Google’s founders love “moonshot” ideas, even when they’re not their own. One they tried to acquire was Impossible Foods, a startup attempting to make food that looks and tastes like meat but is made from plant-based ingredients.
Here’s why fake-meat startup Impossible Foods wouldn’t sell to Google
Can too many moonshot ideas be a bad thing?
Asa Mathat
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
But the startup reportedly turned down the $200 million to $300 million offer last year. Why?
“We’re a mission-driven company and Google has a lot of interests,” founder and CEO Patrick Brown said in an interview on stage at the Code Conference on Wednesday. “We want to have control of our fate.”
He added that he didn’t want his startup’s fate to rest on the whims of a company “trying a million things” in the way Google does.
“It made no sense for us to be acquired by anyone at this stage,” he added.
According to reports, Google made the bid before it organized into Alphabet, which stripped its long-term, non-internet projects away from core Google.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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