This Week in Startups - How to nail Monthly Investor Updates (FounderU) + Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly | E1239

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

First Jason explains how to deliver great investor updates & the benefits of doing them well (1:36). Then, Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly joins to discuss the expanding capabilities of synthetic biology (24:48), how Ginkgo is currently helping customers make products more effectively (35:58), the ethics & risks of editing DNA (51:53) & more!

Okay, everybody, we've got an amazing show for you today. I'm really excited because Ginko, Biorec, CEO, and co-founder, Jason Kelly is here to talk about how they've created a $15 billion business by creating basically the AWS, the cloud computing platform for synthetic biology. We get into biosecurity, i.e. the COVID-19 virus and gene editing and the ethics around designer babies and dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, the whole bit. It's really science fiction, and he's actually, unlike most science executives we interview, he's actually really interesting and jazzed up about this. It's an incredible peak into the future and just how amazing biology is going to get now that we can program it. But first, I want to do a segment as part of our fun segments, our founder university, these new founder university segments.

And I want to talk about why monthly updates are so critical for you as a founder, to get more downstream investments. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Rippling helps thousands of fast-growing startups automate their HR and I IT, from their team's payroll and benefits to devices and apps.

See how at rippling.com slash twist. So why are monthly investor updates so important? I have been talking about this forever. I did a blog post years ago that if you're not getting updates from your founders, the company is going out of business. And in chapter 27 of my book, Angel investor, I said it very clearly. If your startup isn't sending you monthly investor updates, it's going out of business. I would receive investor updates from Uber,com, com, all of the great companies I invested in Robinhood

on a regular cadence. But from the companies that were failing, they didn't send updates. And this is a real trend, so much so that I put it into our side letters with our founders. Not because I'm going to take legal action against a founder. No, that never happens in Silicon Valley. You can count on one hand the number of times investors have actually sued founders. Theranos, Uber, it very rarely happens. And somebody has to feel very wronged or that they really disagree about the direction

of the company. No, we put it in there to basically codify with the founder that this is something that's important. Now, why is it so important? Well, it's super important because for you as a founder, when you consistently write updates, you then build the infrastructure for a high performance organization. That's what you're doing. Now, when I started my first companies, I only had one or two investors, so I was in regular contact with them. Mark Cuban was the investor in Weblogs Inc. He would email me. He would invite me

sometimes to the All-Star game. We got to chat. It was a different time period 20 years ago. Things were slower. People didn't have as many investments. And he'd offer advice. He'd brainstorm with me. But it really got in my head that talking to your investors on a regular basis, it built your credibility. And then when I needed his help down the road, he was engaged. And that's where in 2015 I wrote this blog post, why investor updates are really, really important. It's going to be in the show notes, or you can, if you want to, go ahead and Google it. Why investor updates are really, really important. Calacanus.com. So back then, I pointed out four reasons why these were so important. Number one, startups can launch a product in a couple of months as opposed to a year

because of no code, et cetera. So these products are moving faster. And email, you're emailing your investors lets you help them spread the word, get you press, get you customers and users to use your product, right? Things are moving faster. And since startups are launching faster, they're scaling faster. The market was so hot back then that we'd see the companies get higher and higher evaluations earlier and earlier. So if things go well, it's not uncommon for follow-up funding to happen much quicker and to be more necessary because you're growing faster, which means you might be burning more fuel. In other words, losing more money. And investors need to know this is happening. If you put yourself in their shoes, they want to know when the next round is happening.

Maybe they'll invest in five other companies and then you give them an update and say, I need to raise money. And they say, you know what? I've invested enough in startups for the last six months. I'm going to take a pause. And now you've lost that investor. And because the market is so robust, it quickly becomes clear if something's not working. This means you might need to do a minor or a major pivot in your first year. Maybe you'll do two or three pivots before you figure it out. That is not uncommon. In fact, if you look at a company like Uber, the black cars was the first business, but really was the ride-chairing cars that made it go global. And then eventually Uber eats. So sometimes it's a second or third business. That is the important one. Well,

founders will pitch investors and get the money for the first idea. But you need to take them along the ride and make sure they understand why you pivoted and what the next business is so you have their buy-in so they can keep investing. And when somebody invests in a company and they see a high profile person on the cap table where they've heard about it, they're going to call your previous investors. If the previous investors are informed and jazzed up, makes it really easy for another rich person to invest money in your company. If the other person says, yeah, I never hear from the founder. What impact do you think that has on downstream investors? It's terrible for you. Competition is fierce. There are many more startups out there. I said this at the time. And now it is probably five times

that. There are tons of copycats, as I mentioned back in the time. And so if you can keep your investors updated on how you're different than the copycat businesses and why they should still believe, this is going to be huge for you. Investor updates are seemingly hard for some people and easy for others. And the reason is, if you are the type of founder who makes a plan and sets goals, Well, now you've got the framework of your update. You had a plan to start a newsletter business, let's say, substack, inside.com, whatever it is. And you said, you know what, I want to get to 10 newsletters. And that means I'm going to have to hire 10 writers.

And I want to get to $50,000 in advertising each. Well, now we've set a goal for 18 months from now. If you're going to launch 10 of them, well, that means every other month you're launching an email newsletter. And you're hiring a $60,000 rider or a $70,000 rider, whatever it is. So you know your cost basis. And you know you're going to lose 20,000 per newsletter in the first year because 50, 60,000 in revenue, 70,000, 60,000 for a writer. You get the idea. You have a framework in which to benchmark yourself against those projections and the reality.

That makes writing your monthly update super easy. So if you don't do two or three investor updates in a row, that is when investors get worried. We can't help you if you don't tell us what's going wrong. And investors believe in you and they want to help you. So an immature founder will think, oh my God, they're micromanaging me. You know, a lot of investors don't even read the updates or they might scan them. So we'll talk about what should be in the update in a moment. But just keep in mind that an update in and of itself builds your credibility.

Even if the update is short and has one chart. If the update is, we're still working on our 2.0 product, sales are flat. we're hiring for this one position. We have 17 months of runway. We plan on starting the fundraising process in nine months. But what I just said is the update, right? That is going to be super easy for you to write. A short update is better than no update. And knowing the bad news is better than not knowing anything, obviously. And your investors, if you're picking the right ones, probably have more information about the market than you do. They probably have more experience than you do, and obviously they have more money than you do, because they're your investors.

You would have funded it yourself. So not sending an update because you're ashamed or you want to clean something up or hit some other milestone. That is the card, no mistake that you can make. You want to tap your investors. If your startup isn't setting those updates, it's probably, in their mind, means you're going out of business. So keep your investors updated, but your monthly updates are not just for the investors. They benefit you because you are now setting goals. And your team can rally around those goals. You can tell the team, I want you to help me write this update, which is what I do. I'll tell my team, give me an update for the fund. I want to know which investments have gone up. I want to know which investments have shut down. And then I

want to know what follow on funding we've done. Just give me three sections. And then I'll write some narrative on top. You make sure all the bullet points are correct. So I have that framework. That allows me, on the investment side of the business, to delegate to some team members and let them participate in it, right? And then they queue it up for me, and all I have to do is focus on the narrative. You can do that too. You tell your sales team, these are the numbers I need. How many people renewed contracts? How much did our monthly revenue go up? Who landed and expanded? Just give me these five bullet points. Now, they may write you 20 bullet points and you just pick the five that you think are most important. But this builds your credibility. You know, when you're looking at these, what should be in it?

Pretty clear. Some kind of summary at the top. Just a quick narrative. Short is better than long. you can do a section with a team update. Now, this doesn't need to be about your interns or some junior developer, but more significant positions, we're going to add a CTO or a CTO was fired. Those are the kind of things you put in that team update for product. Really high-level updates. We pushed two updates to the app store.

Here's links to what we updated in the app. And here's what we're working on next, a little bit of the roadmap. Just very simple, top level. Maybe marketing, you know, in your go-to market strategy, people seem to love that. But my personal favorite is charts. If they say a picture is worth a thousand words, a chart is worth a million. If you can put a chart in there, then you will instantly engage your investors. Think about yourself. You get a chart about the growth of Amazon Web Services,

or you get a chart about the growth of Uber or Airbnb. Are you going to look at it? Of course, your mind is going to immediately try to understand the data on that chart. And if you're an investor and it goes up even more. Just think if you open up your stock trading app, you look at your Robin Hood, your wealth front, your crypto account, you're going to open it up and you're going to be engaged in that chart, right? You're going to want to zoom in and understand it, maybe make predictions on it. I always suggest putting the most important metrics right up top in your update. So I love the idea of putting quarterly revenue up top or monthly revenue with your projection. So you put in one color blue. Here are, here's our, here's our,

performance and then you put in yellow or green, these are our projections for the next six months. That's a great way to get your investors and your team aligned around what the goals of the company are. And if you show that hockey stick, or even if it's up and down, the quarterly is up, but the months are a little staggering, that's going to get you more investment in my experience. So numbers of customers, right, versus users, these are two different things. So you don't want to massage the data, like cumulative charts are known for being kind of BS in our industry. Why? They always go up into the right. You're only adding to it. So it's better to have your monthly performance. Here's how many monthly new users we had versus here's the cumulative

users. Or here's how many active users we have versus signups. In the old days, people would just talk about their signups and it's like, well, that's only going up into the right. And you can always tell an immature founder or maybe one who's massaging the data or maybe not as straight up, let's say, because they use the cumulative charts. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business, blog or publish content, promote your business, announce upcoming events or special projects, and sell products and services of all kinds and more. They also have powerful e-commerce functionality and everything

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What an amazing journey it's been. Congratulations again. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. If you can put two different data points on the left and the right of your chart, now you look really sophisticated. Here's our revenue and here's the number of customers. The revenue is the line and the bar chart is the number of customers or vice versa. Now you look super sophisticated.

Breaking down your revenue by revenue stream, super important. Like let's say you have part of your business is SaaS revenue and part of its consulting. Sometimes people get 100K consulting job. They put it into a chart with 50K of SaaS and it gets spiky and it looks weird. If you have two different revenue lines, put them in two different charts or make a stacked bar chart. But just be clear about that. You really don't need to put in your expenses or your sales pipeline. A lot of those are optimistic and BS.

When people show me pipeline instead of revenue, I have one founder who kept sending me pipeline and not the actual revenue. I said, you know, this is getting really tiresome that I have to every month ask you to send me the actual revenue, not your pipeline, and you're starting with your pipeline or not your revenue. Do you realize how much you're lowering your credibility by talking? about pipeline instead of reality. Let's talk about reality. Not what you're going to do, but what you've accomplished, right? They've already got the investment. You're not selling promise anymore. You're communicating progress. You're not selling promise anymore. You've

already got these investors. Now's the time to share with them your progress. But you do need to tell us what your burn is or what your profit was every month and how much cash you have in hand. And then based on that, how much runway you have. If your profits and your losses, you know, and your profit are spiky, take the last three months and say, based on our last three months burn, we made 10K one month, we lost 20K another month, and then we were even another month. Okay, so net, net, you know, you were down 10K, which means you're burning on average 3,000 a month. Perfect. That's great. Average it out, so we know when you're going to run out of money and tell us how big is the team and how much are you spending on the team? Some people will put team size,

60 people. I'm like, wait a second, you're spending 50k on salaries. You have 60 people. And they're like, oh, well, we have 30 freelancers getting paid $500. And then we have the core team of 10. And then we got 10 people in Manila getting paid $1,000 a month, right? You really need to be honest about that as well. Asking people to hit reply and let us know, let me know if you have any questions or telling them what you need help with. We're hiring for these three positions. We need a connection at Disney. These are interesting ways for you to put things at the bottom to see which investors are active and which investors open. in the email, all good things for you to know. But runway is absolutely critical. So we have a system internally. I'll explain to you how it works because it's important for you to know if you're going to work with us. And it's important for you to know how seriously I take this. Most investors, I think, especially early stage ones, if you're not performing, they'll just write you off. Let me say that again. If you're not performing and you're not updating them, they're going to write you off. In their mind, they're just going to say, you know, there's a mistake to invest in you. Now, I'm being candid with you. That's what we do here on the pod. I'm always candid with you. You'd be candid with me.

They'll just write you off because 80% of their investments go to zero, right? 80% of startups fail. And then your top 10% are 95% of your eventual returns. In other words, for me, inside com, grin, Fitbod, and Robin Hood and this cohort of companies I've been lucky enough to invest it, they're going to be the majority. So I could easily just say, you know, the people who don't update me, yeah, forget them. I don't want to do it that way. I want to win every time, or at least have a chance and I want to learn every time. So what we do internally is we keep track of every month who sends us an update and we will email them and then we'll message them in Slack. Hey, we didn't get a January update. We do have December and we didn't get it maybe in February, right? So it's two months

later. We got your December update. Now it's February. At the end of February, we'll say, hey, or maybe let's say March 1st, we didn't get a January update wondering when the February updates coming. Did we miss it? It might have been our spam folders. You know, what email did you send it to? Or if you haven't sent one, we'd love to get a quick update on our investment. So we can be helpful. We communicate that to founders. Then, if it gets to three months, they will CC me. So the person on my team who sends these emails and keeps track of it, they'll CC me. And then I'll just say something positive like, hey, how's it going, pal? This way founders know that we actually take our work seriously. So if you're an investor in listening to

this, you want to do this in a kind way. We're not trying to lord over people or, you know, micromanage them. We just know when it gets two or three months, it's probably because things aren't going well. I would say nine out of ten times, it's because things aren't going well. And we can then, in the fourth month now, we have your phone number. And so now the new process is when we get to month four, somebody on my team is going to text you and say, hey, can we set up a meeting? Me, you, Jason, let's have a call and see how you're doing. Because we won't say this out loud, but what we're thinking is, if you really can't get it together to write an update or respond to our emails, if we get on the phone, maybe it'll just tell us what's going on. Maybe

you're suffering from anxiety and depression and you're paralyzed. Maybe you lost your top two tenants. Maybe you're fighting with your founder. Those are things that I'm good at dealing with. The harder the challenge, the better I am. That's what I do for a living. I have founders want to kill each other. I have had founders lose their top two or three employees and be burning money.

I've had founders being sued. I mean, I've seen it all already. That's when you should engage me. I'm your fixer. Call me. Let me help. And that's what we do. And it tends to work out really well. The sad part is, often the times we get an update is when it's too late for us to help. And that's why I started all this because I was getting

super frustrated. I had somebody call me after four emails to them, four emails, five emails. They said, oh, we shut the company down. They said, two months ago. I said, I've been asking you for five months for an update. You shut the company down five months ago? They're like, yeah, it wasn't working. I'm like, okay, explain to me. They're like, well, it could have worked, but, you know, my co-founder wasn't into it. And we couldn't decide if we wanted to go enterprise or are we. We wanted to charge for consumers or go free. I was like, well, I could have talked to you about that. I would have given you great advice there.

Or we could have flipped a coin. Or we could have bought out your founder. Whatever. This is incredibly frustrating to have a failure because the founders didn't communicate. So you also want to have people rooting for you. It's a crowded market. Yes, there's a ton of money out there, but there's only so much time. All investors go through this cycle where they become post money.

In other words, they don't need to be. make more money. They might like to make more money, but they don't need it. They've already bought their house. They've got their second house. Maybe they want to upgrade some things in their life, but they're post money. What they really want to do is win and enjoy their job. If the person is not communicating, that's not fun. So then you stop rooting for them. And I see this all the time where I've had people on boards with me, where people have co-invested. And they just say, don't bother, just write it off. Why are you even still trying to help that founder? They're bozos. I mean, I've literally heard people say that.

That founder's not worth your time. That's what they say. All because you didn't keep them updated. And then you need that bridge round. Then you need extra money because you didn't hit your number or you got a bad beat or you got sued or something happened. Right? Your CTO or your salesperson quit. Maybe your big customer canceled.

And now the people who you took all that time to convince to root for you no longer root for you. That's the bummer, isn't it? And then you know what? You're probably going to start a second or third company. And now they're not going to root for you. Josh Williams of Goala. I invested, maybe 10K in Goala. They sold to Facebook. I think we eventually got like 10K back and some Facebook stock years later. I invested in the last guide. His second company didn't work out. And now he's doing Goala again. I invested at third time. Three times I invested in Josh Williams. I'll invest in him 30 times. Always kept me updated. Always kept me updated. Always kept me updated. Always kept me updated. Always kept me updated. I called me updated. I text him. He built a great product. Always was just the type of person you wanted to root for. Raoul from Superhuman. invested in reportive, he kept me updated. I call him, I text him, he responds instantly. Now, superhuman is doing great. He tripled my money on reportive, and now he's doing superhuman.

He's going to a thousand X my money, I'm convinced. I would bet on anything he does ever in his life. But he always takes the time to communicate, and you see it when Raul sends updates, not just to his investors, but he sends updates to his entire customer base. Not only updates on his product, but ways to be better founders. He has a little update list where he tells people how to be better founders. I'm beating a dead horse here. You need to stop what you're doing. If you haven't talked to your investors right now, you need to get out your grammarly, your Google Docs, your notepad. You need to write 100 to 500 words. Just do it. Even if it's hard. And don't write 5,000 words. Nobody wants a TLDR. Too long, didn't read. There is a direct

correlation between how many words there are in the update and how good the news is. It's a negative correlation. The more words there are, the less good news there is, right? The more good news there is, the less words there are. I've gotten the simplest updates fromcom. This month, I mean, I sometimes I just search for the updates fromcom.com and I start in 2017 and I just look at those emails. I get a big smile on my face. Thank you, Michael and Alex, and the team at com. I would just write back to them, unbelievable. Wow. And it would be a short update. This month, We hit this many subscribers for this much money. And I watched it go from slow single digits thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions to tens of millions.

And then now you probably get the idea. Companies got two commas and maybe someday they'll have three commas. Trace commas. Short updates being good news. Keep it tight. Tight is right. Get in the game and start writing right now. Today.

Not tomorrow. Today, tonight. If you're listening to this at 11 p.m. At night, I want you to. to write those 100 to 500 words to your investors, you sleep on it. Tomorrow morning you hit the send button, okay? Let's get to work, people. The new world of remote work is here to stay.

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Rippling lets you onboard new hires in 90 seconds. You can instantly set up payroll benefits and apps like Slack and GitHub, and you can ship them on work laptop with all the software and security they need. Inside loves Rippling because it takes a lot of complexity off. our plate so we can focus on more important stuff like sales and hiring and our key business. And now, thanks to Rippling's new PEO option, your employees can likely access better Fortune 500 level benefits for less than other platforms. So here is your call to action.

If you're looking for an easier way to run your startup remotely or just a better way to manage your H-R-N-I-T, visit Rippling.com slash twist. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G.com slash twist. All right, next up on the program, Jason Kelly is here. He is from a company called GinkoBi-WRex. Ginko Biow-Warks is doing really interesting things in synthetic biology.

Welcome to the program, Jason. Thanks, Jason. Two Jason's, though, by the way. Exactly. I don't want this to turn into like a Highlander situation or something. Exactly. Exactly. So let's talk a little bit about where synthetic biology is today.

I think if I were to describe it, there is this ability to edit genes now in order to make cells. And that is opening up a world of possibilities. And the other thing I know is like we did the human genome like in 2000 or something. Yeah. But that cost millions of dollars and took an enormous amount of time. But something has happened in the last two decades that has made this start to move towards looking like a software business more than looking like this biology business. Am I correct in my general description of synthetic biology today?

And what has changed over that 20-year arc? Yeah. I think you're correct even at a deeper level than that, right? So what's really cool about biology, like, once you get into it, is you realize the whole thing runs on digital code in the form of DNA, right? So which is just, I mean, just like, shocking, right? Like, like, think about it. Like, every plant and animal running around out in the world, like inside every cell in those organisms is a piece of digital code, right? It's ATCs and Gs,

it's not zeros and ones, but like, holy crap, it's digital, right? And, you know, and so what synthetic biology is is sort of accepting that fact and then saying, if we can just get better at reading and writing that code, and if you draw the analogy, if you can read and write code, and you have a machine that'll run it, which is sort of how we think of a cell when it comes to DNA, you're programming. Well, then we ought to build programming tools. And so that was the origin of synthetic biology

sort of like back 20 years ago, was a bunch of programmers and engineers coming into biology and being like, holy crap, it runs on code. Does that make sense? That makes, it actually crystallizes it really easily for me. But when we think about this, we built computers over some number of decades.

Now, we're actually getting closer to a century of building computers than we are decades. It's pretty wild when you think about it. Like the PC showed up in the late 70s, early 80s, and that is now 40 plus years from now. And then, you know, guys were working on those, you know, 50s and 60s, we're working on mainframes, etc. So if we start looking at the computer, we built that and we spent decades building it. But in a way, am I right in this analogy that we discovered. that nature around us wasn't just created by the gods or God, depending on what you believe, but there is actually computer code in it. So it would be the equivalent of Christopher Columbus

maybe showing up in the new world and finding a MacBook Pro and having to figure out how does a MacBook Pro work and what is it? What's inside of it? Is that what's happening right now? Yeah, that's a decent analogy. Yeah, I would agree with that. Except we also figured out like how to load bits directly into the MacBook Pro. We didn't have higher order programming languages or anything, but you could feed that thing zeros and ones and just see what happens. Right. And then, and you're like, have fun.

Right. And that's sort of where we are with biology today. It is, it is unbelievably powerful, right? Like, this is the other thing that is completely lost on people because they take biology for granted. Right. Like, you grow up with a pet dog. You got a garden.

You have all this stuff. Like, think about planting a seed, right? You had air, water, and sunlight. This thing freakishly self-assembles out of thin air, placing atoms, you know, with molecular precision, building solar panels, right? All for free, you know, with no manufacturing. So what kind of crazy technology is that, right? And again, I mean, seriously.

Like, like, think of it as a technology. It's just, I mean, and to me, it's always felt like it's, it's almost like it's alien technology, right? And your analogy is spot on what we figured out really in the last. you know, really starting in 78 with the invention of genetic engineering, the ability to basically cut and paste DNA from one organism to another that led to Genentech and human insulin and the beginnings of the biotech industry and then followed up in the early 2000s with the human genome project to start to read DNA at scale.

We got the ability to read and write into this kind of alien tech. And yeah, it's really powerful, but yeah, you're correct. We didn't design it. And so that's the core challenge of biological engineering. it's like a reverse engineering discipline. You're trying to understand how these things work because you know they can do amazing things if you could just put in the right code, right?

And so that's the, does that make sense in terms of the... It makes total sense. And when you look at that human genome that we sequenced 20 years ago and our ability to sequence it now, how much, how has that changed in terms of order of magnitude, cost and time? Because that was a multi-year project that we were being given updates on. It was like, yeah, any year now, we're going to finish.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. To do our human genome, how much would it cost to sequence it now? Yeah. So the first human genome, like, all in was probably about $100 million, if you think of like just the sequencing part of it. And today, Illumina is the U.S. company and then Beijing Genomics in China are sort of at around $100 a human genome.

So you've seen a one million-fold cost reduction in the last, you know, 21 years here. Right. So that puts Moore's lot of shame in terms of improvement rate. if you want to think of it that way. And if that would continue at any kind of a pace, it would be a dollar or essentially free. Yeah. It's going to be free to know my genome or yours. But now when we look at that genome, of the genome, what do we actually understand?

Because it seems to me that we understand just a fraction of what's going on in there. And then I wonder, how do we identify what is happening in each genome and in each gene? Yeah, well, let me make it. I'll make it even simpler for you. Take a, you know, you have a, you know, three, four billion, it's a four billion dollar, a philipillion letter genome. Bacteria is three million letters, right? It's like a little E. coli bacteria. It's a single cell, right? We don't know how that thing works, right? And the entirety of that organism is one cell. Okay. A human, your trillions of, you know, bacteria and your human cells and, you know, all interacting with each other. Like, the whole thing is it's complexity on complexity on complexity. complexity, right? And so, so no, you know, right? Like, wait, it is not. And in fact, like, just Jason, like, I like, like, we, we came, you know, the origins of the field, like back

when synthetic biology got going, like in the early 2000, like the modern form of it. It was a bunch of like engineers and computer scientists. There's a lot of early grounding in computational analogies like the programming I mentioned. But it's important to realize that while a cell is programmable, like a computer, in other words, you can put in different code. it is not predictable like a computer, right? Like, it's not even right now. It's not a giant clock, right? And so even as we seek to understand these things, just know you're not going to quite

understand them the way you think of a computer or a car, right? Because like, that's like there's too much human in there, right? We had to simplify those things because we're too dumb, you know, right? And so like we needed to like oversimplify it to make the engineering make sense. Like biology's had four billion years just to like work at this shit. And so they just the way it designs things and think about like, you know, think about your brain, right? You know, like everyone's always on about, oh, your artificial general intelligence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, we literally have that in biology sitting in your head right now.

It's running on like almost no energy. Like what is going on, right? And so the like the way that when we get in and understand biology better, it's not going to be a direct mapping to like how other engineering fields got built out, in my opinion. It's going to look different. Probably going to teach us how to design other things better. in my opinion, you know, think of neural deaths. I already like that. Yeah.

So in a way, our framework of thinking about the world, what humans are capable of conceiving of and keeping in our brains, biology might be more sophisticated than what we can even keep in our brains. Might be. I mean, this is the thing. Like, just look at it. It is. You know, right?

It just is. You know, it's our arrogance that prevents us from seeing it. But yes, it is. So in a way, it is like the universe. Like, we try to think that we know. what's going on in the universe through all kinds of different techniques, but we haven't even left our planet to visit another planet. We got to the moon basically or sent some probes to different places. So when we do flip switches, walk me through that process of starting to learn about a human

genome or even corn or, you know, a horse, whatever it is. Sure, sure. Yeah. How does that actually work? Like when you go to work in the morning, do you say like, okay, we haven't tried this section. Let's flip some switches here and see what happens. How do you go about discovering what can be done? Yeah. Okay. So I'll teach you to be like a novice cell programmer today, Jason. So you can go home and do some hacking later.

All right. So like I'll give an example of a project we have. We have a. And by the way, Ginko's business works is we're like cell programmers for hire. Got. Okay. Right. So I'm sitting in front of like a 200,000 square.

square foot compiler and debugger for genetic code here in Boston. It's like robotic automation doing what I did back in grad school. And then we use that machine to basically program a cell to meet a customer spec. And then we give it to them and we make money like, kind of like Apple would make money in the app store. Right. Like we get like a royalty or equity in their company or some reach into the value of the app. That's a fascinating business model. So what's an example of a company that sends you on a mission like this? All right. So there's a company called Kronos up in Canada. It's a Canadian Canada. cannabis company. All right. Altria owns like half of this company. And the way that you make

cannabis products today is you grow cannabis plants. Right. And so these guys, they got a giant, you know, like greenhouse up there in Canada and all this infrastructure. And you have to do this whole elaborate thing with the lighting and all this stuff to make, you know, it's little flour the bud. And then from that you're going to extract these cannabinoids that go into all kinds of different things, edible, whatever. All right. Well, that's, you know, those cannabinoids are made with biology. So just to state the obvious, there is code inside the cannabis plant. Yep. Defines the little proteins, which are like basically little pieces of nanotechnology that are

little chemists putting together the molecules that make like CBD, for example. Okay. And and so the, the plant builds that molecule using proteins encoded in the code of the plant. So you as the cell programmer who's been given the job of, hey, could we instead of having to grow all those plants run like a brewery, like you would use to brew beer, all right? And we're going to take brewer's yeast, and we're going to have it make the CBD.

And we're going to do it by basically taking the code that we learn from the plant and moving it into the yeast and having it read the code because it's cheaper to run a brewery than to have this giant greenhouse and all this stuff to make this little bit of oil. Okay? And so that's your source. spec, how do you do it? All right. Number one, look in the plant and find the part of the genome that produces those cannabinoids. And so there's like, you know, call it six or seven genes that are needed.

All right. Now, the first thing you might do is just cut and paste it. Cool. Grab it, print it, right? Which, by the way, like DNA printing literally means I'm like ATC, G, G, I'm typing my computer here. Hit print. And then out of a machine behind me or from a company like Twist Biosciences out in California, will come the piece of DNA you asked for. All right? So you get exactly, you read the DNA using DNA genomics. You found the code. You put it in the computer.

You hit print. Now you got it. And you open the genome of the yeast. So you might have heard of tools like CRISPR. Right? CRISPR is basically a tool to cut a genome at a certain location and open it. So you open it up. And then you put in that DNA you just printed.

And now you grow it in a cell and guess what it does? Jack. Nothing. It doesn't work. Okay. Right. So because you can't just cut and paste it in from the plan. Of course, that's not going to work. Right. So what do you have to do? Just like a computer programmer would, you got to debug that code. So you're going to go and you're going to look and you're going to say, all right, is the first gene the problem? The second gene the problem. The third, there's six of them. You know, what's one's the issue?

And you're going to use sophisticated like analytical equipment to like rip that cell open and look at what's being made. And you're like, oh, the third gene is the problem. Okay. Let's fix it. So you're going to go and look in these big genome databases. There's like big public genome databases. You could log on to it right now. It's called GenBank. And you'll put in that sequence and you'll say, hey, find me sequences that look like this from out in the wide world of nature. And you'll find a thousand other versions of gene number three. Put them in the computer.

Hit print. They'll come out. You'll put all those into the yeast and you'll see that version number 507, fix your problem. Okay? So now gene three is fixed. But guess what? Gene forced. it up. And you're going to go through that process, just like a programmer would,

iterating through ultimately, in our case, hundreds of thousands of designs until you finally make one that, just like Kronos announced last week, they're doing now commercial production of CBG, but like that hits what they want to hit to bring it to market. And so that's, that's an example of a cell programming project for a customer. And that's one, one scope. Yeah. The goal of this is to make that canniboid or CBD, whatever, in order to not have to plant a bunch of plants. Yeah, lower the cost of goods, more scalable supply, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, more control.

So we then, that's one example. That's one example. And then could we also then decide, well, we want to make a strain that doesn't make you tired, but that does give you creativity. It makes you less paranoid. Asking for a friend. Yeah, yeah, I know. I hear you.

Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the, there is a bunch of work on the therapeutic side of the house, actually. Because if you think about, you know, there are many classes. of medicines that come out of plant natural products, right? You know, so like, you know, the whole category of anesthetics, for example, a lot of those came out of plant opioid, things like that. And so, so like exploring around that molecular structure is something that you see

company starting to do pharmaceutically. For the recreational use, it's basically just use things that are already in the... Now, part of this is possible because some part of the process is being automated. Yeah. Tell us about the automation that's occurred and how much faster you can go today than maybe five years ago or 10 years ago. Yeah. I mean, so this is a lot of what Ginkgo's kind of core technology is. So like here's the, I'll tell you a funny story from back we're at MIT.

So one of my co-fathers is this fellow Tom Knight, right? And Tom Knight's like, you might, I don't know if you know the old school. Like he's an old school legendary like if you're scientists from like the hackers book era of, you know, like mini computer era. MIT AI lab the first time around kind of thing, worked with Stallman, the whole thing. And so, you know, Tom's lab, like he did computer, you know, taught the semiconductor design course for years. He started MIT in the early 70s. And in the 90s, he decides, cells run on code. I'm a good, you know, I've been developing programming tools. Like, I'm going to learn biology and try to help out. And so, like, Tom gets in and like gets his feet wet. But he would also attract all these computer

scientists who are like, oh my God, DNA is code. This is so cool, Tom. Like, let's do it. And Tom be like, great, there's the lab. I go there every morning and work all day long on trying to do this. And these people would go in the lab. And like two weeks later, they'd burn out completely. Because you're like, oh, my God, I ran an experiment today. And then I do the same experiment tomorrow. And I get a different result.

I came from a world of pure math and logic in computers. And like, this is not that. It is a nightmare. Right. And like we just flush out people. It feels like alchemy more than science. Oh, crazy. Yeah.

And it was enormously frustrating to that. And here's the reason Tom powered through it, by the way. Tom came from an era of computing where computers were like that. Tom wrote on punch cards. Yeah, he had to fix computers to make his code. You had to be an electrical engineer to be a computer programmer back then, right? Like Tom brought on mainframes, right? So the, you know, he's old enough to realize we like did a lot of work to make it as easy

to program computers today as it is. And he was like, it's fine. This is digital code. We'll power through it. And so one of the things we had to fix was that by hand lab work that was associated with like compiling and debugging code, Jason. Like literally, if you wanted to compile some code, it's like you're like a chef all of a sudden. It's like, get in the lab, do this precious protocol, do it exactly right. One mistake and it won't work.

And you're like, I just wanted to load some code in and see even if it was going to work in the first place. Right. And so what we've done is we've taken all those protocols and move them, standardize them. we move them on a robotics and automation, and we run it like a factory. So to answer your question, in five years, each year we've been roughly tripling the output of the facility and having the cost per lab operation annually. Okay. So two to the fifth better than we were five years ago.

Yeah. And so that and that's why we're now able to do millions of designs, right? Like the today compared to benchmarking with a scientist at the bench, we're about five to ten times cheaper on a per lab operation basis. And tell me without telling me the name of the customer, tell me a project that people came to you and you said, too soon. Not possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But come back to us next year or in two years and let's continue the discussion or, hey, we can do 10% of that.

Yeah. So there's a number of products. So if it's a, there's a lot of interest in the, in sort of like the petrochemical side of the world, like to move off. plastics and things like that. And like the cost point for a lot of that stuff used to make it infeasible. In other words, like it was just sort of like it's too inexpensive compared to the cost of fermenting. You need something higher priced like a cannabinoid or like a therapeutic or blah, blah, blah. And so I think that's starting to change. Like we're just, and in fact, it's not just changing because of the technology. You're also seeing consumer preference start

to fix that. Right. So like customer like you have certain brands we're saying like, I can't have this like spandex or like you know this stuff in my really high end product that you know like people don't like the microplastic the whole thing like we need to fix this and they're willing to pay more for it that I think that's going to start to pull that into existence. In a way that's what happened with the impossible burger you had people who are like I don't want to eat a cow I I am opposed to it on 20 years ago that product wouldn't have worked you know yeah and then now it's like if you told me people would pay three times as much for a burger that didn't taste as good as a burger and that was made from whatever soybeans. No offense

to people who love them. But it's not even close to a great hamburger. Yeah. It's well, I would say it's 70%. I shouldn't say it's not close. It's actually, I don't know. Where would you put it at in terms of like mouth feel and yeah, yeah, yeah. So I love it. I love burgers. Yeah. Exactly. So, so yeah, I used to get a burger base it every day. It was 15 bucks, right? Wasn't it 15 when they first came out in New York. And they were losing money at $15. Yeah. So here's the secret to the impossible burger, the reason I love it.

And I'll tell you about a company we've been working with to in this area. But like, so you bite into that impossible burger. And it is the best veggie burger I've ever had. Right. In other words, like it's no work. That's like a veggie burger you've ever had. Yeah, yeah. Better than a garden burger.

But here's the interesting part, Jason. You bite into it. Like you go to Burger King, Possible Whopper. It bleeds. Yes. And like, that's a little weird, right? There's not a lot of blood in plants. Like, how are they doing that?

And what Impossible has done exactly what we just talked about for cannabis. They took the yeast for like they used to make beer. They found the gene for hemoglobin, which is the protein that makes blood red. They put it in the yeast. They brew it up. Instead of beer coming out, heem comes out,

and then they add that to a veggie burger. And suddenly it smells right, taste right. It's possible whopper. Wow. It's because of that hemoglobin. So they basically made beer bleed so that we can feel like barbarians and wolves.

Without having to kill a cow. Yeah. Wow. Right. Literally we can rip. I mean, they could make us feel like cannibals again. We could go back. I mean, I know it's dark, but literally we could be.

I think you can sequence a human hamburger and be a cannibal. Haddable lector would not mean to be a serial killer anymore. It's so dark. That is dark. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you might go for like some more of like the out there animals first before you went straight. Yeah.

No, I mean, if you think about it. Eagle eggs or something, you know. Yeah. I went foie gras the other night, and I forgot how foie gras is made, not to be graphic. And I had a little bit of a crisis. Yeah, I always turned it down. Yeah, no, I don't like it. But I forgot.

You know, like, I hadn't had it in so many years. I was like, oh, foie gras. Matt Raoul's, let's go. I'm going to have the steak frets and the foie gras. Let's do it. And then I ate it, and I was like, oh, I shouldn't have ordered that. Yes. It was delicious.

But we can make foie gras. Guiltless. Yes. Guiltless foie gras is extraordinary. So I get the microplastics. and stuff like that. We have a company called Motif. There's a company that was built on our platforms.

One of the cool things that's starting to happen is like, you know this from the internet industry, right? But like back in the day, it was expensive to launch an internet company. Like you had to get servers and all this stuff. You had to rack them. Off front costs. Right. Let's go.

Yeah. Nowadays it's like nothing, right? Well, today with biotech, it's still that era of build your own servers. Like, oh, you want to go after like, you know, a new animal-free meat? Then, cool. open a 500 square foot lab, buy a million dollars of equipment, get all the, you know, right? Like get a bunch of labs supplies and all this upfront cost, right? And so what we're doing now at Ginko is we're saying, actually, if you want to start a new company, don't build any of that.

Just outsource it to our lab cloud here. We'll do it for you. And so there's a company called Motive Food Works that's basically making animal products, egg proteins, built proteins, but the things like we were just talking about. They started two and a half years ago on the platform. They just announced last week, they raised $226 million. Wow. Company's 35 people. They have no lab.

They've been using us the whole time. So you're like their Amazon Web Services, your outsource, yeah, cloud. It's so awesome. I mean, we had George Zachary on the program who's actually now retiring from Charles Drives Venture and is working on the company Wild Type, I think, making crispy salmon. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I know Wild Type. He said, like, the thing that they were struggling with with their salmon was it didn't

have the crispy, snappy kind of, you know, skin feel or whatever after being grilled. and that was their blocker. So your business model is to get a little bit of equity or a licensing fee when they make those things. Yep, you got it. Wow.

That would be like if Amazon Web Services was like, yeah, you can put Slack on here, but we just want 1% of your equity or 2% of your equity for it. Yeah, exactly like that. Yep. Let's go to ethics and morality here, which is where these discussions always go.

Yeah. There's no organization telling you, correct me if I'm wrong, you just crossed the line and there is no line officially or is there so yeah I mean there is in various ways so if you want to bring out a product there is a lot that you know there's a whole existing regulatory apparatus that wraps around that so like if impossible foods wants to bring out that burger with that hemoglobin they were going to go talk to FDA USDA okay so there is antiquated arch

for the real world or the non-synthetic biology world that is now being applied to this area. At the point of the product, yes. At the product point. Yeah, in other words, like once it's going to go correct. Yeah, in our lab, we have safety. Like in other words, it's like biosafety level. In other words, like, like OSHA. Lab safety.

Exactly. Like OSHA. Yep, there's OSHA. And then there is at the level of the DNA synthesis companies who are printing the DNA. There is a international organization that's basically, has like a list of things that you're not supposed to print. Okay? Like don't print smallpox, that kind of thing.

And so, and if something gets flagged off that, there's a cycle that goes to engage with government folks and stuff like that. And so that, that is one point of checking. But like at the end of the day, you know, the, you're going to see, I think synthesis is not, you know, it could end up on people's bench tops. It's not like, it's not a great way to limit it, you know. So I actually, I don't think that that's the strongest form of, like, we, been thinking about this a lot, like just to state the obvious, like COVID-19 was not a great event

for humanity, right? And so the- Or it was a great tipping point in humanity in that we realized with MRNA and with coordination, the world could solve a problem. So you could take the other side of it. I hear you on this. Yes. I strongly agree with this. Yeah. And so the, which by the way, like, you know, it's code, right? Like, this is the other thing that's amazing, an amazing moment for site biology, which is like, we suddenly have common language. around the world to talk about this. Like, people know what MRNA is. They get that, like, you know, it got us out of this mess.

Like basically having the cells in your body, read some code, make a protein turn on your immune system and, like, you get to go outside again, you know, right? Like that, that's actually very visceral and important, I think, coming up in terms of, like, how the public thinks about the ability to program cells, right? But to answer your question about, like, like, ethics, safety, security, I do think one of the things I'm hopeful happens in the context of COVID is far more robust biosecurity, right? So it's kind of like if you were to think about like PayPal with fraud detection or Gmail with cybersecurity, right? Like, biosecurity should come up right alongside our capabilities

to engineer biology in order to do this responsibly. And COVID represents a moment where it's like, well, it's a good idea to build this right now because it helps open economies. It helps avoid a wave in the fall. Like, why not? You have a perfect moment. to build out like really robust biosecurity tools that then, in my opinion, will serve us very well as we enter, you know, the next 50 years of making it cheaper and easier until your kids are programming cells someday. Like, we want to do that with robust biosecurity wrapped around us. And, yeah, I think we have a unique moment in the next two years to do that on the back of like vaccines and surveillance testing. With not to be hysterical or hyperbolic, but just on a pragmatic basis,

you know, we had COVID-19 sequenced very, very. quickly, published to the web, everybody knows what it is. The machine behind you cost a couple hundred grand. Um, and could somebody now a bad actor be able to just take that sequence and say, yeah, let's make it more viral and flip some switches. Let's make it more deadly. And how realistic is that? And does that keep you up at night? Well, I would say for now the tools like, like, there's been obviously a ton of discussion around this just in the context of like the lab and China and everything else, but like the whole category of like the gain of function research has been a hot topic in biosecurity for 25 years. It's not a new new topic, right? And so like I think

what I'm more scared of is I think because there hadn't, we haven't had an event of this magnitude when it came to an infectious disease since literally 1918. Right. Right. It's been like a hundred years since a virus put the whole world on its butt. Right. And you might have imagined that with like our modern infrastructure, we wouldn't be susceptible anymore. Right? Like that would have been a reasonable thing to think. I mean,

plenty of biosecure people didn't think that. But like, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, we didn't know anything in 1918. You're kidding me. You know, right? Like, think about it. And yet.

Here we are. Right. And in fact, arguably it's worse. Yeah. You know, yes, it is in certain ways, right? Travel, right? Like blah, blah. Right.

And so, so it's that, what I get more scared of is that is the awareness of the susceptibility. And then that means that you don't need fancy stuff. You just need to do the same sort of junk you could have done before, but now you feel like, oh, well, you might actually work if you're like a bad actor. And so, so that to me is another reason we want to

muscle up biosecurity is so that we reset back to a footing of like, you can try it, but it ain't going to work. You know, and then you have less incentive to try, right? It's different than nuclear because in the nuclear industry, you need planonia. What do you? What would you need? Platonium, whatever. You need

some fissile materials. There's choke points. There's choke points where the materials are hard to get at, but in biology, we don't have that equivalent. Correct. So then it would be licensing these machines and whoever made them. It's much closer to software. Much closer to software. Like you need to have like a footing that looks more similar to cybersecurity. Wow.

Which has been a total. And by the way, public failure. You know, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like like, like again, like the upshot of this, by the way, Jason, my view is in the interest of our national security in the United States, richest country in the world. We ought to just eliminate infectious disease worldwide. It's still killing millions of people every year, you know, in other countries.

Like, let us just build it. You know, like build the shield. Build like perfect biosecurity. It's just going to look like the ability to eliminate infectious disease. That's smart, right? Like that is a good defense footing. Yes, my opinion is. To build the dome. Basically, we can build a dome like Israel has, like against rockets. Yeah, but for the whole world. Because at the end of the day, you can't keep it out of your borders. We saw that, right? Yeah, I mean, we could have, I guess, shut down like New Zealand did and Taiwan and other places, but it feels like the world's too interconnected to do that. Now, in terms of your own, that's an incredible framework to look at it,

in terms of your own line, certainly somebody has come to you and you said, yeah, that's an interesting idea, but we don't want to participate in that for whatever reason. Yeah. What would be the things that with people came to and said, hey, we want to create this. And you say, you know, not for us. Maybe some other people have a different or ethical and moral line, but that's not for us. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, I think we're in a fortunate position where, like, worldwide there is a,

like a biological weapons convention. And I don't think there is like nation states developing weapons today other than, like, you know, rumors in North Korea and stuff like that, people that are really not playing by the rules. But that would be the brightest line. I think that's just like. But people haven't obviously come to you with that. So are there things, well, let me ask it another way. Are there things people came to and you said, yeah.

Yeah. The, um, so an example would be, uh, greening the process of making explosives. Greening the process of making explosives. So organic, free range bombs. Yeah. Yeah, because they make, you know, big, there's big super fun sites from when you go off to try to make, uh, you know, the chemicals that go into explosives, right? But it feels to me a little close to weaponizing biology to see more of it.

Wow. So, yeah. So a green bomb, like a military application. Correct. Yeah. And I think it's just worth making, like, in my view, the right play here. And again, this is like different domains, cyber, nuclear. You just, you need to approach them differently because they are different, right?

And so, so biology is like, you know, it's just, it's like a holy one, right? You know, like we're made out of biology. Like, just, just tread carefully, you know, right? Like, and so I thoughtful. I think there's like a, like, just a very healthy, like, just really keep a big bright line. We're like, we want to do is like, like, sink a ton into public health and make, like, a dome of public health security for the whole world that basically ends infectious

disease. And while it's at it, ends biological weapons. That's a great line of work. Wow. I mean, fantastic. What we don't want to do is, like, end up with an arms race, right? You know, right? Like, that's a mistake.

mistake. Yeah, because this isn't our track. We tried that. We did that before. Just remember, Jason, you're working with alien technology. So it isn't the same, right? Like, like, you don't know how far it could go because it's not yours, right? So that, that's the, that's why you don't want to go play there, in my opinion, like collectively on the planet. We got to be careful. You must talk about the movies like Prometheus and aliens and the engineers in your industry. Yeah. And I'm sure, really Scott, and when they wrote those, they came to folks like you to do their research. But it is like... That stuff's so cool. the movie Prometheus, I think, is such a masterpiece that nobody appreciates because it was just a little too heady and didn't have the aliens in it.

But when they drink that little fluid, when you were talking about a seed propagating, the first thing I thought of is the opening scene of Prometheus when they go to a planet, which is obviously Earth, spoiler alert, and the engineer drinks some fluid and decomposes into the river to start the cycle in on Earth. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of any weird bio movies in general. So what about, you know, it's pretty clear, like, if we're going to work on making a better burger, nobody complains, there seems to be really super easy decision to make. But what about when we start looking at the human body itself and start thinking about changing our genes and changing flipping switches? Yeah. Where are we at with that? And how does the market look at that?

because we did have somebody in China decide they were going to flip some genes in, I think a pair of twins in order to make them resistant to HIV, which seems like, wow, what a great idea. Yeah. Except you just freely admitted that, you know, maybe half the time you don't know what switches are going on

and you have to do multiple experiments, which, you know, we're starting to get into Frankenstein territory here. Yeah. Yeah, people ask about all the time. I mean, my basic view on this is, I think people underestimate how quickly, like, non-human cell engineering is going to become a big deal. Right. Like, it's getting so much faster and easier. Like, our whole, you know, like the majority of our world is physical, right?

And so, like, this is the programmable, like, in the same way, like, you know, a computer moves information around. It's programmable. So if you think about, like, what industries have disrupted, it was like, you know, media, telecom, finance. Well, it was all information-based, right? what didn't it disrupt hamburgers right you know because like hammers don't have that many bits in you know right and now the cells are programmable i said god you put different code in they do different things but they don't move information they move atoms and so they're going to go after all the physical goods industries you know food medicine you know uh building materials electronics like go down

the list right they're all biotech industries they just don't know it and so and so like i think there's like this big wave coming there that nobody really sees coming all they think about is medicine when they think biotech, but there's all these other things. Okay. But the human side, I honestly think people are going to be incredibly conservative there, right? Like, they'll, they'll use it for treatments. Like, there was just a great result earlier this week of a, uh, uh, or gene editing treatment that had a very good clinical trial result that suggests, you know, that that as a, hey, I've got a genetic disease. I take a drug that edits my gene and fixes that problem in my liver or whatever is, is actually looking very promising. That's exciting.

I think people do that left and right. I'll change the genes in my kid. I doubt it, right? Because it's your kid, you know? Right? Like, you know, you don't live with it. You don't have to get it wrong. Like, so there's a, there's such a bar to that and our lack of understand.

You know, like, people have immediately jumped to the gag of stuff. But like, I just think that's like a hundred years off. Whereas like all this. Really, a hundred years before we start messing with our own DNA and making ourselves tall or stronger, better, smarter. Yeah. I just think people aren't going to mess with their kids. That's what I think, yeah.

In an unpredictable way. Like, do you want yours to be the first? You know, right? Like, it's hard to test. And there's no, like, the predictability of it sucks, right? Like, so there's just a, I think it's going to be slower, that in my opinion. But I think the other stuff is going to be faster, right? And so it's going to get we're doing it with other living creatures.

And in, we are. So, like, are people taking insects or mice and flipping these genes? And what are we learning there? you don't do that. Like cancer has been cured many times in mice, right? Like, you know, like the, the, you, you, you, you do, they are a place to learn what might work in humans. I think that's accurate. But they are not perfect models.

And they certainly, again, aren't something that I think you'd mess with. You know, I think probably the best thing you're going to get is like broad human genome sequencing. So you're going to get all these little studies that like compare a bunch of people and on different genes. But like, even after you sequence everybody, it's just not that much data, right? You know, there's only so many, you know, what was, 8 billion people? Like, there's 8 billion data points across a three billion letter genome with all these changes, you know, right? And the complexity of a body that also includes your upbringing and 50 other things. And it's like, you just, it's too sparse, right?

It's like too sparse to bet your kid on. And so, so like, I think that makes it, it's going to take it longer than people think. So would it be unethical to then try to bring back, is the Jurassic Park question you get all the time on Thanksgiving or whatever holiday? it does seem probable that we could bring back some species, maybe not dinosaurs or Willie Mammots, but some. Yeah. Yes, I do think it's very probable. Yes.

I think you can get, and I'll make one last point because I thought of it on the human thing. The only other thing I would say about that one, just to keep in the back of your head, is like, it's also just a much bigger question. Right? Like, in other words, like, there's just a bigger societal conversation about that. That would need to come for it to also get off the ground.

You know, like, it's like, ask your priest. You know, like, it's like a, it's a more complicated topic because it's humans. We're really getting into that. Every other type of bioengineering doesn't have that problem, right? So it's like literally like the human piece is very unique. And then the rest of it is very different. There are also ethical concerns there, but they are supremely different than when, when you deal with humans.

I just wanted to flag that. But, okay. So, yeah, I do think that's actually worth meditating on for a second, which is there is a risk analysis and a cost benefit and then you get into morality. and should we even be messing with that and God and who created us? It does open up a massive can of words. Correct. But we don't actually think about increasing our joy,

increasing the experience of people who are not sick. It's really interesting in science how everything is about curing some disease or lowering some pain as opposed to increasing joy or making people more intelligent or making people happy or whatever it is. that's the one I always find peculiar I don't know about you yeah I mean we have a there's a lot industry focused on like trying to make us

more joyful yeah I mean I go back and forth on it right we have like we we have in medicine right and yeah yeah and and we have people are studying MDMA and like oh let's make people have more serotonin and yeah you know yeah it's interesting yeah I don't know I honestly feel like in a lot of ways our economy is like overly focused on that kind of stuff you know right like Like how much of the economy actually flows through like mostly trying to like entertain.

And you know, right? Like it's interesting. So I agree with you on the medical side. But I would say like collectively we spend a lot on that. So what about the willy mammoth? Okay. All right. Yes.

So you're definitely going to get a mammoth. I think, yeah, that's a very deal. That's a layup. That's a layup. Yeah. The dinosaurs are hard because they are too old. So like DNA doesn't last long enough. But birds are dinosaurs.

right so so like they they didn't die out they just turned into birds so it's like the raptor lineage is birds and so if you look at birds like they're close so so like the right the right change if you spend enough time working with birds you probably get one to look like a dinosaur yeah so that's the that's probably the shortest path you guys went public recently we're we're spacking yeah yeah talk about that concept because it it feels like you're very early um And is this, do people who are investing in a company like yours, should they look at it like a venture investment and really swinging for the fences? And how do you make that decision? Because there's an unlimited amount of capital in private markets right now.

You're choosing to go public where you're like the tip of the spear and like this new industry. How did you make that decision with it being too early or maybe it's great that everybody gets to participate in this? Yeah. So a part of it is that actually. Like, like, the, there hasn't been this model of like all the value accruing to the sort of like private investor community and not grow, you know, like, like, it's more recent phenomenon. It's more like a Facebook phenomenon than like an Amazon phenomenon, right? Like Amazon grew on the public markets, right? And so, so part of me is like philosophically wants to basically get more people in the public involved, you know, right?

Like, I think it's like, I think it feels good to me. And then it was, it was like our sector, in my opinion, right, is like, it's the right time to have. the public conversation, right? So, like, we're going to, so right now we're, we're, merging with this fact called Soaring Eagle. Uh, once the burger's complete, we'll trade under, like, the ticker DNA, which used to be like Genentex ticker. And like, which is like, I'm so proud. I was so cool. Uh, and like, like, this is it, right? Like, like, to me, like, I'm not going to, like, like, even COVID, like, push some of this. Like, we did a project with Mederna. Like, like, like, we've done a lot in the last year and a half around like, like,

like, like, vaccine supply chain, all the stuff. And like, I think there's like a moment right now where like the public is ready to hear about this stuff. Public market. are supportive of our industry. Like, we did a $775 million pipe. The Spax got $1.75 billion in it. Like, this gives us, like, ammo to scale the heck out of this place. And then we are inflecting. Like, we've just started to be announced to deal with biogen recently.

We're doing more and more in therapeutics. And so, like, I can use the capital, right? And so, like, it was like the right mix of. It felt like the right time on the investor side. It was good access to capital. And I like the SPAC because it was, like, faster, right? Like, the process was just like, the IPO process. I was going to like lobotomize my team for like the whole year.

And this was like we were done basically. And, you know, the pipe got done in two weeks. And then we've been mostly back to building things. And so like I liked it. Yeah. Who makes all the hardware you use? There's now from, correct me if I'm wrong, you know, if you're, if you're AWS, you don't have to make the servers or some, you know, in the AWS equivalent.

You know, there's somebody in Taiwan. There's somebody in, you know, India. And there's somebody in China competing to sell them servers, memory chips, you know, whatever it is, hard drives. And so has that happened in your industry where now you have people coming to Ginko and saying, hey, you know, we got a better one, faster, cheaper, you know, and what's that industry shaping up like the hardware side, the machines? For sure, yeah.

So there's a different halves of it. There's sort of like generic automation. So the good thing about that is we're increasingly climbing the automation curve of just industrial automation. Like it doesn't need to be lab automatic. You look at our new facility and it's like, there's like tracks, mag tracks with stuff flying around and green arms. And like, you know, it's all, it's all like much more like various automation taken from

even outside of lab automation just to drive scale. So basically what happened in factories to make products is now in the lab to do what you're doing. To do so, to compile and debug code, right? And then we do have like specific suppliers like Twist or Berkeley Lights, well, down in California who are like, we have really close relationships with them because we're their biggest customers by like a substantial faction. And so then we do co-developed, right? Like, we're like, okay, what can we do to make it, you know, better on the synthesis?

You know, right? And that is a little more of like what you're talking about where we do mutually beneficial. Yeah. Is there something out there that could become a massive accelerant in this whole space where we could see a huge jump in, you know, even beyond Moore's law? But is there something out there that could make all of this, you know, go 10 years faster or 100 years faster? that people are working on. I mean, well,

no, no, here's up, et cetera. Yeah. Here's the cool part about biology. So, okay,

we talked earlier about like, how you, you're a novice cell broker, like put that DNA in the genome, right? And you have to find a location, open the genome up, and put the DNA in.

And in higher organisms, like plants and animals, like I'll explain how we did it in plants for years. They had a thing called a gene gun, which was gold, Gold-plated nanoparticles with piece of DNA hanging on them, shot ballistically through a plant. They would go through the cell wall, hit the genome, like, cut it and like attach it in random locations.

It would be like kind of like loading code just at random locations in memory on your computer and hoping you didn't break anything. Literally. Okay. And so clearly that's not super efficient, but that was like the best we had. And we got, oh, I don't even know what the right number is. 100,000 times better at it a few years ago. Why? CRISPR. Did someone work on that? No. Someone found it. So the magic of biology. Remember, it's alien technology, Jason. What could make it go faster 10 years? Someone might just go in the freaking woods and find a piece of advanced technology. Like, it's wild. You know, and so there is crazy. Crazy. Just crazy. And so like, you know, being on the lookout for that sort of thing, I think it creates these like disruptive, like, accelerators. to the whole field. And like, even like, like, you know, like that DNA sequencer that

aluminum has that, you know, or like Oxford nanopore out in the UK, he's like, do these cheap genomes. You know what's in the middle of that thing? That Oxford nanopore, it's a protein nanopore. It is stolen from biology. Like the meat of this machine is actually a little protein that sucks the DNA through letter by letter. So it's like half biology, half electronics, right? You know, and so like that's where it's going, right? Does that make sense? It makes total sense. So knowing what you know about biology, do you think there is, you know, when we look at alien life, we look at the Goldilog zone, you know, it has to exist at this temperature, et cetera. Do you think we actually are correct? And where would you stand on extraterrestrial life and life in the universe?

Oh, it's got to be life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't need to, do you think it has to exist? Do you think it needs to exist in the zone that we can comprehend, i.e. we kind of believe it has to exist in this temperature range. It has to exist on these planets, etc.

Like, you know, in these conditions, oxygen, etc. Yeah, I don't, I'm not enough of a student of that to know. Yeah. But, you know, like, I think, I think you basically get to call life anything that replicates and passes information, I think probably digitally, but at least with high fidelity to its offspring. And like, if it can do that and it can mutate. We're off to the races.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Listen, continued success. It's amazing to have you out there working on this. Thank you for making better plants, et cetera. And G, oh, you know, I didn't ask you about GMOs. You know, you got all these people in Europe and hippie-dippies here in America who are like, it's GMO, it's bad.

But we've been modifying stuff like hybrid and corn for thousands of years, I believe, to make the, you know, corn more productive. And we did it with animals and livestock. Yeah. How do you look at GMOs and if you're genetically, you're genetically modifying stuff as the core of what you do is anti-GMO. We print more DNA than anywhere on planet Earth. What do you think about that anti-GMO kind of moment that we've had for the last, whatever it is, two or three decades?

I mean, in Europe, they ban GMO foods in certain places, right? I, we think about it a lot. Yeah. So I'll give you, and by the way, like we have, you know, We have a $100 million joint venture with bear crop science to engineer microbes to produce fertilizer for crops as an example of like one of our cell programming projects, right? And so, so like we do do stuff in ag. It's a great industry.

I remember there's like a GMO labeling debate like five years ago in the U.S. about like whether there should be a national label. And so at the time, it was like, all industry, no, no, no, no, no. And like I did a New York Times editorial that was like, I run a GMO company. I think we should label GMOs. And the idea was like the scientist and engineer view is like, hey, these things are safe, which, you know, there's been a trillion meals eaten, like, you know, like, we just need, like, we just need to educate people or another safety study that they'll just have to understand it.

But it isn't an issue of like, of like safety. It's an issue of trust, right? Like there's a powerful technology being deployed. Do you trust the people deploying it to be acting in your interests? And when you frame it that way, well, what's one of the best ways to eliminate trust is to be like, oh, yeah, hey, I want to know, is this in my food because I'm going to eat it and give it to my kids. You're like, no, I'm not going to tell you, you know, right? Surprise.

Why? Because it's so safe that you shouldn't have to know. You know, right? And it's like this crazy illogical, you know, and so then of course we passed GMO labeling and people bought more GM, right? Like, you know, like it's only gone out. Like after they passed it in Vermont and stuff, like the amount people were buying increased because like the, like the, and so our view on things is like, like, like we have like I heart GMO shirts. Like it's like we should be proud of it. Like, and the kind of person. Like, like, you should have eye heart like nuclear power shirts. Like literally the no nukes concert, which was a fantastic concert. Like there's a lot of great people who played it. Yeah. Like set. back the environmental movement and obviously contributed to global warming. Yeah, I mean, my view, I mean, my view, I mean, literally deprecated the best way to fight global warming in all likelihood. Yeah, it is a very interesting thing. Yeah. I mean, I think like the, my view on it is the

kind of person who wants to see this label, who cares about what's in their products and in their food, is ultimately the person who is going to want more cell engineering. Right? Because biology is just a better way to make stuff. Right? Like if you think about how we did it with the Industrial Revolution, we basically dig a hole in the ground, extract something, oil or some amount of material, run it through a big factory, use it for a little bit and then throw it in the landfill. And our whole big plan is like the hole will never run out. Yes. You know, right? And like, whereas biology for four billion years has been making just, I mean, more stuff than any of our other industries. Think about like global jungles and everything. Biology is amazing manufacturing.

It's actually plays well with the planet. And like, we should just use it to make everything. And the answer is like, well, once we get good at programming it, we will. And those kinds of folks will be the first people in line for it because it makes everything renewable, right? Literally the same group that would be complaining about GMOs are the ones going and ordering the Impossible Burger. And that's a great thing.

And it's because Impossible was transparent about it. And they brought people along and they gave them something that meant something to them, you know, right? Like, that's the way to do it. We really have to educate the public. on this because they literally don't understand, you know, these new nuclear power plants that Gates are working on or exactly how safe they are or GMOs, like, you literally are working against your own best interests and the best interests of the planet.

Yeah, I would say that the root of it is to figure out how to get them, is to how to build trust, right? Like, and interestingly, it's not always education, right? Because like, if I'm like, hey, I'm going to educate you. I'm sort of saying like, you're dumb. You don't know, I'm smarter than you. You're a dumb. Right. And what really they're like is, no, bro, I don't trust you. You know, right? Like, and, and so like, that's the, that, that was a big learning for me that I was taught by the team here at Ginko, honestly. Like, you know, and our folks on our. And building trust is about what then? Transparency is a big one. Yeah. And then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, and then, you know, I mean, it's just people, I couldn't believe after Fukushima.

like Germany, it's like, yeah, we're going to turn off our nuclear power. I know, it's sad. I know. It's like they built it below sea level against all, you know, advice they were given. And it's like the oldest, you're talking about a design from the 60s. Like, things evolve. Like the airplanes we flew in in the 60s are different than the ones today. Yeah, I hear you.

I hear you. All right, listen, continued success. Thanks for doing this work for society and humanity. And, yeah, I love to check in with you in a year or two and see how far you get. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, if you're out of Boston, come give you a tour. Absolutely, yes. I love Boston. I haven't been there since the pandemic, but I was there right before it and God, had some great food too. Yeah. All right. We'll see you next time on this weekend service. Bye-bye.