A Million Babies and What It Cost to Save Them

Ali Wing is the CEO of Oobli, a food biotech company in Davis, California that makes sweet proteins through fermentation. Sweet proteins were first found in fruits and berries at the top of the rainforest canopy in West Africa and Southeast Asia. They are about 1,000 times sweeter than sugar by weight, bind only to the sweet taste receptor, and then digest like any other protein, without a blood sugar spike. They work alongside sugar and every other sweetener, so a packaged food or drink needs 60 to 80 percent less of them without changing the taste or the cost. Ali is clear that Oobli is not anti-sugar. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Ali explains how the plants evolved the trick, why the company's research began with a founder's family member who lost her sense of taste during chemotherapy, and how Oobli brews the proteins with a standard yeast in tanks she describes as somewhere between a brewery and a NICU. She shares the numbers that brought her from healthcare into food, the lack of incentives for big food companies to talk about health, and the gap in capital for anything built around prevention, and Oobli's work with Ingredion and Mars. The second half is personal. Ali grew up in Montana, just outside West Yellowstone, one of 10 children with seven adopted siblings and foster kids at the table. She talks about her father's love of the parklands, leaving Nike to work deeper on health, and what parenting her son taught her about dropping the plan. Ali joined the Unreasonable Fellowship in 2025 through the Unreasonable Food program, run in partnership with Mars.

Kresse Wesling CBE is the co-founder of Elvis & Kresse, the British company that has rescued decommissioned London fire hose from landfill since 2005 and turns it into luxury bags, belts and accessories. Half the profits from the fire hose range go to the Firefighters Charity. The first year that came to £134. It is now approaching half a million pounds, and has funded more than 29,000 therapy sessions for firefighters and their families. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Kresse goes back to the beginning: Silent Spring at 13 in Western Canada, a scholarship to Hong Kong at 16, the coal-black air of Guangdong Province, and a biodegradable packaging company whose first shipment biodegraded on the way to the UK. Then a week apprenticing problems in sewers, waste transfer stations and landfill sites, and the rooftop where she found the material that changed everything. The second half is about what came after circularity. Since 2015 they have been rebuilding the company around regeneration, defined strictly: clean more water than you use, generate more renewables than you consume, sequester more carbon than you emit. That produced a straw bale workshop that cut power consumption by 94.7 percent, a wetland sewage system, and a farm of degraded pasture now holding 11,867 hand-planted vines. She is candid about the near-death moments too, from an Apple order that shipped back to a seller who pulled out on the day of exchange. Kresse joined the Unreasonable Fellowship in 2016 in the very first cohort of the Unreasonable Impact program, run in partnership with Barclays.

Tessa Clarke is the co-founder and CEO of Olio, the number one food sharing app on earth. Olio connects people with their neighbors so spare food and household items get given away rather than thrown away: 10 million people have joined, items have been shared in 63 countries, and 150 million meals' worth of food has been safely redistributed, alongside 16 million household items. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Tessa traces the story from the beginning: a childhood as the family workforce on an isolated farm in the northeast of England, the 17 year corporate career that left her sick and tired of being uninspired by herself, and the moving day when removal men told her to bin all her uneaten food. She and co-founder Saasha Celestial-One, both on maternity leave, gave themselves ten months to make Olio work. She is candid about what came next: five rounds of fundraising against investors who called them "you girls with your little project," the trust decisions that set Olio apart from other social networks, and the food safety system that has redistributed 150 million meals without a single incident. The conversation also covers the surprises: two thirds of the community making brand new friends during a loneliness epidemic, a lifetime social impact recently valued at 1.1 billion pounds, AI doubling engineering productivity, the approach to break-even, and a vision of hyperlocal rails of redistribution for the whole world. Tessa joined the Unreasonable Fellowship in 2018 through the Unreasonable Impact program, run in partnership with Barclays.

Molly Morse is the CEO and co-founder of Mango Materials, a Bay Area company that turns methane into a biodegradable plastic alternative. Its material is grown by bacteria that eat methane and store a natural polymer, PHA, in their cell walls, which Mango harvests into pellets that behave like conventional plastic but break down naturally at the end of life. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Molly explains the science in plain language: why methane, a greenhouse gas 20 to 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, makes the material carbon-negative going in, and why PHA breaks down in the natural environment and even in the human body, unlike the petrochemical microplastics now found in our blood. She traces the company from its origins in a Stanford PhD to products shipping today, from Natura soap dishes to Stella McCartney sunglasses, and is candid about the one barrier that remains: the scale needed to reach price parity with petroleum plastic. The conversation also goes personal. Molly talks about descending from a family of inventors, with a distant tie to Samuel Morse and a great-grandfather who commercialized the bicycle chain; what it has meant to build a hard-science company as a woman and a mother in a field that still treats both as risks; why we can't recycle our way out of plastic pollution; and the humor and clarity that keep her going. Molly joined the Unreasonable Fellowship in 2022 through the Unreasonable Impact program, run in partnership with Barclays.

Patrick Walsh and Anish Thakkar are the co-founders of Sun King, the world's largest off-grid solar energy company. Over two decades they have brought solar power to more than 26 million homes across 46 countries, created work for more than 37,000 field agents, and extended over $1.7 billion in financing to customers most banks would never reach. In this conversation with Daniel Epstein, Patrick and Anish trace Sun King from its origins in a University of Illinois student project with Engineers Without Borders to a fully integrated company that designs its own hardware, runs its own village agent network, and finances customers through pay-as-you-go solar. They explain how a family living on a few dollars a day can unlock a solar system for about $5 down and $2 a week, why they built their own credit process for customers with no credit score, and how the same technology now serves everyone from off-grid villages to city households enduring twenty-hour blackouts. They also go beneath the business: the first sale in a village in Uttar Pradesh, the mentor who wrote their first check, why they consider off-grid energy access only twenty percent solved, and what has kept their co-founder partnership intact for twenty years. Anish closes with a challenge to investors, to back the next generation of founders building from inside the communities they serve. Anish joined the Unreasonable Fellowship in 2014 and Patrick in 2017 through the Unreasonable Impact program, run in partnership with Barclays.