Key Takeaways (TL;DR)
- Our Initial Model: We launched Tälist as a for-profit recruitment agency to address the alternative protein industry's talent bottleneck, aiming for financial sustainability.
- Pivot & Impact: While traditional recruitment had limited impact potential, we pivoted to a matchmaking platform and achieved significant results on the candidate side, contributing to 200+ placements in 2024.
- The Market Reality: Despite this candidate-side success, a major downturn in the alternative protein market meant that an employer-facing, for-profit model was not viable and did not prove to be more impactful.
- Our Solution: We adapted by transitioning our largest asset, the Altprotein.jobs platform, into a nonprofit initiative to focus on our proven, high-impact, candidate-facing services.
- Key Lessons: We learned crucial lessons about validating ideas with real-world behavior (not just interviews), balancing expert advice with founder-led strategy, and prioritizing external traction over internal perfection.
- Our Future: Now operating as a lean nonprofit project, Altprotein.jobs is expanding its career services to accelerate the food transition and is exploring new initiatives—input welcome!
Disclosure: In some cases I refer to other organizations without naming them. This is because I haven’t confirmed with them whether they’re comfortable being mentioned. Readers familiar with the space may still recognize them.
The Beginning as an Industry-Specific Recruitment Service
Before founding Tälist, we conducted numerous interviews and consistently heard that talent was a major bottleneck for the industry. Companies described finding the right people as highly challenging and, at minimum, a time-consuming process. At the same time, the limited data available—such as this Blue Horizon/BCG report—painted a highly optimistic picture of the sector’s expected growth. We assumed that as the industry scaled, the talent bottleneck would scale alongside it.
When we founded Tälist in 2022, our goal was to build a high-impact, for-profit venture in the alternative protein sector. Our reasoning was:
- Since alternative proteins are driven by private-sector companies rather than nonprofits, we assumed employers would cover the cost of recruitment services, enabling a sustainable for-profit model.
- Financial independence would allow us to avoid competing for limited nonprofit funding.
We started with executive search and recruiting services, securing our first clients and generating revenue from recruitment within the first 6 months. This decision was heavily informed by expert interviews that portrayed an industry-specific recruitment service as a feasible solution. (I will later come back to this point in my lessons learned).
However, we quickly identified limitations in the traditional recruitment model:
- Affordability Barrier/Ceiling: Many early-stage startups, Global South organizations, and nonprofits cannot afford premium recruitment services, limiting scope for impact.
- Second-order Bottleneck: Executive search/recruitment services usually target crucial roles where the best candidate must be significantly better than what the employer would find alone. This in turn depends on the availability of exceptional recruiters—a bottleneck in itself.
- Not Neglected: The recruitment sector is highly crowded and competitive. While there were no industry-specific recruiters in our sector at the time, we saw a strategic advantage in collaborating with established recruiters from adjacent industries rather than competing against them.
Pivot Towards AI-Powered Candidate-Job-Matchmaking
Given these constraints, we searched for a solution that was inclusive, scalable, and addressed a neglected need. This led us to explore different talent solutions, eventually focusing on the candidate-job matchmaking platforms proven in more mature industries. Around the same time, discussions with The Good Food Institute (GFI) confirmed the need for a professional job board to replace their existing one, validating our direction.
We decided to make a pivot, which involved bringing on a new co-founder and CTO to lead the technical development, hiring SEADS to build the core AI for the matching algorithm, and building out extensive career resources to attract candidates to our platform.
A matchmaking service is a two-sided platform business; its success depends on building and serving two distinct user groups simultaneously—candidates and employers.
By 2023, we had built the largest global job board for alternative proteins, surpassed our candidate growth targets, and gained international recognition. In 2024, we launched the matchmaking feature, starting with the candidate side only. Our goal was to test quality and effectiveness before offering it as a paid solution to employers.
We also conducted a thorough impact evaluation for 2024 and published our first Impact Report, which indicated significant positive effects on the candidate side. In short:
- Using tracked LinkedIn career changes and a user survey, we extrapolated results to our registered user base.
- Because only a limited number of users consented to cookies, the actual user base remains unknown. However, it is significantly larger than the registered base, as many used the job board without creating an account. To stay conservative, we only extrapolated to registered users.
Impact: Based on this analysis, we estimated that the platform helped to fill 200+ roles, of which 35+ may have been counterfactual hires. As an anecdotal example, one candidate clicked the “apply” button for a CTO role on our platform and later listed that position on their LinkedIn profile.
The Challenge of Sustaining a For-Profit in the Current Alt. Protein market
While we achieved strong traction on the candidate side, acquiring employers proved more challenging. Part of the delay was due to founder capacity constraints at the time, but more importantly, it reflected a misaligned approach: B2C (candidate) and B2B (employer) acquisition require fundamentally different strategies.
To address this, we undertook professional sales coaching and implemented a comprehensive, multichannel strategy:
- Social selling on LinkedIn
- A five-touch email sequence targeting alt-protein employers globally
- Leveraging warm introductions
- Hosting three webinars on AI in hiring
- Publishing and distributing an industry report
Despite these efforts, employer interest remained limited. Even when we removed the cost barrier and offered services for free, demand remained insufficient.
In short, we did not find product-market fit on the employer side, and we wanted to understand the underlying reasons. We did in-depth research and our analysis revealed a significant market downturn and a shift in hiring dynamics since original projections. Key indicators included:
- VC funding in the sector has steadily decreased since its peak in 2021 (see here).
- The average number of open positions fell from ~3,000 per month at the peak to ~2,000 per month in 2025. Additionally, for 2024, we identified less than half of the job openings we had projected at the start of 2023 (for more details see here).
- Most roles are filled within one month, indicating that employers receive a high volume of applications (anecdotal evidence suggests this is often several hundred per role).
Our conclusion is that while hiring efficiency could still be improved, it is not perceived as a primary pain point by most employers. Many companies are facing broader, existential challenges in a difficult market, and despite some positive developments (e.g. more public funding, increase of patents), we see no signs of a near-term recovery in the alternative protein sector. As a result, we concluded that an employer-facing matchmaking model is neither more impactful nor viable in the current environment compared to candidate-facing services, which have already demonstrated tangible impact.
We briefly considered returning to executive search, but earlier concerns remained valid. Further evidence reinforced this:
- Since our founding, more recruiters—both specialized and general—have entered the alternative protein space, attempting to build profitable businesses.
- At the same time, others, such as one of our former partners, shut down their recruiting operations within a year or withdrew from the sector entirely.
- Several EA-aligned organizations have explored recruitment services as an intervention, but eventually discontinued them.
As a consequence, we decided to shut down the for-profit entity (Tälist) and transition the platform Altprotein.Jobs into a cost-effective, candidate-facing nonprofit initiative. Concretely, this transition included:
- Relaunched the website to focus entirely on candidates, offering career guidance (free career guide, roles & pathways overview, AI career coaching), career resources (impact calculator, podcast, events, courses & programs), and our global job board.
- Establishing new partnerships, such as with the Protein Diversification Academy, to maximize candidate value.
- Streamlining services by deactivating the complex and costly employer-matchmaking function, which can be reactivated if market conditions improve.
Lessons Learned as a Founder
While market dynamics were a major factor in our pivot, there are several things I would approach differently in hindsight. I hope these reflections are useful for others building impact-driven ventures.
Over-relied on Self-Reported Data
Validation interviews consistently highlighted talent as a bottleneck, but enthusiasm in interviews did not translate into willingness to pay. (It reminded me of Henry Ford’s famous remark that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.”)
Key Insight: Move quickly from interviews to real-world testing. Opinions ≠ behavior. This avoids over-investing in solving problems that stakeholders describe as important but won't prioritize with their budgets.
Followed expert advice too closely
We received excellent advice from domain experts. Out of respect for expertise, we often deferred to these recommendations rather than questioning whether they aligned with our overall priorities. In hindsight, modesty can itself be a pitfall: listening to experts is important, but it must be balanced with listening to your own voice.
Key Insight: A founder’s role is integration. Correct advice in one domain may not be the right strategic priority for the org overall.
Early adoption of complex tools (e.g., ClickUp) added overhead without proportional benefit.
Key Insight: Start simple. Adopt complexity only once lightweight solutions are insufficient.
Too involved in daily operations
I often got pulled into execution—like reviewing the work of team members—instead of focusing on higher-leverage activities such as sales, fundraising, and senior networking.
Key Insight: For early-stage ventures, sales, fundraising, and senior-level networking matter far more than operational polish.
Followed the wrong "founder playbook"
I initially followed the "LinkedIn founder playbook": frequent, high-energy posts and aggressive personal branding. For me, it felt like performing a role. It was draining and unsustainable.
Key Insight: Sustainable communication requires authenticity. Align external branding/marketing strategy with founder energy and personality.
The Next Chapter
Our nonprofit pivot is not an end, but a strategic realignment. We're currently exploring other ways to accelerate the food transition through career services. We've broadened our scope, encouraging job seekers to consider impactful roles beyond the core movement (e.g., in traditional F&B supply chains). We've also launched an AI career coach to make personalized guidance more scalable and accessible. Beyond maintaining the current platform, we now have the capacity to take on new projects that help accelerate the food transition.
Initiatives we are currently exploring include fellowships or a centralized mentorship platform.
Where do you see the biggest bottlenecks, and what kind of initiatives would you like to see in the future?
