Biofounders

>FASTA: weekly short reads of the global biotech ecosystem | Papers and patents, acquisitions and bankruptcies, biotech philosophy | Read in under 5 min | Follow on LinkedIn, X, and now Instagram too! | Versión en Español

Pilgrim is proud to sponsor >FASTA! We’re developing the next generation of military medicine to meet the operational demands of modern warfare—moving beyond theory and bringing biotechnology from the benchtop to the battlefield.

1/10: ViaGen clones polo mares 🐎

2/10: Threesome IVF babies 🧫

3/10: In-ovo matriarchy now in stores 🐣

4/10: Helania’s athletic lactoferrin 🍼

5/10: Kascaid wants your interstitial fluids 👀

6/10: AstraZeneca pledges $50M for US biomanufacturing 💵

7/10: Puna Bio goes international with the Gates Foundation 🦠

8/10: Plants vs microplastics 🌱

9/10: Alphagenome 🧬

10/10: Augmentation Lab's Hacker Houses 🧠

Poets: What happened to biotech DAOs?

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Onye Ahanotu—scientist, artist, scholar, home chef, material architect, and founder of Ikenga Wines, a company reimagining palm wine, a drink with thousands of years of cultural depth in the global south. He previously worked at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and remains an active board member of the Counter Culture Lab in Oakland.

In today’s episode, we talk about:

* How his former interdisciplinary experiences shaped Ikenga wines

* How palm wine is actually made and supply chain resilience

* Balancing traditional with progressive knowledge in the wine industry

* Why he was using GPT tech before ChatGPT was launched

* Brand positioning and business model for Ikenga

* Why he’s choosing to build his brand slow and methodically, as opposed to going the “build fast and break things” route

* Challenges approaching foodtech VCs with a truly unconventional product

* Owning a small niche vs going for a well tested and huge market (Blue Ocean strategy)

Biofounders: fun conversations with unconventional founders, biohackers, CEOs, and investors you haven’t met yet, but definitely should | Follow along on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram

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Timestamps

* 00:00–01:58 Intro: BioFounders, Biopunk, and Onye Ahanotu

* 02:01–03:50 Interdisciplinary Product & Brand Thinking

* 03:51–06:59 Founding Origins & Prior Experience

* 7:00–09:00 Challenges of Palm Wine Commercialization

* 09:01–12:00 From Biology to Wine Chemistry

* 12:01–14:00 Supply Chain Resilience

* 14:01–15:30 Sensory Design & Winemaking Philosophy

* 15:31–16:55 On Using GPT Before ChatGPT

* 17:46–20:22 Brand Positioning & Target Customers

* 20:23–21:49 Business Model: DTC, Preorders, Wine Club

* 21:50–24:14 Social Media & Brand Expression

* 24:15–26:30 Line between engineered and natural wine

* 26:33–28:16 Why Not Make Grape Wine?

* 28:18–31:14 Climate Change as an Opportunity for Leapfrogging

* 31:15–35:09 VC Challenges & Blue Ocean Strategy

* 35:10–36:47 Food Trends, Cultural Shifts & Future Bet

* 36:48–End Closing Remarks & Founder Advice

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By day, Nick is a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Ueli Grossniklaus at the University of Zürich. By night, he is a flower engineer and artist on a mission to communicate the beauty of plant science to the public through educational projects… you may recognize him as the guy who genetically engineered Arabidopsis flowers and leaves to have different colors and shapes.

In this episode:

* Where do you draw the line between art and science?

* Can we build flower design LLMs?

* Could we engineer interactive, responsive, moving plants?

* How can we epigenetically reprogram plants?

* What future plant biotech tool would you be the most blown away by?

* What are Nick’s next steps in his educational projects?

* What are the craziest ideas to make with plant engineering?

* How is biology different to other expression media?

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Thanks for following the Biopunk! Please share this episode, there will be new ones every week ;)

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Senseory is a startup creating plants that bring natural, effervescent aromas indoors. This is an interview with Gigi Minsky, the co-founder and CEO. We talk about her previous experience at companies like Ginkgo Bioworks, her business plan for Senseory, working with a plant biohacker, and the product's most important technical specs (what they can say for now). Enjoy my intro on why I think companies Senseory are the future of consumer biotechnology.

Thanks to Elliot Roth for kindly providing the space to record and thanks to Gigi for helping me experience the biotech they’re creating :-)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.biofoundershq.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.biopunk.life

Myriam es ingeniera en biotecnología por el Tec de Monterrey Campus Toluca, y Maestra en Ciencia de Plantas por la Universidad de Bonn en Alemania. Fundó Bosky, el primer laboratorio de micropropagación/cultivo in-vitro en Toluca, para el cual obtuvo apoyo del COMECYT y con el cual fue finalista en el concurso Falling Walls México.

En este episodio hablamos de:

* Lo más valioso de haber estudiado biotecnología en el Tec y qué le cambiarías si tuvieras una "varita mágica"

* Por qué trabajar en biotecnología de plantas

* Cómo empezó Boski

* Ambientes laborales y de investigación en Alemania y Canadá

* Cómo obtener apoyo del COMECYT y cómo es venderle al agricultor Mexicano

* Crear contenido y cursos como otra fuente de ingreso para Bosky

* Inteligencia Artificial para la biotecnología

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Sígueme en Twitter como @SofiasBio y en LinkedIn como Sofia Sanchez.

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Checa el trabajo más reciente de Memo en esta nota.

Suscríbete gratis a Biofounders y Biopunk para conectarte al primer mundo de la biotecnología mediante newsletters, videos y podcasts.

Sigue a Sofía en Twitter o LinkedIn para platicar sobre startups, biotecnología, o filosofía.

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Episode highlights in 5-min video

* MeliBio started as a precision fermentation company yet pivoted towards a plant-based product to avoid remaining as a “garage science project” for too long, without fulfilling their mission.

* Darko experienced first-hand the hurdles of building not one but two manufacturing facilities in his previous jobs. He’s now outsourcing that for MeliBio and focusing on building a great team that improves the science and the brand for their customers.

* Coming from a place of scarcity of resources, Darko is the only biofounder I’ve heard talk about the importance of using venture capital as a launchpad, which means making the right decisions to reach profitability.

PS: HAPPY 4th-year BIRTHDAY, MeliBio 🥳!! Looking forward to trying out Mellody on my pancakes very soon 🍯.

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It’s 5:00AM in Toluca when Sofia Sanchez wakes up to the sound of her Westclox, ready for another day as a business major. She drives to her hometown’s business school, listening to the radio, wondering what her professor’s reaction will be to the 76-page final report she wrote with the help of her beloved IBM Selectric, her worn-out Chartpak stencil, her family’s encyclopedia, and Mexico City’s IBM center for some calculations. She makes a stop at a phone call station to remind her teammate to correct the finger mistake on the cardboard they made about some ultra-innovative “personal computing” devices her uncle in the US once told her about. Not much more is to be said about Sofia Sanchez. April 1st, 2024 was just another day for a normal 20-year-old in a small town in Mexico.

Thank Lick it’s April Fool’s!

“How do the current and next thing get determined?” was the question that gave birth to this piece. Whether they’d be ideas, beliefs, fonts, or technologies, I’d been deeply curious to understand the nature of trends in our world. I wanted to know if there were principles for steering the world towards a particular direction, and whether I could use those principles to change the way biotechnology changes the world.

For the past few weeks, I’ve explored J.C.R Licklider’s visionary mind, Everett Roger’s theory on the Diffusion of Innovations, René Girard’s Theory of Mimetic Desire, and the desires of GenZ influencers on Instagram. This piece is a third batch of thoughts at the intersection of culture and biology, this time focusing on how biology can influence modern culture as much as modern culture influences biology.

The Presynbiotech Era

The habitants of the terrifying alternate universe I described in the very first paragraph, are firm believers that the future is merely what hasn’t happened yet but eventually will. To them, technology equals destiny and evolution is synonymous with inexorable. What we, in this universe made happen in 30 years, they might start dreaming about in 60.

To yours and my own fortune, 5 years prior to the birth of Moore’s Law, Man-computer symbiosis was published by J.C.R Licklider (Lick for us friends). While Moore had made an accurate prediction on how far we could take computers, Lick set a clear vision and agenda for how personal computers and the intergalactic network would become the new medium of creative expression: how tech would change culture.

Lick dreamed about everything from Zoom to PayPal, Instagram, and the iPad and he led the development of early versions of them. Slightly paraphrased, one of my absolute favorite passages in the Dream Machine book answers how he did that:

Lick knew he couldn’t get it all done in one year or two years or a lifetime. By creating a community of fellow believers, however, he guaranteed that his vision would live on after him. When he arrived at ARPA in 1962, there was nothing more than a handful of uncoordinated efforts scattered across the country. By the time he left in 1964, he had forged those into a nationwide movement with direction, coherence and purpose. By putting most of the money into universities, he supported the rising generation, whose hearts and minds he won and convinced that computer science was an exciting thing to do. In 1988, that community was the one thing that he was willing to take credit for: “I think I found a lot of bright people and got them working in this area”.

Of course, we would be doomed too if the world was only full of dreamers like Lick! We need builders like Alan Kay who build them to life and artists like Steve Jobs who steal from them and bring the tech to everyone once it’s cheap enough. Call it lack of vision, bad management or timing, neither Intel nor H&P nor Xerox nor IBM capitalized on their decades of technological advantage over the garage hackers. Yet the garage hackers didn’t invent the tech alone; they more so put the puzzle together once the pieces were there. Dream, build, sell.

Today, we are living in the Presynbiotech Era. It is a time before ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence-engineered life, a time before the worlds of silicon and carbon intelligence truly fuse as one.

Oddly enough, I have not yet encountered a clear 50-year dream of the social paradigm shifts that we will create through biotechnology. If no one’s even dreaming, how will we arrive at a different future❗❓

Computers have changed the way we think. Synbio will change the way we feel. There will not only be dinosaurs, but UBERs, TikTok marketplaces and AirBnBs. We will have new kinds of enhanced humans of mixed sexes, races and talents, iPlants that act as programmable vending machines where I can buy anything from on the street, an axolotl-turtle hybrid that wakes me up in the morning and cleans my bedroom, and expresso machines that use personalized capsules that keep track of and maintain each one of my biomarkers in place. End of famine, disease, poverty and war too.

The fact that we even start thinking of a Pre-synbiotech Era means that we can start dreaming about a Synbiotech one. If you’d been waiting for a call, here you go: I’m calling YOU to share more audacious, truly crazy, dreams of a Synbiotech future, for those who look back on these dreams 50 years hence might as well be living them.

And surely, remember: had the world waited for Lick to sell iPads, you would not be reading this either. Dreams matter as much as execution and you truly can learn anything. So if you enjoy building, go for it. Real artists ship.

Today’s weirdos are tomorrow’s basics

In his Theory on the Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers defines innovation as anything that is perceived as new by someone. He categorizes the adopters of an innovation into 5 main groups, according to influential power, risk aversion and the resulting order in which they adopt: the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—A business school all-time favorite.

The graph is so good that reading the whole book won’t get you much farther than: 1) it’s early adopters (aka influencers) and not innovators who bring innovations to billions; 2) though anyone can be an influencer, the closer the better; 3) the who matters more than the what.

The theory checks as I go back to my latest purchasing and habit decisions. For example, I’d heard about the WHOOP band from Bryan Johnson, Steve from Diary of a CEO, other macro influencers and numerous YouTube ads, but I was only convinced enough to buy it until I interacted closely with a user I could relate to: a young, female, Mexican bioengineer who’d graduated from the same university where I study.

Something that Tesla has left clear too, is that innovators and early adopters can absorb the cost of being first. They are not only helping spread the technology by providing feedback and generating revenue but by modeling that desire to the early majority that relies on and admires them.

Where Rogers falls short and Girard goes deeper is in the actual dynamics between influencers and followers. What I learned from reading about the Theory of Mimetic Desire is that, in our quest for personal differentiation, we look up to people whom we can relate to, who are looked up to by people like us AND who have something we still lack.

The most obvious examples of influencers are early adopters like Bryan Johnson and Steve. The more subtle yet more powerful influencers are people like the bioengineer with the WHOOP who had something I wanted (being perceived as a healthy person) while still being relatable.

Lick’s dreams have come to life to such an extent that being an internet influencer is no longer exclusive to elites. The rise of the microinfluencer (<100k followers) is a whole case study, not only of a shift in the distribution of goods but a paradigm shift of trust from the system towards the individual (which Lick’s visions quite promoted too). I, a GenZ girl, no longer care for what Walmart might put on TV or even YouTube ads but tell me about the 20-second reel of a microinfluencer on her Sunday trip to Walmart and I’ll buy the thing just as I bought the WHOOP.

“The thing” only matters to the innovators and the early adopters, the masses only care about who is modeling it. One day you buy the story of Zuck and Thiel dropouts, the next you buy YC’s and PG’s of staying in school. Stupid TikTok trends go viral and waves of Web3, LLM and VR founders come and go. Why, then, wouldn’t we be able to make culturally viral biotechnology once it’s ready?

In all non-pharma biotech, I consider myself an early adopter (and aspiring innovator) of ideas. While all opinion leaders are early adopters, however, not all early adopters are opinion leaders. The key to innovations crossing the chasm towards the early majority is in opinion leaders (aka influencers). I think biotech in particular, needs translators: people lying at the intersection of innovators and early adopters. Translators understand the science well enough to SHOW and SELL it to an early majority of niche influencers who will take it to the masses. In the best case, they are founders with amazing products who are also great storytellers.

Idea-grown bioeconomies

People are freaking making live sales on TikTok, snacks are the new autographs, the young are heavily steering towards lifestyles of running more than drinking and subscribing more than we owning. Sustainability and diversity are on the agenda and actions of major corporations, and social media is the new search engine not only for products but for people starting communities and friendships that are URL-first and IRL-second.

Knowing stuff like Moore’s law for DNA gets you to build Ozempic. Knowing where culture is headed (and where it’s not) gets you to design the right thing in the first place so that billions actually use it. It gets to to understand the power of making pilots with [farmers] who are also influencers who can model your product to their followers, at scale. Replace farmers with your customer.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need less videos of adayinthelifeofanivyleaguephdstudentpipetting and more lab and startup tours of [Living Carbon], explaining step by step how they make their [superplants]. Sexy Instagram pics of that [superplant] in my nice millennial-styled home. Replace Living Carbon and superplant for 500 startups doing cool s**t like that.

Though I’m mostly talking about consumer biotech here, vaccines like moderna’s, GMOs like BT maize and cotton, recombinant insulin, and algae-derived Omega-3 all needed someone to be convinced to even begin production and eventually reach massive consumption. Sometimes that someone is a policy-maker, as is the case of Mexican officials who ban GMOs.

Ideas can inspire products that grow bioeconomies. To change how biotechnology changes the world, how biotech influences our culture, I shall share my Synbiotech dreams with biotechnologists as much as I translate and show what they build to the early majority so we all can live in the future, in a different future.

“I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one” — Ayn Rand

Thanks for reading S🧠FIA! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

PS: In OUR universe, at 5:00AM, a young Sofia Sanchez wakes up to the vibration of her WHOOP band, ready for an extraordinary day as a future biological technologist. She nurtures her mind by listening to the brightest minds from around the world on podcasts, and connects with friends creating the future on something called X. She wrote down this article on her beloved MacBook Air and sent it to nearly 500 hundred people via an intergalactic network. April 1st, 2024 was a new beginning in her journey to bring exceptional biology into the hands of billions ;)

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Majo es actual investigadora en UCSF. Es iGEMer de corazón, ayudó a empezar Compound Foods (alternativa sustentable para el café), y estudió en el TEC de Costa Rica. Me da mucho gusto que podamos compartir contigo sus fascinantes e inspiradoras experiencias!

Mis links:

* Twitter

* LinkedIn

* Substack (blog)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.biofoundershq.com/subscribe