jrkelly

Yeah look at research group websites at major research universities that are working in your area of interest. The students are usually listed on the lab website. They’d love to be emailed.

"If you want to start a company working on a better way to build homes, gene editing, artificial general intelligence, a new education system, or carbon sequestration, you may actually be able to get it funded, even if you don’t have a degree or much experience."

I encourage anyone to give hard startups a shot, but there are tons of PhDs/Postdocs out there who would make amazing founders -- they should make the leap! Often feels to me like recent undergraduates get more encouragement to launch startups than recent PhDs/postdocs -- which is a weird miss especially when it comes to hard startups where PhDs have the advantage of deep understanding of a hard field.

hedonic treadmill is close to word you are looking for.

Agree the professor track is tough but a PhD is a great idea even if you don't want to be a professor. It's just a unique experience that both gets you deep in a specific area of science and teaches you how to conduct open-ended research in general.

Getting a PhD was one of the best decisions I ever made. You have your whole life to go optimize for making $ if you want afterwards. At a top research school in the right lab you get a 1:1 apprenticeship with a world-class expert in an area of science you are passionate about. They take 1 or 2 new apprentices a year. It's a unique experience and changed me dramatically for the better. Postdocs are a different story (only do that if you are sure you want to be a professor) but I recommend getting a PhD to anyone passionate about an area of bleeding edge hard science or engineering.

If you'd like to spin up on GMO debate / tech this series is the best source I've found: https://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/

Yes should be 400 million. 100 million from our last order plus 300 million in this new order.

The biggest technical problem in general for synthetic biology is predictive design. Most of the technology we are building is to enable massive numbers of designs to be tried in parallel b/c the complexity of the cell rebuffs predictive CAD models. This will change as we get more data which is what foundries like ours generate - lots of data.

I'm Jason Kelly, one of the Ginkgo co-founders -- happy to answer questions!

YC is the only credible threat to elite higher education that I've seen come out of Silicon Valley.

This is complete nonsense. Here's a decent debunking: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2016/01/31/g...

This sentence in pretty staggering: "... people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group’s data for their own ends ... or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited." As in, science.

This is what is going to make Echo the next big computing platform. The voice recognition just works. It's like being on the Enterprise.

Haha, I'll vouch that it is him. He's a cofounder of a YC company with me (Ginkgo Bioworks) and I emailed him about this thread a couple hours ago. But I would like to see him take the quiz someone posted below :)

They recently added Anne Wojcicki (23andMe) as a part-time partner.

Also this post on "the mathiness of Nassim Taleb" -- Taleb is a serial offender on the mathiness front: http://www.inexactchange.org/blog/2015/07/24/the-mathiness-o...

Nice recent post on the "mathiness" of Taleb's paper: http://www.inexactchange.org/blog/2015/07/24/the-mathiness-o...

Best resource on GMOs remains this Grist series: http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/

Yeah it is a little ugly in pharma particularly. But I'll take the good luck :) If you come through Boston happy to give you a Ginkgo tour sometime.

You do seem to have it all figured out. I'm glad YC is running the experiment, guess we will need to see how it plays out.

I won't go down the pharma IP rathole, but I don't think this problem is intractable. There are many inventions that aren't CRISPR where TLO is happy to have the student who invented it run with it. Funding is a much bigger limiter than IP in my experience.

I don't think that is true of the last biotech boom in 80s when recombinant DNA tech was developed. Amgen, Genentech, Biogen, etc, were outsized winners. Just b/c biotech has gone to more of a 'single drug asset, build and flip to a BigPharma' model in recent years doesn't mean it is some permanent law of the industry.

Who do you think is doing the hands-on work in Bob Langer's lab that leads to that scientific breakthrough (hint - it's not Bob). No reason that recently graduated PhD/postdoc can't start a company built on their work. The pharma VC ecosystem has a blind spot for these sort of founders - I'm glad YC is an option for them.

Mmmmm. Flagship (Noubar's shop) mostly incubates it's own companies (same with 3rd Rock) and uses VC partners as founding CEOs -- so if you are a missionary founder it's not really a fit. In general the pharma VC ecosystem is way more "professional executives"-minded. It's a stark contrast to tech venture ecosystem that goes for young founder leadership. So if you are a great, recently graduated life scientist solving important problems and want to build your own company I'd still consider YC.

I'll take a pro-Boston comment on hackernews however it comes!! It is true that BOS is basically unrivaled for pharma-biotech. Biotech is moving into other markets now too though. That said, we (Ginkgo Bioworks) are mostly non-pharma but are in BOS anyway. There is an awesome pool of bioengineering talent here.

We didn't relocate to SF. We are in Boston and kept the lab and the majority of the team there while we did YC. + lots of red-eyes.

I'd recommend an SBIR/STTR (or other govt grants) first for wet-lab biotechs - it's a good source of patient money while you show early technical traction. YC after you've got things rolling can be throwing gas on a fire. It was for us (Ginkgo Bioworks, S14). Awesome founder community/ partner advice / investor connections.

That sounds like an insane thing to do? Have no idea where that is from.

CRISPR makes it easier to edit genomes in a targeted fashion especially in organisms where engineering the genome has traditionally been really hard (plants, mammalian cells). We work in microbes that are a lot easier to engineer out of the gate so it's a little less of a game-changer for us. Still it is amazing technology -- I'm sure we'll make use of it along with most everyone that does biological engineering in the future. Though the synthetic biology crowd is currently poking fun at Wired's over-hyped CRISPR issue, check out #CRISPRfacts

Sure. To the general public GMO has become synonymous with genetically engineered food crops. At Ginkgo we genetically engineer microbes (brewer's yeast mostly) not plants. We also wanted to highlight that designers at Ginkgo spend time designing the microbes to specification for customers. So we went with designer organism as the term.

I'm Jason Kelly, one of the Ginkgo co-founders -- happy to answer questions!