Chat with Mark Winstein: Helping Build Vegan Business Ideas That CARE

When we learned about Vegan Launch and their promise to build a global vegan economy based on caring for the animals, the humans, and the planet, we wanted to hear more and share it! We were curious to know how Vegan Launch can help build vegan business ideas. And, we wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth!

We are pleased to share our chat with Mark Winstein, Founder of Vegan Launch. Mark has taken upon himself the challenging task of bringing under one umbrella investors willing to support vegan business ideas.

How can this investment capital help grow vegan businesses?

Mark explains in this interview.

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Vegan India! – Hello Mark, we are happy to have the opportunity to speak to you! From your website, Vegan Launch, we understand that the purpose of your initiative is to provide seed and expansion capital to vegan business ideas via investment crowdfunding. So as we understand it, Vegan Launch tries to bring together investors who are interested in vegan businesses. Please verify whether this understanding is appropriate.

Mark Winstein, Vegan Launch – Yes, this is correct.

The most difficult step for any vegan entrepreneur is to locate risk-tolerant, like-minded investors. By gathering like-minded vegan investors together in a community, we significantly reduce the cost to finance individual vegan enterprises. To be able to serve vegan entrepreneurs in this way, we are continually working to grow our investor membership base. Vegan and vegan-friendly investors can become Investor Members here.

Vegan India! – How do you identify which vegan business ideas are worth investing in?

Mark Winstein, Vegan Launch – We consider vegan companies at all stages of development. Companies that are ready for presentation to our investor members have two core features:

(1) A strong vegan value proposition, and

(2) A well-designed capital plan

The vegan value proposition describes the vegan outcomes the entrepreneur aims to accomplish via business development and growth.

The capital plan provides a way for entrepreneurs to visualize their business as if they were an outside investor. This allows them to enter into meaningful discussions with investors and has the added benefit of optimizing internal business design and decision-making.

Here is our process for receiving business concepts from vegan entrepreneurs and helping them accomplish their goals:

* Vegan entrepreneurs submit their projects via our Entrepreneur Intake Form provided here.

* Most projects we receive are not ready to receive funding because they do not have a capitalization plan yet, or have other business limitations to solve first.

* Businesses that are ready for capitalization follow a fairly straight path to being reviewed by our investor members. There is no fee for suitably presented vegan businesses at any stage of development to be shown to our investor members.

* For those entrepreneurs who do not yet understand how to properly design, structure, and present their business in a suitable way for receiving capital, we offer a range of training options to fit every budget.

Whether at a fundable point or not, we look at the following metrics:

(A) The company aims to deliver benefits reflecting the vegan value set – animal rights, human health, and ecological vitality. Projects that are highly focused on one aspect are fine. Projects that benefit one aspect but produce a negative outcome in others would be less desirable.

(B) The lead entrepreneur and key staff must be deeply committed vegans themselves. The company does not use any part of its business operations to pay for animal cruelty, including cafeteria meals, per diems, testing, or other so-called “incidental” uses.  

(C) The capital plan and offering concept make sense to investors on their own merits, and do not require investors to take a charitable view of the company to rationalize their investment decision.

The final decision on the worthiness of a project is made by the investor members themselves. We present concepts to investors as early as possible to gauge interest and gather useful feedback for entrepreneurs as they plan and design their offers.

As the community of investors and entrepreneurs grows, we believe the definition of vegan value outcomes will increasingly become more objective for all participants.

Most other early-stage investors in the financial world such as venture capital firms and angels tend to focus narrowly on “already successful” companies. In contrast, our investor and entrepreneur community approach helps like minded-people to work in a cooperative way to expand vegan values and outcomes in the world.

Vegan India! – As you know, our website, Vegan India!, caters primarily to an Indian audience. In what ways could Vegan Launch help support vegan business ideas in India?

Mark Winstein, Vegan Launch – Vegan Launch is already a global community with investor members and entrepreneur projects coming in from all over the world.

Vegan entrepreneurs in India may be especially appealing to global investors given the favorable exchange rates between India and the more westernized countries.

Our community based approach to crowdfunding vegan investment offers also means that many more Indian citizens can invest in global early-stage opportunities which in the past might have only been accessible to the wealthiest individuals.

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Vegan India! – From the time a vegan business is interested in exploring investment capital with Vegan Launch, what conditions must they satisfy in order to proceed? And, if they satisfy the eligibility criteria, what are the next steps?

Mark Winstein, Vegan Launch – The main condition an entrepreneur must meet is having a solid capital plan for their particular business development stage, whether pre-revenue, break even, profitable, or expansion stage.

The first step for an entrepreneur to develop a business relationship with Vegan Launch is to complete the Entrepreneur Intake Form provided here. The typical first response is a personal email. If appropriate, a free personal conference call is also provided. Based on these initial exchanges, we will propose a clear path forward toward the entrepreneur’s success.

Entrepreneurs with a solid capital plan and investor presentation can move quickly toward engagement with investor members. Those who require business design, capital planning, or other development work will be provided with options to address those issues.

Aside from having a strong vegan value proposition, a reasonably profitable business model, and suitable presentation materials, the decision to present an entrepreneur to our investor members is based on Vegan Launch having a mutually satisfying relationship with each entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur’s willingness to work through any limiting factors to create high-value opportunities for our investor members.

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Vegan India! – Finally, we are eager to know about you, as the founder of Vegan Launch. Please tell us how you got inspired to start Vegan Launch and all about your journey as a vegan!

Mark Winstein, Vegan Launch – I have been vegan since September 1, 2016. I followed a mostly vegetarian diet since 1990 but like so many other Americans I thought I needed at least some meat occasionally for good health. As a lifelong environmentalist, I knew eating animals was a big environmental problem, but I thought I would personally suffer if I did not eat at least some animal products, so I pushed away those thoughts. After spending several months in India in 2014, I dropped eating animal flesh for good but continued to eat eggs and diary.

Finally, in 2016 I was struggling with health issues and overall energy. I started watching YouTube videos looking for answers. Thankfully, I was guided to information that directly related to my health, animal cruelty, and the environment.

When I realized that eating ANY animal foods was actually the cause of all my particular health issues and not a remedy, and when I saw my consumption of eggs and dairy caused unspeakable cruelty to animals, I resolved to go vegan for good.

Going vegan in 2016 immediately improved my health, sharpened my thinking, and gave me the energy to follow my life purpose of helping solve big challenges. About 18 months in, decades of stomach issues cleared up. That same month, April of 2018, I launched the Vegan Launch website.

Leading up to this, I’d been an environmental entrepreneur and activist since 1983.

My early successes led me to see that finance is the ideal platform for solving large scale social and environmental challenges.

Back in 2001, I’d set out to create an ecological investment fund that would grow the kinds of business that could take full responsibility for the ecological health of the planet. This project faced continuous challenges. After 10 years of relentless efforts, I took a respite from that daily effort to focus on my family. Sadly, by 2012, my wife and I separated. I spent the next few years looking for answers, and working on restoring my personal and financial health.

In 2016, U.S. financial laws were liberalized. This created a range of new ways to overcome the obstacles I had I faced in the previous decade.

At the same time, going vegan made me see that how we treat animals is at the center of all the world’s environmental, social, and health crises. With my entrepreneurial energy restored by a healthy vegan lifestyle, I committed the rest of my life to helping vegans build a new generation businesses designed specifically to care for animals, humans, and the planet.

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For more information about Mark Winstein, please check his bio on Linkedin.

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