In this episode, I speak with Ela Madej, founding partner of Fifty Years.
EXCLUSIVE OFFER: Get 15% off all Four Sigmatic products, including their popular Mushroom Coffee Elixirs, Mushroom Hot Cacaos, and Mushroom Matcha! Shop at: foursigmatic.com/eatfortheplanet.
Listen Now
About Ela Madej
Ela Madej is a serial entrepreneur and Founding Partner at Fifty Years, an early stage VC fund that backs entrepreneurs solving the world’s biggest problems with technology. She is a Y Combinator alum who previously co-founded Base CRM, the software development company Applicake, and was a Partner at Innovation Nest, a Europe-focused VC firm. With Fifty Years, Ela has invested in over 30 private companies in areas such as synthetic biology, energy, space tech, health tech, food tech, autonomous vehicles, and more. Ela also runs Impact.tech, a platform for technologists in Silicon Valley who want to combine purpose with profit.
Why You Should Listen
In this wide-ranging and unique interview, we discuss how Ela got interested in purpose-driven technology and business.
She also shares her thoughts on the following:
- The problems with our current economic system and why capitalism needs to evolve if we want to prepare for a future negatively impacted by climate change.
- How artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the business world.
- The importance of building values into technology and business to avoid potential disasters.
- Ela went vegan a few years ago and shares her thoughts on how technology can play a key role in helping us fix the food system and feed 10 billion people by the year 2050.
This is one of the most unique and multifaceted interviews I have done to date and I’m so excited to be able to share Ela’s wisdom and foresight with you.
People/Companies/Resources Mentioned in This Episode
- Fifty Years
- Seth Bannon
- Winston Churchill’s essay called “Fifty Years Hence”
- Y Combinator
- Marc Andreessen
- Ruby on Rails
- Nick Hanover
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies by Nick Bostrom
- Jaan Tallinn of Skype
- Elon Musk
- Tim Salimans
- Open AI
- International Conference on Cultured Meat
- Professor Mark Post
- Cellular agriculture or clean meat
- Memphis Meats gets investment from Bill Gates and Richard Branson
#EatForThePlanet With Nil Zacharias Podcast Links
- Check out all episodes of the podcast here
- Follow Nil on Twitter @nilzach
