How a founder who once lost investors' money built a half-billion-dollar meat company on a Kickstarter, a trash bag of grass-fed beef, and a refusal to take venture capital.
Crowd Cow is a Seattle-based online meat marketplace that connects independent farms, ranches, and fisheries directly with home cooks. Founded in 2015 as a 'cow-sharing' crowdfunding experiment, it grew into one of the best-known direct-to-consumer protein brands in the U.S., known for radical transparency about where each cut comes from, hard-to-find products like Japanese A5 and Olive Wagyu, and a mission to give consumers an alternative to the anonymous, commodity grocery-store meat case.