Meet Darko Mandich & Aaron Schaller, Founders of MeliBio
Invest in startups like MeliBio alongside Climate Capital here.
Founders: Darko Mandich & Aaron Schaller
Motto: Giving Bees A Break! World's first sustainable and animal-free honey.
Year Founded: 2020
Stage: Seed
Location: Oakland, CA
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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?
Darko: Worked in honey industry for 8 years running large honey companies in Europe. After realizing the damaging effect of my former industry, I decided to move from Serbia to San Francisco and launch world's first sustainable bee-free honey company.
Climate Capital: What are you building?
Darko: Bees are crucial for our survival on the Planet and the outdated honey industry is going against the bees. With MeliBio's approach, we remove the pressure of commercial beekeeping on wild and native bee species and directly support bee biodiversity.
Climate Capital: What is next?
Darko: Mission oriented thinking and grit! The next is more of that, just repeat every day until the bees are saved and the food industry is sustainable.
Climate Capital: How do you hoster growth and career development for your employees?
Darko: Honesty, Integrity, Openness. We help all of our team members grow through providing coaching and talent development within weekly office hours.
Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?
Darko: Scale is the challenge for itself. Everything is bigger at scale, including problems. Manufacturing is always way harder than in any hardest scenario imagined. However, they stay on top by doing hard work and getting great experts on board.
Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?
Darko: Go for a problem that will be a calling for you, and not a job! Startup life is hard. Choose wisely what you will focus on.
Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?
Darko: Tag your favorite food companies on Twitter that use honey and mention to them that @MeliBioInc is around and that we can help them by supplying them with sustainable animal-free honey. Thank you all!
