Fool2.0 News

Entrepreneurship

At 21, This Entrepreneur Has Launched Three Startups, Raising Millions

‘A lot of youngsters have crazy ideas. He has the power to convince people to bet...significant investments,’ says one investor
Ben Pasternak just raised $50 million for his food-tech company. His products are carried by Target and Sam’s Club. this is often his third startup. he's 21 years old.

Raised in Sydney, Australia, he has been living on his own in Manhattan since he turned 16.

His mother, Anna Pasternak, who still lives in Sydney, says that when she was 21, she was in college and dealing as a waitress. “I can’t decide what to possess for breakfast, and he’s running this huge team in ny,” she says. “I don’t understand where it comes from.”
It started when he was 14. A geek with average grades, Mr. Pasternak was astounded when Impossible Rush, a game he invented while sitting in science class, hit the app charts with quite 2 million downloads. “It was a small little game, but addictive,” he says.

Mom encouraged him to call the local paper with the story. He soon had the world’s attention and interest from a replacement York filmmaker who offered to attach him with investors within the U.S.
On his Judgment Day of eighth grade in 2015, he put a note in his locker that said, “If you’re reading this, you actually f—ed up.”

“My goal was to never attend school again,” he says. And he didn’t.

His dad took him to San Francisco that summer for a series of risk capital meetings arranged by the filmmaker, followed by a visit to Disneyland. To the family’s surprise, he landed nearly $500,000 from four backers, and therefore the filmmaker suggested he move to ny to launch his startup.

In August, his mother took him to Manhattan and located him a little apartment during a Hell’s Kitchen doorman building where a family friend also had an apartment.

Ms. Pasternak says agreeing to let her son live alone in NY was among the toughest decisions she’s ever made, and did so only because she believed it had been temporary: “I thought Ben would last maybe a month,” she says.

She stayed with him for several weeks, until his 16th birthday, and recalls a teary goodbye. Mr. Pasternak says he spent his first night alone experimenting with a replacement watermelon carving technique he saw on YouTube.

The first few months in Manhattan were strange, fun and a touch lonely, says Mr. Pasternak. He saw his mentor and family friends once in a while but was mostly home alone, sitting on the couch together with his laptop, building his next app with a web team of hacker types.

He bought steam-table rice and peas from the bodega for lunch and ordered nutriment from Seamless for dinner. He drew his goals on the walls. He slept on the floor—a teen’s idea of discipline—and watched the startup competition show “Shark Tank” when he felt lonely.

He launched his new app in Spring 2016. Flogg was a shopping and social-media platform for teens. It flopped. “No one liked it,” he says.
Washed up and broke at 16, Mr. Pasternak did what any good serial entrepreneur does: He persuaded more people to offer him extra money.

This second attempt was harder—he pitched quite 100 investors, mostly by cold-calling—and raised just $200,000. But it had been enough to style and launch another social-media app. Monkey was successful. He built a corporation round the new venture. it had been acquired by a Chinese firm for an undisclosed sum in 2018.

There was many investor interest when he launched his third startup, SIMULATE, a “tech optimistic” nutrition company. Joe Medved, a partner with Lerer Hippeau, an early-stage venture-capital fund based in ny with quite $1 billion under management, says he was impressed with Mr. Pasternak. “A lot of youngsters have crazy ideas. He has the power to convince people to bet their careers thereon. Or bet significant investments,” he says.

Mr. Medved considers Mr. Pasternak’s youth a plus. “You got to have some level of naiveté to make something that's truly disruptive,” he says.

Mr. Pasternak says he got curious about food because the industry has been shunning new technology like GMO crops and factory processing in favor of production techniques from the 1800s. Starting with NUGGS, a vegan combat the classic chicken nugget, he's applying a software framework to food.

He launched NUGGS in beta mode, selling direct to customers targeted on Facebook and Instagram and soliciting feedback. Everyone agreed the nuggets were terrible. NUGGS 1.0, launched in June 2018, was the primary design to hit supermarket freezers. Each version includes release notes. Version 1.6, launched June 2020, states:
“Includes fixes and enhancements. This update has an improved, chicken-like flavor.”

I recently visited the SIMULATE lab within the company’s oversize SoHo loft where scientists are busy building a far better faux nugget out of ingredients that include textured wheat protein. I sampled the soon-to-be-released NUGGS 2.1. Tastes like chicken!

The best part is that the product tagline: “Kills you slower.”
“One of our company’s core values is non-preachiness,” says Mr. Pasternak, who came up with the slogan.

Mr. Pasternak says the startup will invent new food categories and alter the way we eat.
Mr. Pasternak says SIMULATE will spend the $50 million to triple distribution to quite 15,000 stores, and triple its staff of 20. Half the new hires are going to be scientists and engineers.

His vision goes beyond fake chicken. SIMULATE will invent new food categories and alter the way we eat, Mr. Pasternak says.
I reported this back to Mr. Pasternak’s mother. “Why can’t he just be a failure and are available home?” she quipped.

But she’s betting he follows through. “I’ve learned to not write him off,” she says. “He seems to be ready to have a vision and know it. So watch this space!”