After 9 months of building on Gabanna, I have left the company. (The company is continuing).
I’ve used the last few weeks to reflect, and want to write down a few lessons from this experience.
Most of these are for my own reference, but they might be useful to others.
Why I left
After coming out of Fresh Ventures last year, my plan was to become a co-founder in Gabanna Foodworks, a pasta manufacturing company.
Because Gabanna was an existing business, Sean( the founder) & I set out on a trial phase to discover whether it made sense to become co-founders.
When the trial ended, we both felt we were looking at things very differently. Mainly around core values, expectations, timelines, and how the company should be run.
I still firmly believe in the product and the change it can make in the world, so I wish Sean all the best in making that happen.
But I was and still am bummed out about the missed potential of what I could have done in this company.
Lesson 1: Purpose is a superpower
Gabanna pasta is great-tasting, highly nutritious pasta made from ingredients from regenerative farmers.
It’s not just food that’s good for you, but it also has a very real impact on where the ingredients come from and how they’re grown.
Health and sustainable food systems are 2 very important things to me. So have a way to combine them and have a clear pathway to bring more of this into the world gave me a tremendous sense of purpose.
It really feels like a superpower.
The death of Atlas, my son, made 2025 the roughest year of my life. Being able to navigate those dark months and having something to occupy my mind, getting out of the house, being around people, and working on something bigger than myself, helped me to stay sane.
Note: Purpose just has to make sense to you, not to anyone else.
Lesson 2: A well-functioning team is table stakes
No money and high expectations turn every startup into a pressure cooker.
In our small team (4 at its peak), everyone was juggling work to pay the bills with actual work that moved Gabanna forward.
That means not everyone was working at the same time or physically from the same location.
To counter this, you need to make a deliberate effort to keep everyone in sync with changes and focused on the same goals.
That means having the systems and routines in place to make sure this happens.
Looking back, we coasted on this for a bit too long and should have fixed the gaping holes much quicker.
Lesson 3: I really like physical things
For most of my professional career, my work has been digital.
This gives you a lot of options (like travelling the world while working remotely), but there is also a clear downside.
You lose touch with people and with everything that’s associated with a physical location: environment, community, people, weather, etc.
I feel like working with physical things brought me closer to the real world.
Visiting a farmer where the grains are growing, seeing those grains milled into flour. Handling those bags of flour in our facility. Mixing different grains together in our machines. Then, seeing the freshly produced pasta is drying on the racks. Packing that pasta into bulk boxes for our clients.
And then seeing our pasta on the plate of a hospital.
It’s messy. It’s inconvenient. Challenges pop up at every step. The weather and seasons have a very real impact on the day-to-day of running the business.
But this also makes it very real and anchors you, literally, to a specific location.
Before I didn’t think about it but the whole production and logistics parts of the busines was really fun. Especially tinkering with the processes that are behind the work.
Lesson 4: Entrepreneuring abroad
I live in Belgium.
Gabanna is located in Rotterdam, a 1h20m drive from my house.
Not too crazy, it’s closer than other Belgian cities like Brussels or Ghent.
I ended up there because Fresh Ventures is located in that same building. And I didn’t really mind.
But now that I’m reflecting on the year i’ve been driving back and forth, it’s clear that all this commuting had a high cost.
Best case scenario, it was 2h40m per day spent in the car driving.
In a startup, which requires a lot of time, that’s just dead time that has to be made up for by leaving home very early or arriving home late at night.
Not ideal with a small child at home.
But beyond just the commute, there was also some flexibility needed in the actual business:
- Unscheduled pickup for a shipment of pasta? 2 hours gone.
- Come in on Saturday for a quick thing? 2 hours gone.
One of the many positives from this experience is that I discovered how amazing a city Rotterdam actually is.
Lesson 5: Minority ownership
In previous projects, I’ve always been the sole owner. Or in cases of a startup, I was there from the start, together with others.
With Gabanna, the business had been around in a different shape for 3 years or so.
Joining afterwards without the ability to put in the capital to really take up a significant portion of ownership led to very different expectations and power dynamics within the founding team.
Startups are risky. Wasted time, and there is a real opportunity cost at this stage of my career.
Looking back, I really did not have a lot of decision-making power on where the business should go. Which caused me to go along.
Even if things had worked out, this would have manifested itself in different ways.
Lesson 6: The insides of a regenerative food company
One of my main goals after Fresh Ventures program, was to learn what it would take to run a regenerative food company.
I can say that I definitely learned a lot in this regard.
Running a normal food company already is hard, but adding the regenerative to it turns up the difficulty setting another notch.
Things like: more complex (and expensive sourcing), smaller batches, owning (processing) & production, creating a real business while keeping a clear eye on the impact you’re trying to achieve, difficulties in selling these complexities to funders.
I want to dive deeper into this in a later post,
What’s next?
I’m still thinking about what to do next, but after this experience, here are some extra things I’ll be thinking about.
From these lessons:
- Purpose: our food system desperately needs change, so the company or idea I work on next has to have this high up in its priorities.
- Team and organization: want to see what a great team and organization looks like up close
- Ownership: either a co-owner or building on an organization without equity
- Industry: food
- Location: closer to home 🙂
That’s how far I’ve gotten.
For now, I’m using my newfound free time to talk about opportunities with old and new friends.
So if any of the above resonated, please get in touch 🙂
Leave a Reply