Underdog Founders - Alberto, CEO of Equal Food, leaves Goldman to tackle food waste

Some people go from rags to riches. Alberto left London banks for Iberian farms.

Everybody loves to see underdogs win.

When I met Alberto, he had zero startup experience.

But Alberto is a smart cookie.

He studied in Granada, Spain, before scoring jobs at Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

Great to learn about finance.
Terrible to learn about farming.

After 5 years of long hours and London weather, Alberto took a gap year to travel.

Tasting food from different cultures was amazing - seeing crazy amounts regularly being thrown to the trash bin drove him nuts. 

So, he started to pay attention.

When he read we waste 2.5 billion tons every year, he found his next chapter.

Alberto pitches his friend Lukas and both start dreaming about starting a company.

Without any experience in farming or logistics.

A couple of months later, they’re buying a van and 500kg of avocados.

(Alberto in Equal Food’s early days - delivering an order of berries during lockdown)

They join the accelerator Demium in 2019 and love their support.

Equal Food was born.

A B2B2C company that sells fruit and veg too ugly for supermarket shelves.

Pitching and networking is exciting, until the bad news hit:
-”Company X is doing it.”
-”The operations will kill you.”
-”It’s a low-tech tech business. It doesn’t scale.”
-”Gonna be hard to raise capital for that.”

They chose to ignore the naysayers (including me) and stuck to it.

Last year, Equal Food made its first million in customer revenue. They sell directly to restaurants, corporates and homes.

Fully bootstrapped.

They’ve saved 280 tons of healthy food from going to waste.

Now they’re preparing to launch in Spain, after Lisbon and Porto.

Because they didn’t listen to experts and set out to solve a problem they didn't want to ignore.

We need more people like Lukas and Alberto.

They’re hiring a Head of Growth and a COO for their Lisbon office.

Forward this to a good fit - I’ve added LinkedIn profiles below.

If you know underdogs winning against all odds, I’d love to write their story.

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Cheers,
Joao


Underdog Founders - Alberto Mojtar, Lukas Friedemann

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