importantly, friends who have supported me along the way and shared their invaluable experience and knowledge. Additionally, I made some capital and acquired experience that helped me believe I was ready to create the world-changing business I have always dreamed about.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
There were lots of them, as doing startups your whole life kind of puts you in a position to have a lot of crazy situations happen. I’ve been through writing books overnight, which resulted in hundreds of enterprise leads we never expected; building business units that generated $200K MRR in a field where neither investors or the team believed it was possible; and hiring one of the best esports players in the world through an absolutely random late-night call on Discord.
FlyFeed sort of brings these stories to a new level: Imagine having zero experience in doing business in Vietnam and then sitting in on a meeting with a local governor and heads of departments, impacting Vietnamese regulation in insect farming and surprisingly getting lots of support towards your company from them.
The most eye-opening experience is how much support FlyFeed got from people within the industry. At first, it seemed almost impossible to even get feedback from top talents, not mentioning having them join our team or board. Like, why would they spend time with us? One of my first meetings with an industry expert started with her saying, “To be honest, I’ve agreed to meet just to save you guys several years of your time and several millions in money, because what you plan to do isn’t going to work.” Six months later, she agreed to drop her other activities and join FlyFeed on our journey to beating world hunger. 🙂
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
I started to see success when I stopped spending my time on things and people that do not help me grow as a person and a professional.
It really works like magic. As soon as you find the strength to go for the things and topics that you have passion for and surround yourself with people who support your growth and development, you soon find more energy for more important things. Thanks to this energy and the right community around, you grow faster and achieve better results. And this once again leads to you being surrounded by more cool, talented people who share your passion. It’s an endless cycle.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’ve been lucky enough to interact with lots of brilliant people who helped me tremendously: my old teammates, advisors, and people who consulted me and came for my consultancy. It’s not so much about a specific person but more about the approach.
For the past eight years, I’ve been consciously surrounding myself with talented entrepreneurs and experts who try something new almost every day. Learning from their experience saved me months or maybe even years of life. We spend time together and share our wins and failures. This empowers you to learn from your mistakes in a smarter way: You spend time and effort to learn from your own failure only if this is a new failure for your network. If that’s not the case, this system just naturally prevents you from doing something really dumb.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
That’s much simpler!
Firstly, I get tied to problems, not to ideas or products. When some specific idea is proven to work poorly, it’s easy for me to drop it and start looking for a better solution.
Secondly, I believe that passion about the problem the company is trying to solve and its core values is much more important than experience when building teams. On a 0 to 1 stage, it’s much better to have smart, motivated people with low experience than smart and experienced people who don’t care.
Lastly, I’m more of an observer than a doer. That’s obviously a weak and strong point at the same time — while others act, I prefer to ponder over things. It feels like this helps me to find better and easier solutions, even though sometimes it leads to missed opportunities.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One of my favorite quotes is, “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid? That is the only time a man can be brave.” It’s taken from Game of Thrones when Ned Stark explains to his son Bran that one cannot be brave unless he is tested. You become brave when you are challenged to rise above yourself.
I have long had a rule that relates to this quote: “If it feels scary to do a thing, then it should be done. This is the key point of growth.” So I’m sort of taking myself to my limits, always challenging myself to do better. It’s about taking risks that you are afraid to take because you might not be able to win eventually. To speak out and tell uncomfortable truths when you are afraid of consequences. To attend meetings with top industry people that you might not feel ready for. To quit projects that have ceased to meet your initial expectations, even if it is not yet clear what is next.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Can you describe to our readers how your work is helping to address the challenge of food insecurity?
In 2022, there are 3 billion people who cannot afford healthy nutrition, and 1 billion people are undernourished or do not get enough calories. Growing demand and lack of food supply are rooted in the fact that agriculture in its current form was not meant to feed billions and billions of people; it only supports millions if we’re lucky.
Firstly, agriculture is highly dependent on natural resources, which are limited. Many market players are giving in to the thought of rapid growth and quick earnings and are willing to use measures that cause deadly consequences in the long term.
Secondly, agriculture is scaling horizontally, not vertically. It used to work well when there was a lot of free agricultural land, but now the amount of crops and fertile lands are decreasing. Out of 12.2 billion hectares of land, 5 billion hectares are already used for crops, and there is no way to raise this number. Due to global warming and decreasing soil quality, fertile territories will not be doing any better, even in the best possible scenario. Realistically, they will continue to decline rapidly.
Thirdly, most human food production actually transforms nutritional value instead of creating it. We take something edible for humans and change its form. However, the problem we actually need to solve is generating more nutritional value for humanity’s food chain.
We’ve analyzed dozens of alternative food production technologies and believe that insect farming is the way to go. Insects don’t rely on our already limited natural resources, create new nutritional value by transforming food waste into healthy proteins and fats, and scale vertically, producing hundreds times more protein per square meter than soybean or animal farming.
Can you share something about your work that makes you most proud? Is there a particular story or incident that you found most uplifting?
I’m proud the most of the way FlyFeed solves problems. For example, at the beginning, one of our major challenges was to find customers for our insect products. We were complete newbies in agriculture, so we faced a lot of rejection. People either ignored our emails or left the calls within the first 15 minutes. For some, it could have been a sign to drop the whole thing, but FlyFeed’s team just continued trying. In several months, we’ve gained understanding of what our customers want and how they think of protein raw materials and started signing contracts with top-tier feed producers one after another.
Being ready to make uncomfortable choices and solve problems connected to them is sort of part of our DNA. As I’ve mentioned, we construct our first factory in Vietnam, even though prior to FlyFeed I’ve had zero experience operating there. Of course, it would be much more comfortable for us to do it either in the EU or United States — markets we understand much better. But then, what’s the point of doing this at all if, after analyzing 70+ locations, we know that Vietnam is one of the best regions in the world to build top-notch insect farming factories? So yes, we force ourselves into these kinds of problems. Fortunately, we’ve managed to solve them all so far.
In your opinion, what should other business and civic leaders do to further address these problems? Can you please share a few things that can be done to further address the problem of food insecurity?
To effectively tackle the problems we face, we need leaders from different industries to cooperate more. Every novel food and feed industry, including insect-farming, is relatively new. Companies in these fields have to focus on their industry-specific challenges and solutions — like recipes of food waste combinations for insect feed or breeding solutions for black soldier flies in our case.
Sometimes, we realize that unexpected industries have the same problems and have managed to find some working solutions already. One of the biggest challenges for BSF farms is climate control. In agriculture, few businesses face similar problems, whereas, for example, data centers and mining farms are already implementing tech solutions for temperature management of the same complexity.
Exchanging experiences across industries and involving a more diverse community of entrepreneurs to food security definitely would help us discover innovative and effective solutions.
If you had the power to influence legislation, are there laws that you would like to see introduced that might help you in your work?
Being experts in the field of insect farming, FlyFeed is eager to share its expertise and vision with authorities. We believe that by establishing continuous communication with the government we will be able to make a change to the industry and contribute to its growth.
FlyFeed is already sharing its expertise with the Vietnamese government, and we hope that we will bring even more value in terms of industry knowledge in future.
One of the main limitations to insect farming industry growth is the types of food waste that authorities allow for insect feed. Food waste is key when it comes to further reducing the cost of insect products. Ideally, regulatory authorities should start to work closely with researchers and insect farming companies to find and quickly authorize the use of new types of waste that are safe.
This will accelerate the development of insect farming and the pace at which this industry reduces the cost of foods.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
- When you do something new, it always seems that there are people who know exactly how to do it. The truth is, if you do something truly new, there are most likely no such people. There will be no one to give you a detailed plan of action, so there is no point in self-doubting and stagnating.
- However, there are people who know how to handle specific parts of your venture much better than you do. One needs to learn how to identify these people and get them on your side.
- It has occurred to me quite recently that everything in the world I admire has been created by ordinary people who were probably also experiencing bouts of apathy or even struggling with depression. I wish I could have accepted earlier that it’s okay to fall to the bottom, but one has to move on to find the strength to rise.
- The passion for your business is the most powerful multiplier of any effort. Things have never been so difficult for me as they are now when I’m working on FlyFeed. At the same time, I have never been so consistently happy and passionate in my life. Looking at this experience, I am convinced that doing things that do not make you feel passionate are just not worth spending time on. This makes you less happy and drags you down.
- It took me a long time to realize that a key asset for me as a manager is not money, tools, equipment, relationships, or anything else. Our main asset is time. Spending a lot of time on unimportant problems is like spending all your money on a beautiful painting in the living room when the roof of your house has been blown off. You are unlikely to make anything of it 🙂
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If there was only one thing that I could do to bring value to people, I would try to inspire 1,000 people to build companies rather than set up my own business. I’d like to make more impact by providing other people with opportunities, rather than simply concentrating on what I can do myself.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
If I could choose any person in the world, I’d choose Isaac Asimov. I grew up with the universe that he created in his books, and there are so many things it would be fun to discuss.
A person you could actually tag is Eliezer Yudkowsky. I’m a big fan of “Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality” and the LessWrong community in general, and I’m fascinated by the ways he thinks about problems.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Feel free to connect!
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
How Arseniy Olkhovskiy Of FlyFeed Is Helping To Address The Growing Challenge Of Food Insecurity was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.