The really great companies, like the really meaningful stuff, takes fucking forever. If you look at OpenAI, those guys were just grinding in obscurity for a while, like a lot of people saying that that wasn't going to work. Like it was like what, six or seven years before ChatGPT? That's like what it takes. Same thing, like you look at Microsoft, same way, Amazon early days, right? Like you just... like the big ideas, like if you feel like the thing you're doing is going to work out real quick, it's probably not that important.
How's this last year been? How are you over these last year or two? Like, if the volatility of the company, meaning from the outside looking in, has anything to do with how you... like if what I can see from this roller coaster ride, which is insane, is anything like what you feel on the inside? That would be too much for any man to bear, like being a public company and then going through all of this right now. It's insane, isn't it?
Yeah, I don't know. I'm like so... I mean, Ginkgo, private company for a long time, right? So we started the company in 2008. We bootstrapped for five years where we had basically no money, no venture capitalist would invest in us. We were buying all our equipment on eBay. Then we did YC in 2014 and sort of scaled there more like a traditional growth company. It's so much more relaxing than the first five years of Ginkgo, like I can't even tell you, you know. Yeah, I think when you're a founder of a company and you've been with it from the point in time where things were really always on the edge, nothing is like that again after you get the ball rolling. You have more external scrutiny, but like when you're in the seat, external opinion is not what matters, right? Like what matters is the reality, and so you feel that more viscerally. We've been through a lot of stuff, so yeah, this stuff is actually relatively easy in comparison. The first like five years or so when you're kind of toiling away in relative obscurity or absolute obscurity.
So you're kind of just doing your own thing, as opposed to today when you're a public company, the largest biotech IPO ever. Like it just going from one to another, I guess I'm a little surprised to hear that this is chill, relatively speaking.
It's kind of funny, right? Like a few things that surprised me about taking the company public. People sort of assume that your life is dominated by what investors think or the share price or something like that. But I think if you're, again, if you're a founder-led company that more or less knows what you want to do, you're very insulated from that stuff, right? I think the reality is like a traditional company, you know, you bring in a CEO, you know, they're a hired gun, their job is to do X or Y, whatever, a three-year period or maybe a five-year period on the outside, because that's as long as they're going to work anywhere in that role. They are very much like driven by the spirits of whatever the hell is happening in the moment in the stock market or whatever. But I'm sure that's not how it felt at Microsoft. I'm sure it's not how it felt at Amazon even in '99, you know, right? Like the companies that are actually trying to do a big thing over a long period of time led by people with a long-term vision, like they just don't give a shit about that stuff. That's just the reality. They need to care if there's something that puts in danger the fundamental objective, right? You know, like the fundamental objective is to build a huge company that makes biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo. If something was actually putting that in jeopardy, I'd have to freak out. But external noise doesn't put that in jeopardy, right? It puts it in jeopardy if you need to raise money and you can't, right? Which is not our situation. It puts it in jeopardy if your customers aren't happy with you, which ours are fine, right? Like there's various things that actually put it in jeopardy, but like that whole other stuff is just not it in a company like this. I do think it happens though, you see it a lot with like more hired-gun leadership where they're just like chickens with their heads cut off, responsive to the flavor of the week and stuff. But yeah, it's just less... I think it's less the case when you have a founder-led company.
Yeah. When you were growing up, is this the story that you've recreated because it fits so perfectly into the Ginkgo narrative? When you were young, you used to watch Jurassic Park. Is that actually true?
Well, yeah. I mean, I'm of that generation, right? So I think Jurassic Park came out in like '94 or something, right? And I was 13 years old. And you know, it's funny, like I was at a meeting with Feng Zhang, who was like one of the inventors of CRISPR, the guy on the MIT side of the house. He was on stage like, 'Oh, what got you into all this stuff?' I was like, 'Oh, Jurassic Park.' Because there's a whole generation of like bioengineers that are now in their early 40s that are... I'm telling you, it's like nine out of 10 are a product of Jurassic Park, because things like that inspire you, right? You know, like you have this moment as a kid, and then you know it has to then be a thing. Like I'm sure there was other things also that happened around then that could have inspired me in different directions, and I didn't find that it was an area that also caught my interest. But this did, and then it was just good timing, right? Like it was kind of like this... I mean, I can tell you more of the story, but like you know, from there I was able to keep doubling down on that. But yeah, that was how it started.
Why is that the inspiration? For those listening to Ginkgo today, like how do those two things fit together? Look, let me explain what Ginkgo is, because most people in the tech world have no idea. You might be the coolest, least well-known company that I've ever studied.
Yes, and there are a variety of reasons for that, actually. But people don't realize just how much software has taken over venture. When people think tech, when they think venture capital, when they think fast-growing companies, they just think software, software, software, software. Anything that's not... it's not just Ginkgo, like any interesting company. Even think of the early days of like EVs, right? Like there was years where people didn't know Tesla was like something. And look what Elon's had to do to just get anything that's not software onto the radar. He has to like literally act like a crazy person all the time. So you have this like myopia in the tech community that really orients on software. So we aren't well-known. We don't make software, but we do program. So we program DNA is the idea behind Ginkgo. And the way you can get this in your head is, you don't have to be a biologist to understand this, but if you remember high school biology, if inside of every cell, which is like the fundamental building block of all the biology out in the world, is a piece of DNA code, every single one. And that DNA code defines what that cell does. It defines how it builds itself. It defines what it eats and what it turns the things it eats into, and all that. All the functions of biology are at the end of the day encoded in that DNA code. And the magic is, even though it's A's, T's, C's and G's instead of zeros and ones, it's like a linear, effectively digital code. That's crazy, right? Like you have a physical substrate, right? In other words, a thing that grows and breathes and moves that's encoded digitally. Your car is not really encoded digitally. Like I can't go in there and change a bit and the wheels change color automatically. That is how biology works. It is encoded digitally in the physical realm. And so a lot of what we're trying to do at Ginkgo and in the broader field of synthetic biology is to bring a lot of the learnings from programming code in the world of computers, which is virtual, right? It's all about bits, into programming in the world of atoms via biology. And so that's what we do at Ginkgo. And our business model, taking a page from tech, is very much like Amazon Web Services. We build, and we can get into the technology, but I've got 300,000 square feet of highly automated robotic labs, they look cool as hell, that are basically building DNA, putting it into a cell's genome, testing what it does, so that our DNA programmers can design cells for customers. You know, we work with Novo Nordisk and Merck and Biogen on developing... we just did a deal with Pfizer for RNA drug discovery, for drug cell programming. But we also work with Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva, the largest ag biotechs in the world, for programming DNA for plants and agriculture. And we work with fragrance companies to program cells for making fragrances. And we work with cannabis companies, engineering yeast cells to make cannabinoids. You can like brew cannabinoids like you would brew a beer. All of those are like apps, and we're sort of an AWS behind the scenes that lets those companies program cells for all those applications. That's the business of Ginkgo. And when it comes to Jurassic Park, I can get into that in a second, but does that make sense on the general business, from like putting a tech filter on it for a minute? Bio people don't like when I describe it that way, they're much more like biology purists, but like for a tech person, that's probably the best way to think about Ginkgo.
Yeah, it does make sense. Go into the Jurassic Park thing.
All right, okay, I'll give you Jurassic Park. So Jurassic Park's the greatest movie about biotechnology ever made. Although there's a new movie called Vesper that like nobody has seen. It's like kind of like a low-budget, really cool, artsy movie that is freaking amazing. I highly recommend it. It's like the best thing I've seen since Jurassic Park. So if you're like a kid today and you see Vesper, you're gonna end up being a bioengineer. Highly recommend it. But anyway, Jurassic Park. Why is it the greatest movie for biotechnology? It does two things that are really important to communicate about what's so amazing about bioengineering. The first is wonder for biology. Okay, like remember that scene where they pull up on a hill and like Grant sticks his head out of the Jeep and he looks out and there's like a Brachiosaurus like over by this lake, and he puts his glasses up and it's just like, yeah, believe it, it's a dinosaur.
Uh-huh. You did it, you crazy son of a bitch, you did it.
The thing about biology is because it's everywhere, we take it for granted. The air you breathe, is it produced by the United States Air Manufacturing Company? No, no, it's literally... you need it every minute of your life, and it's produced by the biology on the planet without even a thought, with nobody regulating that, nobody controlling, no one in charge of it, no one managing supply chains. Like literally the air you and your family and everybody you love breathes every day, just provided by ecosystem services from biology. The food you eat, right, half of your medicines, right, all these things. Like biology is doing all this really fundamental stuff on the planet, and we just are like, 'Oh, whatever, it's not important.' There's a weird blindness to the intrinsic power of the substrate of biology because humans didn't invent it, and we're so self-centered, unless it's something we made, it must not be a big deal. And so one of the cool things about Jurassic Park is it wakes people up. Holy shit, dinosaurs, right? Like holy biology, right? So that's point number one. And then the second thing that it gets right is what's the most famous line? 'Life finds a way.' So it also makes a statement to the bioengineers that are watching, me at 13 and now everybody since, that you didn't invent biology. Okay, you need to have humility in the face of it as you start to work directly with it by engineering the DNA code, because life will find a way. It will do things you don't expect. It's not a computer. And so that's actually a really important message as the tools for programming DNA have just improved exponentially since 1994. I mean, that book, you know, Crichton's a genius, but like Jurassic Park was built on the technology of cut-and-paste DNA. Take a gene and move it from one place to another. 'We use the complete DNA of a frog to fill in the holes and complete the code, and now we can make a baby dinosaur.' That technology had just come out like, you know, early '80s, Genentech, human insulin. I can tell you the whole story, but like it was infantile when that movie, you know, really in terms of what compared to what you can do today, not even close. So, but that message was already there day one. Life will find a way. Be humble, bio-designers. Like that I think is a really important message. So it gets it right right out of the gate. Really amazing.
Was there like a technology, and again, like excuse my ignorance here because not my domain, much to my mother's chagrin. Both my mom and stepdad are PhDs in biology and chemistry respectively, and at my dinner table when I was growing up, the only thing that they would talk about is fucking science, and I actually grew to hate it, unfortunately. So maybe this will be their favorite episode, but they'll also be embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. Was there a breakthrough that enabled a company like this to exist?
Yeah, yeah. Let me... I'll give you like a quick, yeah, please, dime tour of biotechnology. All right, so mid-century we discovered DNA, right? We discover... I mean, we like humans figure out that inside of every cell is DNA code, okay, right? So just note that we haven't... that wasn't even run to ground, right? That like the hereditary material and the structure of DNA, remember Watson and Crick and that whole thing, till the middle of last century. 1978, Herbert Boyer, Stanley Cohen invent what's called recombinant DNA. And what this is, just to explain it, there's like basically three technologies that came together that allowed for all the biotechnology companies of the '80s and '90s, Genentech, Biogen, Monsanto, all of this, okay, came downstream of like these three things happening in the late '70s, early '80s, okay. The first was a biological discovery, and this was done at Harvard, and it was the discovery of the operon. So it's a very sciency term, but it's basically how in a bacteria a gene gets turned on or off. What is the on switch for a gene? What makes something turn on in a cell? All right, it was a biological learning. So that's an important point because a lot of bioengineering is studying biology, not just humans inventing. Okay, this makes it very different than other engineering fields like computer science. Computer science, everything we invent ourselves. We didn't invent the operon, we had to go discover the operon. Does that make sense? That's invention number one. Okay, invention number two, PCR, polymerase chain reaction. So this basically allows you to choose a section of DNA and make many copies of it, billions and billions of copies, okay. And it's a little trick, I'm not going to get into the exact details, but you can use the mechanism that cells already use to copy their DNA, because every time a cell makes a baby cell, it's got to make a copy of the DNA, right? So you hack that mechanism, identify just a small region of the DNA, and make a billion copies of it. That's PCR. And then the third technology is called restriction enzymes. This is again not invented by humans, discovered by humans. It was something that bacteria used to protect themselves. So if you try to infect a bacteria with a virus, the bacteria would chop up the DNA of the virus. Well, those little chops that it makes leave little overhangs that are like little sticky ends of the DNA. And so here was the genius of Genentech out in San Francisco, right, founded by Boyer and Cohen. They identified the gene for human insulin in a human cell. They used PCR to make billions of copies of it in a tube. They used restriction enzymes to cut the ends of it and leave little sticky bits. And then they went to a bacteria, E. coli, found an operon, a little on switch, and cut right behind it and stuck in that human insulin gene. And suddenly in a bacterial tank in South San Francisco, you were producing human insulin without a human, because they had cut and pasted the gene from the human into a bacteria, and then they grew it in a tank like you would at a brewery. It had the on switch, and it was making the human gene, and voila, out comes insulin protein.
Okay, my dad's a type one diabetic, like he was there for that transition. Like he was a... you know, like he got insulin from pigs, which is where we got it from before, until Genentech.
That set of technologies was the birth of biotech. That was the beginning. What was being able to cut and paste a gene from one species to another. And they found the first commercial application was making these human proteins that people with these diseases were missing. And then that kicked off everything. Okay, so I can talk about what we have today, but does that make sense in terms of like what the very beginning was driven by?
It does make sense. Also fun fact, Kleiner Perkins led the Series A of Genentech.
Sure did. Yeah. And Ginkgo today, you know, we have the DNA ticker, so like that used to be Genentech's ticker on the stock exchange.
Yeah, when Roche bought them on the New York Stock Exchange.
Yeah, when Roche bought Genentech, the ticker goes back to the stock exchange, so we got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome. Oh yeah, trust me, VC is like, they're the best. They were the OG, original biotech. They, you know, they invented the whole thing. But those are the technologies that came together.
Yeah, that's super helpful. Can I rewind to something you said, that there's like a variety of reasons why you're not well-known? It felt like there was something behind that. I don't, maybe not, but this incredibly undiscovered but cool thing. And maybe the answer is like, maybe the answer is, Jubin, you live in your Silicon Valley bubble and outside of that everybody knows us. Maybe there's nothing there, but...
No, no, it's great. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you my general take on this stuff. So, well, consumer goods are like the things that people get the most touch on. No one really knows about AI until ChatGPT. I think one of the issues is like up till now the cost of doing biotechnology work, which is by the way a big thing of what we're trying to bring that cost down at Ginkgo, just like Amazon Web Services reduced the cost to launch a website by centralizing infrastructure. Where you used to have to build a, you know, I don't know, spend five or ten million bucks on a server farm, hire all these IT people just to launch your website, and that turned into a $200,000 AWS contract to get off the ground. If that transition has not happened in biotech, it still costs five or ten million dollars to try anything. So as a result, you don't get people playing around with the consumer applications. Everything is like a drug, right? Or like, you know, like it's all this like very heavy, long time cycle, further away from people's stuff. Like you don't get as much of like the magic of the early web and all that kind of stuff, or early apps on the iPhone, like all that stuff. It's just sort of like just people playing. Like we don't get to play much yet.
Yeah, the analogy that you would draw is like if Amazon is a sandbox for technologists to go innovate with a really low lift, the analog of that in the science world doesn't really exist. And so it's a small handful of large pharma companies that have to go through a bunch of R&D, they have to go through all of their own cycles of process and reviews and all that, and then finally they get into a lab space, they get all the drugs together, they get the team together, and it already has cost a bunch of money before they've even really gotten past go.
Yes, I think that's a big part of the reason why like people feel like they can't participate in it in the way they can participate in software. You have less entrepreneurs because it's like the barrier is too high, and you have just less creativity in the product. People just can't take the risk, so you get your product in a more narrow window. That said, if the technology really gets hot, you know, like I have a great... I don't have it with me unfortunately, traveling, but at home I have an old Time Magazine from 1981, and on the cover is Herbert Boyer, the founder of Genentech. And the guy's like ridiculous, he's got like a mustache, crazy hair, the whole thing. It's like crazy DNA behind him on the cover. And literally in the top right corner, like in a little fold-down picture, is like Princess Diana got engaged. So like Herbert Boyer was like, you know, like Genentech at that time, it was in the popular mindset because like it was such a new breakthrough technology and it was going to change the world. So I don't want to also say that it's even... even if it's in pharmaceuticals, like we can have those moments when a technology really breaks through. It just hasn't quite... like I think we're getting closer to it now with what we're seeing with synthetic biology. Like we're seeing now when you see like the government talk about like what are strategic technologies for the US, it's like AI, chips, quantum, synthetic biology. We're like in the bucket, but we haven't had our ChatGPT moment. Neither has quantum, okay, right? And so like we're kind of like hanging around the hoop. If a breakthrough pops off, we're pretty damn close. That would do it. Or some consumer product, right? Like something magical. I saw this thing on Twitter yesterday. This guy had done a... at home he made a gene edit to... there's a plant called Arabidopsis, okay, right? It's like this little flowering... you would never... you wouldn't see it at the garden store, but scientists like to work with it because it's very easy to manipulate its DNA. So this guy, he puts in a gene that makes this normally white flower pink, and then he crosses it, this is all being done in like a lab, to mix it with a version that like puts more petals on the flower. And he basically turns this kind of janky-looking white flower into something that looks like a pink rose in like a two-month period. First-of-its-kind flower. That's pretty cool, you know, right? Like you might want to give one of those to your significant other, like to be able to design flowers, right? Like a living thing that would be unimaginable to the agricultural engineers of 20 years ago. Like lunacy. Like, I'm sorry, what? Like a person two months in their basement could do that? Like what are you talking about? The distance we've traveled is quite far. But those sort of like playful applications, I think, are part of why you don't see... we don't have enough of that stuff. So that's another reason I think it's a little behind the scenes.
You can still build a big business B2B, you know, right? Like, yeah, how many people know about Stripe? It's kind of hiding back there doing pretty damn well, right? But like the average person has no idea what Stripe is. So you can be behind the scenes and still do well, but it just... I think it would help biotech for more of those consumer things to be out there.
Yeah, so you think the ChatGPT moment for biotech could be something like one of your customers is Vuori or something?
And yeah, that's a fun one. What they're trying to do is take the bite out of alcohol, if I'm not mistaken. You tell me if I'm wrong, but it's like if you were to like take a shot of vodka, what they want to do is not burn. Something like that, I imagine, would be the type of thing that would capture the zeitgeist and imagination of folks towards a space like this.
Yes, absolutely. And there's actually a really cool project, speaking of Jurassic Park, that I like a lot. So there's a company called Aromyx, and they have just launched, I think it just went on sale like a month ago in Nordstrom's. The brand is called Future Society. And what they did was, and they're a customer of ours, this partnership with us, their flower was a hibiscus that went extinct in Hawaii in the 1850s. Before it goes extinct, somebody, some like, you know, biologist collects a sample and it ends up in the museum at Harvard, okay? And it's dried down and in a drawer. After that, a lot of people move to Hawaii, lots of things, and you know, like we do a lot of ecological destruction there. This plant goes extinct. So scientist at Aromyx goes, collects a little sample, we get permission from Harvard to do this, get a little sample of that flower from the herbarium, grinds it up, puts it into what's called a DNA sequencer. So a DNA sequencer, remember the Human Genome Project, like 2000 got done, we read the human genome. That Human Genome cost $100 million to sequence that first human genome in 2000. There's now machines today, $100 to $200 for a human genome. One million-fold cost reduction in the last 20 years. All right, so just to be clear, that like completely kills Moore's Law, like way faster improvement than computers. But we grind it up and you put the cell into one of these genome sequencers, because remember, even though these things got built for human DNA, guess what? All DNA is the fucking same. We run on the same low-level architecture as flowers. All right, so you can grind that cell up, put it in that same kind of... it's a big washing machine-sized device, and out on your computer screen, A, T, C, G, G, C, C start coming up. It's the code of that extinct flower. Because this thing is only, you know, whatever, a 100-year-old sample, 250-year-old sample, the DNA is fine on that time scale. It lasts that long. So now I've got the code for the flower, and what we do is we look in that code to find the part of the genome that encodes the fragrance, okay? Because there's certain enzymes, little proteins inside your cells that do chemistry to make molecules that the flower emits, and then they hit your nose, and that's the smell. So we find that DNA code, we redesign it a little on the computer to make it work in a yeast or bacteria, like Genentech would have used to make that insulin. We print the DNA, so a thing called a DNA printer, you go A, T, C, G, there's a company out in California, the biggest printer in the world called Twist, you print the DNA, you get it, they send it to us, and we install it into that yeast. So you open the genome up, remember those restriction enzymes for insulin, something similar, you can use CRISPR today, but you open the genome up and you install that code from the flower. Now when you brew this yeast up, instead of making beer, it makes the scent of this extinct flower. So we can't bring the flower back yet, we don't have like flower Jurassic Park just yet, that's like beyond our skill set, but we can do like Jurassic Park for fragrances. And so Aromyx launched, I think, five different fragrances with Future Society that are five different extinct flowers where they brought back the scent, and then they work with perfumers to design a scent around it, like a commercial fragrance. And they just... I mean, this is like a brand-new product, like in the last 30 days. That kind of stuff is cool, right? That's a story that... it's like a one-of-a-kind fragrance, right? Like it's from an extinct plant, no one else can have it, right? So there's kind of like a cool thing where biotech is actually enabling a new story in fragrances, which is a market that like struggles for new stories, right? That's why you see so many like, you know, different celebs all, you know, pushing fragrances, like, well, what else do you got? What else do you have to offer, right? And so this is actually like a pretty cool new story. So I love to see stuff like that. I think that's the kind of thing that really helps ultimately get people to like know about this technology.
What's something you believe that most people wouldn't?
That's a good question. Um, well, probably a lot of different things. I was going to say you have to probably whittle it down because I have a feeling that there's quite a few things that you see in the future that you think most people would think is crazy. Maybe, maybe, maybe I'll talk for a minute, like since I know there's like a lot of entrepreneurs and folks in that community that listen into this. So maybe I talk about like some things I think about differently than the entrepreneur world. One of the things I would say is I think the really great companies, like the really meaningful stuff, takes fucking forever. So I think a lot of the community has sort of gotten focused on really quick cycle time, really quick ramp. Like, let's take the latest one that everyone... we did Y Combinator Summer '14. It was right when Sam Altman had taken over, okay, right? So he had like just as the new president, he wanted to do not just software YC, but biotech and nuclear energy companies were in our batch, Helion. And so he wrote this blog post that was like, I want YC to do like biotech. I was like, oh, thank God, like somebody... like if you're not doing a drug, no one will fund you in biotech. And so I was like, oh, hey, like thank you for writing this. Like we're too late, you know, we've been around for four years or something, but thanks at least for writing the blog post. Like, no, no, you got to talk. And so I went out and I met him, and he's an amazing sales guy. And anyway, he was like... I was like, oh yeah, I gotta do YC, it was great. So we did YC, you know, I got to know Sam. And if you look at OpenAI, those guys were just grinding in obscurity for a while, like a lot of people saying that that wasn't going to work. Like it was like what, six or seven years before ChatGPT? That's like what it takes. Same thing, like look at Microsoft, same way, Amazon early days, the ideas. Like if you feel like the thing you're doing is going to work out real quick, it's probably not that important. That would be one of my controversial ideas.
It's a very, very good one, but nobody wants to do that, right? Why not?
Because they think if it's not going well quickly, it's lame or something. There's a sort of like a sense that if you were better, you could get into the thing that's going quicker or something like that. And I just don't think that's true. It's actually harder to grind on the thing where you have to just really believe that you're right and you're not actually getting a lot of good external feedback that you're right. Like that, back to your question at the beginning, like why is it easy for the founding team to like, Ginkgo for example, to shake off like if people don't like what we're doing or whatever? Because that's like how it's always been, right? Like from the beginning, it's always been like, ah, this will never work. I actually think that that's tougher because you aren't getting the positive feedback loop. But I would argue, don't get discouraged by that. Like that, in my opinion, actually means you're probably working on a more important thing.
When you were starting Ginkgo, it was you and what, four co-founders from MIT?
Yep, yep. All biological, all PhDs in some version of science. Yeah, there's four of us that were grad students together and then one MIT professor. And so we had three computer scientists, a mechanical engineer, and a chemical engineer that were all like doing biology PhD kind of stuff. And it's actually a unique story. The first five years before YC, which again, I don't know how many companies join YC after being in existence for five years.
Yeah, what was that, those first five years? When we talk about like toiling in obscurity, how obscure are we talking here and how much toiling?
