Uber project manager Grace O'Brien worked at the company's San Francisco office until the Covid-19 pandemic forced remote work. First, she m

This 23-year-old Uber employee used her stuck-at-home pandemic time to create vegan 'eggs' — now she's turning it into a business

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2021-07-19 11:00:08

Uber project manager Grace O'Brien worked at the company's San Francisco office until the Covid-19 pandemic forced remote work. First, she moved back home to Los Angeles. Then, she and her boyfriend, who also has a job that transitioned to remote work, started Airbnb cabin-hopping to places where they could go hiking.

"I'm a young 20-something in a pandemic: the things that filled my extra time, like socializing with friends, completely disappeared," O'Brien says. "I wanted to fill my additional time with a meaningful project."

With her newfound bucket of time, $3,000 of her own cash and the internet, O'Brien set out to create a new kind of vegan egg subsitute in her kitchen. With no prior food science experience, O'Brien now has a viable product, Peggs, and is trying to raise funding via her Kickstarter campaign to turn her passion project into a business.

The vegan egg options available were not appealing to her: They had unnatural, confounding ingredient lists or could be used for baking but not for scrambled eggs, or they were largely relegated to specialty stores, O'Brien says.

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