Nearly half of society has some sort of skin sensitivity. Cybele Microbiome is the company behind a new direct-to-consumer skincare brand. Cybele’s unique products trigger the natural skin biome to secrete skin restoration compounds. Today I sat down with Cybele’s CEO and Founder, Nicole Scott PhD. Nicole is a geneticist who became fascinated with the interaction of skincare products and the skin biome. Cybele was born when Nicole discovered how to gain precision control of microbes through the use of functionalized prebiotics. She thinks of cosmetic ingredients as first and foremost “food for the microbiome.”

Q. During IndieBio, you ran a small pilot study with your skin serum formulation and got some exciting early results. Tell us about what was seen?

Just two weeks into the study, I got a bunch of excited phone calls, because many of our volunteers were noticing the results right away. We provided the photos to a dermatologist who is highly experienced in reading skin conditions on photos, and he confirmed there’s notable decreases in scaliness, flakiness, hyperpigmentation, papular eczema, eczema, psoriasis, and even a decrease in a precancerous lesion. We knew that one of our long-chain ceramides is a known anti-melanoma compound– but these early results after just 2 weeks have us floored.

Q. Your prebiotic ingredients trigger the skin biome to create only long chain ceramides and no short chain ceramides. Why is that so important?

There are huge differences in the bioactive function of short chain and long chain ceramides. The long chains are the good ones. The short chains actually harm your skin, competing with, and fighting against, the good ceramides. Your typical skin care products that advertise ceramides don’t make this distinction, and can be doing as much bad as good.

Q. As a direct-to-consumer company, how does your hero product evolve over time into additional products and SKUs?

From skin serum we can round out that product line with moisturizers, toners, and eye creams.

But we aren’t a one trick pony. What is also really exciting is that we can get your skin biome to make hyaluronic acid — the most common ingredient in anti-aging cosmetics. These advances come from our platform to identify and formulate new prebiotics for other uses. This allows us to create a suite of related and complementary products. We also will customer’s skin biome assessments and input to help craft the additional products.

Q. How do you manufacture the prebiotic ingredients, and how does this affect Cybele’s margins in the early years of the company?

Our prebiotics are the output of fermentation. At small scale, we can purchase our prebiotics. They are not expensive. As we scale up, we can use any standard contract manufacturing organization to produce them for us — so no capex needs to go into ingredient manufacturing.

Ceramides are normally expensive to add to skincare products — and every bit added to a formulation hurts margins. In our case, not only is our product more effective, but we aren’t paying for ceramides. The skin biome makes them. So we have a much higher margin — estimated at 88% for our serum product.

Q. Tell us about your team.

Our team includes James Lamoureux — a microbiologist that received his PhD with Dr. David Low at UC Santa Barbara — and Hui-Ling Seow, who helped develop and carry out the marketing strategy for a HR platform Epic Quest Games, and Liz De Ruyter, who lead the Amazon On-Campus Store, launching products like PuraVida, Red Bull and Aveeno at UC San Diego. We are currently expanding the team by actively recruiting a Chief Marketing Officer right now.

Cybele Microbiome: Skincare Through Precision Prebiotics was originally published in IndieBio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Michroma makes food colors to bring brightness to the new food revolution. The vast majority of food dyes used today are synthetic chemicals derived from petroleum which have been linked to allergies, hyperactivity, and even cancer. Biocolorants do exist, but they are expensive to use and don’t hold their color when cooked or processed; insect-based dyes aren’t halal, vegan or kosher. Michroma’s sustainable solution uses edible fungi cells that express the natural colorant into the bioreactor. No solvents are needed to extract and purify the color. The performance characteristics of their dyes are far superior to existing biocolorants. Food coloring is a $5 billion market inside a larger $70 billion market for dyes. During their time at IndieBio, this team from Argentina garnered enormous interest from food companies wanting to test their dyes.

I sat with CEO Ricky Cassini and CSO Mauricio Braia of Michroma to learn more about this unique company. Both were professors in Argentina when they met. Ricky was an Adjunct Professor of Operations & Logistics at Austral University. Mauricio was in the Biochemistry faculty at National University of Rosario, as well as an adjunct professor at Argentina Catholic University.

What’s the origin story of your company?

Mauricio: I was looking for enzymes, growing fungi in liquid medium. I found one that, instead of producing enzymes, expressed a pinkish color into the media. That got me looking for other strains that could produce color. I knew food color was a potential market. I have been a vegetarian for over a decade, so I always had to look at food labels very carefully. I was always noticing we were using petroleum based colorants. At one point, I was visiting Austral University and making a presentation to MBA students. Ricky stopped by to listen.

Ricky: I knew this was needed by the market. As a kid, I developed skin rashes on my chest every time I consumed synthetic dyes. I had to change my diet. I also knew what Mauricio was working on was scalable, and widely needed.

How much do consumers know about the problems with current food dyes?

Most health and wellness media outlets published a story at one point or another. On Change.org, there are 44 petitions targeting every big food brand to stop using synthetic dyes. But it hadn’t really come to a head until this past fall.

The big snack brand, KIND, had previously released a line of fruit snacks without any dyes in them. Then in September, right as IndieBio’s program began, KIND pulled the line from retail shelves, blaming its failure on kids so accustomed to bright colors. To raise awareness, KIND set up a display in New York’s Herald Square, with 2,000 gallons of synthetic dyes in huge test tubes. 43% of products marketed to children have synthetic dyes as an ingredient.

Now the California Office of Environmental Health Assessment has been ordered by the state legislature to review all data and make a risk assessment for children, particularly for neurobehavioral and other neurologic effects. They’re reviewing all 8 synthetic dyes on the market.

Throughout Asia, food dyes from fungi have always been used. A billion dollars of food dyes are consumed. Why are those banned in the US and Europe, and what’s different about your colorants?

Asia has been using fungi colors since before synthetic dyes were even invented. So they’ve stuck with them. However, those food dyes come from a genus called Monascus. We all know how some mushrooms are entirely safe to eat, and others are dangerous. The Monacus genus contains mycotoxins. In high doses, from accidental poisonings, mycotoxins have been shown to cause apoptosis, stop the liver, or even kill people.

Michroma doesn’t use Monascus. We use another genus that is fully edible, and it’s halal, kosher and vegan. Some of our most excited customers are food companies in the Middle East, where they can’t use carmine red as a food color, because it’s made from ground up insects — it’s not halal or kosher to eat insects. And the vegetarian and vegan community, all over the world, are concerned with eating insects.

But it’s not just that our food dyes are safe. Our colors are made from food, and they are actually nutritious. Our pigments are a metabolite called azaphilones. Our pigments have been validated in scientific testing to have antioxidant properties. So we enable brands to not just have a clean label, but they can even add “antioxidants” to the front of the package.

How soon could you get revenue?

We have been working closely with our regulatory consultant. While a color petition to the FDA can take up to two years, we can get to revenue within a year by selling our fungal biomass. We intend to file a GRAS certification for our biomass.

Tell me more about your biomass.

Mycoprotein is a common alternative protein food ingredient. Our biomass is 47% protein, and is very similar to portabella protein in its nutritional value. It has almost no flavor. It’s highly digestible and has a great amino acid balance. While making our red coloring, the fungi cells also produce this biomass, and we can tune how much our culture favors biomass production or color production. Mycoprotein is sold at $13 per kilogram now, but ours has a strong red color, which is unique in the marketplace, allowing us to charge a premium. In fact our first “Letter of Intent” is with a very large food company that wants to use both our red dye and our biomass, for use in their plant-based burgers.

Can you extend into the larger dyes market? There’s a lot of inks and pigments used across industry, and they’re starting to get scrutinized for their sustainability and toxicity.

It’s a huge market and we are already sharing sample colors with cosmetics companies for use in lipstick and makeup. We have a letter of intent in the pharmaceuticals space, and we’ve even been talking with companies that make printers and photocopiers.

Michroma: Reinventing Food Colors was originally published in IndieBio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s kinda like this: Imagine a huge work crew shows up in some suburb, and they start rapidly digging up the streets and parks and pile-driving huge beams into the ground at 10x speed.

People come out of their houses and wander around asking the workers what the hell they’re doing and what is it, what are they making? One worker tells people he’s reinventing the elevator, it’ll be a “gravity consistent experience” that’ll allow infinite height. Another worker tells the residents he’s reinventing the fuel system using just water and aluminum to make 110% renewable power. A third says he’s putting in the world’s most advanced vivarium for historic species. The residents are confused, because every project sounds cool, but not one worker can begin to explain what the whole contraption is going to be. Most of the work crew doesn’t even know what the next guy is doing.

So finally they find a manager, but he only knows what has to get done this week. He’s going on vacation after Friday and another manager will handle next week’s build, and he has no idea what’s in next week’s work order.

The residents ask him, “From the direction you’re tearing up the ground and building, it kinda looks like, by Friday, whatever you’re building is headed straight for that section of townhouses over there.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “All those townhouses will be gone by Thursday morning.”

“But where will the people who live in those townhouses go?” they ask.

He has no idea. The townhouses are gone a day early.

Then the residents notice that all the materials arriving are in boxes from a guy named Jeff. So Jeff must know. But they find Jeff and he says no, he just does the deliveries. Then they hear there’s some guy named Bill. They call him, and he says he’s not responsible, he’s got nothing to do with it, he’s in Africa. Then they hear about a guy named Steve. Then they find out Steve’s dead. And it reminds them all of that battle scene in Apocalypse Now at the Do Long Bridge, the last outpost before entering Cambodia. Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen, asks the gunman firing randomly into the dark, “Who’s the commanding officer, soldier?”

“Aren’t you?”

It infuriates the residents that nobody can tell them what this monstrosity is going to be. Then the local factory where many residents work is leveled to make room for the gigaheliscope.

“So if the factory is gone, where will they work? What will they do?”

“I don’t know,” says the manager on duty. “But don’t you love riding the elevator where your ears don’t pop and the floor never seems to fall out beneath you? Don’t you love getting to go into the vivarium for free and petting the new animals we’re creating with directed evolution? Aren’t you excited that it’s powered with 110% renewable energy?”

And they are amazed and they do love the elevator — and the vivarium, and the rocket launcher, and the mysterious glass oracle in the lobby with the black hole that sucks all memory of the last 24 hours out of their brains.

But as the wondrous contraption of a building continues to climb into the sky, and more apartment buildings are razed, and more people disappear … still nobody knows what it will be.

That’s Silicon Valley today.

Everybody knows what they’re working on. Everyone can say they’ve tested their project on customers and they’re confident people will need what they’re making. But nobody can say what we’re building collectively.

Of all the VCs in the world, the only one who came close to painting a grand vision of what we’re making is Softbank’s Masayoshi Son. He talked about everyone being happy and having less depression and more joy. We would have telepathy and live to 200. (And he pronounced this in 2010, long before BMIs and aging science exploded.)

But even Masayoshi Son couldn’t — or didn’t — address what we’re going to do for work, or for money.

And it’s that particular part that’s uniformly missing from the vision.

We talk a lot about how we’re we’re going to cope with the jobless future when the robots do the work. But a lot of people are already living this way.

There are only 4 million “unemployed” in America now, but 95 million other Americans have “left the workforce.” 9 million more have left in this decade. They aren’t retirees (they aren’t that old). They aren’t working part-time. They’re not going to school. 11 million of the LTWs are stay-at-home parents, but it’s natural to wonder: what are these other 84 million people doing?

We know millions upon millions more will be joining them. The manufacturing robots are already in the factories, and the service robots are now fired up to do so many service jobs that people don’t like doing anymore. The window-washing robot is here; it can clean 86,000 square feet of skyscraper windows a day. The autonomous janitor is already mopping floors at SeaTac airport, ready to be the new great co-worker for the six million people doing building and grounds cleaning work. Autonomous security guards are on night patrol at factories, banks, and warehouses.

We were real visionaries. During this era where we knew that command of new technologies would be important for the future workforce, we engineered the system to reduce college enrollment. We raised the price of college so much that students are burdened with record debt. Only 39 percent of Millennials today believe a college degree “leads to a good job and higher lifetime earnings.”

You can interpret this as college students are merely pessimistic, and the 39% statistic reflects their state of mind (but not necessarily their reality). But in fact I’d argue it is indeed their reality. A study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce looked at all the jobs filled from 2007. A lot of the jobs that were lost in the recession came back, but of the new jobs created — 11.6 million of them — 99% of those jobs went to people with a graduate degree. In this economy, a bachelor’s degree is not enough to climb out of the underemployment trap. It doesn’t cut it.

Since the Occupy movement, “we are the 99%” has become the linguistic shortcut to frame inequality. But the 99% tagline ends up obscuring — and thus ignoring — the critical difference between what I call the Asset Class and the Thrift Class, the two parts of the 99%. People in the Asset Class aren’t increasing their job-related income by much; 2.1% year on year. But they have assets — houses and financial investments — which are constantly appreciating. This gives them a sense of wealth, and makes them confident spending. The Asset Class is propping up the nouveau-luxury economy. They aren’t underemployed — they have good jobs. Right now they’re about 25% of society, but the 40-year trendline has them shrinking to about 19% of society over the next decade.

The Thrift Class don’t have financial assets. 70% of society doesn’t have $500 in savings. Their wages go up only 1.2% year on year. Half of America lives on less than $31,000 a year. Their income is extremely volatile, too — varying 30% to 40% per month — which makes it very hard to plan. The 35 million people who work part-time earn, on average, $261 a week.

Silicon Valley is both the push and the pull. Automation, robots, machines, offshore labor, international plane flights, video conferencing — all of that is the push out the door. The pull is the other side of the equation. At the same time as we made it harder and harder for regular people to earn money, we also used our mastery of technology to create things that made it easier and more enjoyable to live on less money.

Thrift means simply, “careful with money.” Living that way is not new. What’s different today is how many conveniences of modern society have, critically, made it easier to stretch a dollar — which, in turn, has allowed the thrift class to grow.

We now have tons of retailers who compete at Ikea prices. Sharing economy platforms defray the cost of having to buy things only used occasionally. Thrift store shopping is now a $7 billion business. Cheap, unlimited entertainment like Netflix, Spotify, and Fortnite are filling thousands of hours of people’s time. People read so much now, for free on their phones, that we call it an addiction. As one thrifter texted me, “It’s never been so entertaining to be poor.”

Living on the wrong side of inequality, the thrift class has shown incredible imagination and creativity in adapting to the circumstance and making it their own. What’s fascinating is how they’ve turned the tables on their predicament, building a moral philosophy around their lifestyle. There’s a rejection of consumerism. It’s liberating to get out of the trap of always earning more money and buying more things. Spending a lot of money on something — when there are much savvier alternatives — is increasingly seen as gauche or just dumb. In a world where the jobs aren’t offering enough people a sense of self-determinism through work, they’re meeting their need for self-determinism and freedom through a kind of minimalism.

And while the powerplayers and policy makers are trying to figure out how to save the planet from climate change, the thrift class has its own solution that’s already fully up and running. It’s called buying less and sharing more. Rather than gas up the skies, just don’t buy a car at all — and stop going everywhere this way and that. Rather than flush microplastics into the ocean with every wash cycle, don’t buy new apparel at all. Rather than jam more plastic bottles into landfills, just drink tap water. Buy beer in refillable growlers. Don’t buy clothes at department stores — just take the clothes into the dressing room, post a photo of yourself on Instagram wearing them, and leave as the likes start accumulating by the hundreds.

And so, even though the thrift class is surviving on very little money, they’re doing something unprecedented. Only 1/3 of society is working full-time. In the history of world economies, we’ve never seen this phenomenon at this scale. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, they’re saying “I prefer not to.” The US has 6.9 million unfilled jobs available right now — and that doesn’t include farm jobs. 800,000 jobs in retail, 250,000 in warehouses, 900,000 in food service, 1,100,000 in patient care, and 1,200,000 in backoffices. But people simply aren’t desperate enough to take these jobs. When that work makes them feel replaceable, and the sense of being able to say “I’m great at what I do” is not on offer, they’re finding meaning in working less, or not working at all.

In the thrift class way of viewing the world, freedom isn’t something you reach by working for decades to earn a big pile of money. Freedom comes from being master of your own time. Gig-work is a tradeoff most are willing to take, because they can prioritize their personal lives. If they want to hang with friends on Tuesday, just don’t take a gig. They’ve seen their parents run ragged from trying to “have it all,” and they don’t want the stress.

There’s arguably more social capital in informal, unpaid work than in paid work. Help set up a bar’s wifi; your beers will be free for a few days. Do taxes for a friend-of-a-friend; someone else will give you an hour of physical therapy. Fix someone’s water heater — someone else will help watch your kids.

On Abraham Maslow’s pyramid, nobody knows where they are anymore. The thrift class is taking care of lots of its wants before taking care of its needs. It works only until it doesn’t. All it takes is one medical bill to trigger a downward spiral.

The thrift class is not powerless, but it’s a power in numbers. When the #hashmob flares up, it’s a superpower. But the vast majority of the time, the thrift class’s power is diffused across so many problems, and also split ideologically within.

Millennials are spending $20 less per day than their counterparts 10 years ago. College enrollment is down 5% this decade. The birth rate is down 15%. This is perhaps one of the most wincing details of our times. People with tons of time available to parent kids, but too little money to feel safe having them.

Silicon Valley is creating a future faster than it can understand the ramifications. To me, it feels like driving in the rain on a windy road in the dark with the headlights off. Around the country, even the avid fans of Silicon Valley — riding in our backseat — are getting confused where we are going. In the previous 20 years, it felt like we were driving them towards something. Now, to them, it feels like we’re driving away from something. Maybe away from the scene of a crime — to some it feels that way. To most, it feels more like driving away from a future we actually understood, and into a future we don’t.

People who work on climate change can tell you what needs to happen in the next ten years, and what will entail if it doesn’t get done. People who work in A.I. can tell you about the super-abilities they’re coding into the next-gen systems. People who fight cyberterrorism and cyberfraud can tell you what their next ten years looks like. People who work in biotech can tell you how biological engineering will rebuild the world.

But nobody seems to be able to tell us what’s going to happen to the thrift class.

It’s not like Silicon Valley has cooked up a secret plan that they just haven’t revealed. There is no cogent plan. There is no commanding officer.

There are stabs at answers. We get vague around the question society wants the most clarity on. It’s a combination of 1) the government will resort to paying people a little, 2) people will get a little kickback from companies who sell their data, and 3) blockchain’s infinite ability to track everything will somehow make sure it doesn’t feel like a welfare state, and will feel more like a video game.

We need to recognize our answer is not satisfying society’s concern — simply because the problem we’re creating is happening much faster than the solutions we’re still brainstorming. People are calling bullshit. We need to hold our socioeconomic-solutions to the same standards as our other construction projects. If it was a pitch-deck, we’d laugh at how unclear it is. We’d shoot holes in the business model. We need to think of inequality as an economic externality the same way greenhouse gasses are an externality.

So what I’d suggest is that, as we develop and fund the next wave of technology, and as we disrupt the next ten industries, we keep the thrift class in mind.

We’re in the middle of reinventing the energy industry; solar power will only go down in price. Let’s make sure utility bills actually go down too. Let’s take care of their water supply (which has nearly doubled in cost per household this decade) — let’s get it free of contaminants, and make it as cheap per person as Netflix. Surely, we can make water as affordable as movies. If we can go to Mars, then we can find a way to make apartment buildings safe and sound. I don’t know if the thrift class will be living in glorified college dorm rooms in twenty years, but if they are, let’s make those the most fun places to be.

We’re already reinventing the food system, nutrient by nutrient. But let’s not make the mistake of recreating the mistake of the old food system, where only people with money could afford nutrition. We won’t change anything if we just feed the hipsters.

If we made good health actually affordable, then in Washington D.C. they wouldn’t be trying to avoid paying for health care. All the pieces for Healthcare 2.0 exist — early detection, digital monitoring, radical new therapies. Arguably, great affordable health care is biotech’s equivalent of Universal Basic Income.

We have to get education right. It’s never been easier to learn things, for free, and yet more expensive to earn the degrees.

It’s a design failure that there are so many unwanted jobs. Maybe we shouldn’t design jobs, then, for maximum efficiency. Maybe if we want people to work, we should maximize community. Create a place where people actually want to go spend their day. And let’s raise the minimum wage. We could get millions back to work right away. In December, Amazon announced a raise in its minimum wage to $15 an hour. They got 840,000 job applications. That’s an astounding number. It suggests that while the LTWs report “making a difference” is what they really want in a job, “more money” is what gets them to drop the video game controller. The economy would perk up, and then some.

We built a system of amazing wealth creation, called “venture capital,” to profit on future technologies like robotics and biotech. But we forgot to make sure that everyone, no matter how poor or rich they were, had equal access to it. Anyone can become an entrepreneur, but you need a million dollars in the bank to qualify as an accredited investor.

Actually, all of this isn’t something we should do. It’s something we’ll have to do. 70% of consumers will be in the thrift class. Around the world, the middle class is converging. On one side of the world, we describe it as booming. On our side of the world, we say it’s cratering. But everyone’s ending up in the same place.

About IndieBio: At IndieBio, we built an open-access system for biosciences. We scout the world for great scientists to start companies. We’ve launched 105 startups. 43% of them have a female founder or co-founder. Our founders have come from 35 different countries. IndieBio is one of seven accelerators run around the world by the multi-stage venture firm SOSV.

What Silicon Valley Can’t Tell You was originally published in IndieBio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Big Food has become Big Energy

This is a corn field on a small homestead in Iowa. You’ve probably heard the concern that so, so much land is used to grow corn for cattle feed in intensive agriculture — and that if we didn’t eat meat, that land could be put to much better uses. So is that accurate?

Iowa grows more corn than any other state. And only 1% of it is sweet corn for human consumption. The rest is field corn, and only 5% goes to cattle feed. 20% goes into feed for chickens and pigs. 12% is converted into high-fructose corn syrup for unhealthy snacks and sodas. There are a few other uses, but the biggest portion — 53% of all corn grown in Iowa — is made into ethanol, to make up 10% of our gasoline.

Another way to say that is: more than half the corn in Iowa goes to feed cars — 10x the amount that goes to feed cows.

We really should be questioning the amount of corn used for fossil-fuel burning cars. Ethanol makes a small dent in the carbon dioxide emissions, but electric vehicles are on the verge of making ethanol unnecessary, and giving us 35 million acres of corn farmland back, to figure out what to do with. 35 million acres is about the same size as the entire state of Iowa, every inch of it. That’s a lot of fertile farmland, just from not feeding cars.

Okay, now let’s talk about deforestation hotspots.

You’ve heard, too, that our constant appetite for meat results in the constant slashing and burning of the Brazilian rainforest to make room for cows and soybeans. In 2004 alone, over 10,000 square miles of the rainforest was cut down. That’s bigger than the size of Maryland. Since 1970, more Brazilian rainforest has been cleared than the size of Alaska.

But if I asked you how bad the problem is in 2018, what would you guess?

Would you imagine that the spiking demand for meat in Asia is causing even worse deforestation in Brazil today, than 15 years ago? Or might you guess that it’s better? And if so, how much better: 20%? 30%?

Brazil has made a lot more progress than most people realize. In 2006, all the major buyers of soybean declared they would refuse to buy any soybeans grown on deforested land. Similarly, slaughterhouses do not buy any cattle without knowing the GPS coordinates of the farm. Supermarkets refuse to buy beef from deforested land. The government protected 50% of the land as national parks. Combined with new tax policies, and carbon offset programs, the rate of deforestation was cut in half by 2007. The country of Norway paid Brazil a whopping $1.1 billion over the last decade to assist their efforts. Satellite monitoring came online. GPS sensors, buried into the bark of trees, helped law enforcement track illegal loggers back to the illegal logging mills, and shut them down. It’s all added up.

Since 2004, there has been an 82% reduction in the deforestation rate in Brazil.

So why hasn’t it stopped entirely … 82% is great, but an area the size of Delaware is still being deforested, annually. Think about it for a minute. If they’re not doing it for the soy, or for the cows, or for the trees? It’s for crude oil. A lot of it headed for American refineries. Most of it goes to California, because clean air standards prevent our refineries from processing Canadian heavy crude. Oil and gas fields in the Amazon that will eventually cover the same amount of land as the state of Texas are being proposed, by American and Chinese refineries; the election of the ‘Trump of the Tropics,’ Jair Bolsonaro, makes these oilfield auctions a certainty.

So it’s not cows anymore that are causing the deforestation of Brazil. Once again, it’s cars.

So let’s combine what’s happening in Iowa — which is that plants are being fed to cars — with deforestation. How much land is being deforested for the growing of car fuel? Indonesia and Malaysia are looking at a 6x increase in deforestation, because they are growing export palm oil to make biofuels to meet emissions standards in many countries. Rainforests the size of West Virginia are on deck to be chopped down over the next decade. This is horribly tragic, because they’re specifically doing this to meet outdated environmental requirements. Every organization that studies this practice notes that, when you account for the deforestation, biofuels are not 20% better than crude oil, they’re 100% worse.

In Argentina, soybean farming has spread across the Gran Chaco forest to increase biofuel production.

While US laws don’t allow deforested land to provide our biofuels, the other countries just send us their good biofuel, and send their bad biofuel elsewhere. 100 million gallons of Indonesia’s palm-based biofuel is imported by the US. Two out of every three gallons of US biofuel import come from Argentina, over 400 million gallons. This past summer, the EPA reported to Congress that our biofuel requirements were specifically causing deforestation around the world. Even then, the EPA tried to raise ethanol and biodiesel requirements. Growing gasoline has been a steady income for farmers.

Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, and India are all seeing increasing deforestation to grow the oil-rich plant jatropha. It’s actually toxic to eat — so it’s entirely for biofuels.

Without consumers realizing it, the industrial agriculture system commonly attacked as “Big Food” has actually become Big Energy.

We can confirm this characterization by looking at, simply, the number of cows over time. Cows are what traditionally caused deforestation and land-clearing. And so it’s intuitive: as global demand for meat increases rapidly, the amount of land devoted to cows has to also increase rapidly. So ingrained is this logic that we often don’t even bother to double-check the assumption.

Let’s look at China. In 2006, they had 87 million beef cattle. Ten years later, they had 82 million. Australia exports a lot of beef to China. But the country has gone from 28 million head to 25 million in ten years. India has 10 million fewer cattle. The US has 5 million fewer in a decade (and 50 million less since 1970). This is all FAO data. In most places in the world, the number of cows is actually going down.

Across all of South America and Central America, combined, the population of cattle is almost level over a decade. It’s inching up slowly — a third of one percent a year — but that clearly does not explain the continued deforestation of the Amazon and Gran Chaco.

Meanwhile, the number of cars on the world’s roads — in that same period of time — has gone up rapidly. The world had 960,000 cars on the road in 2007. A decade later, 1.3 billion. That’s an increase of 35%. To feed those cars, we are extracting more oil and growing more soybean, palm, and corn, which is made into biogas.

Deforestation has always been one of the biggest causes of climate change. Prior to 2007, deforestation was indeed attributed, primarily, to cows. But in 2007, world governments mandated ethanol and biodiesel be mixed into gasoline for vehicles. So, since 2007, the reason for continued deforestation has shifted to the transport sector.

This is one reason why climate change analyses have changed so dramatically. Any report based on old data is going to point a finger at cows. A report based on current data is going to point at cars.

The granddaddy report of them all was the United Nations’ 2006 report put out by the Food and Agriculture Organization. It was called “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It was the first report to really make the comparison between the livestock sector (cows) and the transportation sector (cars). It was also the first report to really sound the alarm about methane emissions from cows. (Pigs and chickens are not ruminants, so are very small sources of GHG emissions.)

“Livestock’s Long Shadow” was written in 2006 by FAO lead analyst Henning Steinfeld. But in the fall of 2018, Steinfeld co-authored an essay for the Thompson Reuters Foundation, explicitly warning everyone that it’s wrong to compare livestock to transportation anymore. Deforestation (not direct emissions) was always the majority of the livestock contribution to climate change. As the primary use of deforested land has shifted, Steinfeld warns that old comparisons are “flawed.”

Many new climate change reports still pull in old datasets, and because of that, conflate the issue, ignoring the way land is being used to feed cars. (Such as the recent study by an Oxford graduate student that the WeWork corporation relied on.)

Another prominent academic struggling to correct the record is none other than Michael Mann. Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State. He’s a legend. He was in Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. You’ve all seen his graph, widely known as “the hockey stick,” that showed a thousand years of global surface temperatures, with a sudden and very steep rise since 1900. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change credited Mann’s work when they were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Look at these tweets where he’s trying to correct the impression that meat is the #1 enemy in the fight to stop global warming:

To be clear, we need to do everything we can, including eat less meat. And India, which has 30% of the world’s cows but doesn’t eat them, has to figure out how to reduce their emissions, too.

The world eats 68 million tons of beef every year. It’s a lot. But we mine 7.4 billion tons of coal — 109 times more by weight — and burn it. Coal is 78% carbon. We pull another 5 billion tons of oil out of the earth (some 36 billion barrels), which we also burn.

Nobody has done more, for longer, to say we’re underestimating the relative impact of cars and coal than UC Davis professor Frank Mitloehner. Today, Frank Mitloehner is on the FAO’s Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance steering committee, as Committee Chair. He and Steinfeld are colleagues, and they are cooperating on a global summit for the FAO. They met a few years after Steinfeld had written “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” Mitloehner was doing a research trial at a commercial dairy farm; he had rigged up the farm with analyzers to measure all the emissions. Steinfeld wanted to see it. They spent the day together.

Over time, Mitloehner felt that “Livestock’s Long Shadow” misrepresented the comparison of livestock and transport in contributing to climate change. The livestock calculation Steinfeld had made was a complete life-cycle analysis. But the transport sector’s was not — it only counted direct emissions. It did not include the impact of oil drilling, refining, shipping the crude and gas, or the manufacturing of all that equipment, or the coal-smoke to make electricity to run those factories. It did not include oil spills, crude gushers, or the pollution from tar sands extraction. It didn’t count our 553,000 underground storage tanks, in the US alone — the largest single threat to groundwater quality. It did not count deforestation for oil or biofuel, of any sort. But for livestock, Steinfeld analyzed all of the equivalent.

Mitloehner and his UC Davis colleagues ended up writing a rebuttal, and the FAO publicly admitted that Mitloehner was right. In 2013, the UN issued a corrected report, removing any comparison to the transportation sector.

“I used to be the only one fighting back,” Mitloehner told me. But now he has legends like Michael Mann and the very author of Livestock’s Long Shadow on his side.

I worry, though, they are still losing the battle for the mindshare of the next generation.

Intel, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft are powered by 100% renewable energy. Retailers REI and Kohl’s are. Georgetown, Texas, north of Austin, runs on 100% renewables. Hundreds of corporations are making the pledge to be there by 2025, and many huge stockholders have pulled their money out of coal and gas — Lloyd’s of London, Nippon Life Insurance, the Dutch financial firm ING, and many pension funds.

But we have only 9 colleges using 100% renewable energy. Students on campus should be pounding on the doors of college administrators, demanding their school go 100% renewable energy and divest from coal and gasoline.

Meanwhile, we have 157 college campuses running Meatless Monday programs, putting up posters telling students it’s more important to not eat meat than drive an electric vehicle. And an entire generation is eating it up.

Cows vs. Cars was originally published in ATTN: FWD on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

He built a powerful system for launching scientific ideas into startups. Can he do it again?

Arvind Gupta seems an unlikely person to lead the renaissance in synthetic biology. Though he studied genetics at UC Santa Barbara, he did not continue that path, and in the two decades before starting the life sciences accelerator IndieBio in San Francisco, he didn’t invent a drug or bring one to market, and he wasn’t a partner at a venture fund investing in biotech. Yet the most exciting things in biotechnology are happening at the intersection of these two domains: giving postdocs from academia a lab and just enough cash to prove their breakthrough science works.

IndieBio is far from the only life sciences accelerator, but it stands out for its ability to consistently crank out startups that sound like science fiction, with ambitions to save the planet. They make wood without the tree and meat without the cow and plastic out of mushrooms. They make chemicals without making pollution. While IT startups are busy making fitness bands, IndieBio’s startups make smart bees and computers with neurons.

IndieBio’s four-month program, run twice a year, provides a would-be startup a $250,000 investment in exchange for 8 percent of the company. In three years, IndieBio has graduated 81 startups, and 70 percent of them have already received additional venture backing — a “follow on” rate that’s double the average of typical, very good accelerators. The portfolio of graduates is now worth more than $700 million, collectively. “IndieBio is really the first accelerator to bring the engineer’s mindset to biology,” says Ursheet Parikh, a partner at Mayfield Fund, a venture firm.

The rising IndieBio brand is making the process happen even faster. “We had a number of angel investors looking at us all last spring,” says Anand Parikh, co-founder of Chronus Health, which is developing a “lab-on-a-chip” diagnostic device. “When we were able to tell them we had been chosen by IndieBio, I was able to secure $230,000 in cash, in the bank, in under 10 days.”

Now Gupta is about to test just how far he can extend IndieBio’s reach. He is going to clone the accelerator in New York. He will be moving there mid-autumn, for at least a year, putting a continent between him and his original creation machine. The reasoning was clinically mathematical: tons of federal research funding goes into New York universities and medical systems, but relatively little venture funding capitalizes on it. “In Boston and San Francisco, for every dollar of NIH research, there’s $1.30 to $1.40 in life sciences venture investment,” he says. “In greater New York, for every NIH dollar, there’s only 10 cents in life sciences venture. The market has to equilibrate.”

Before creating IndieBio, Gupta, now 43, spent a decade as a designer at IDEO, learning to generate great ideas for clients systematically, rather than praying for creative inspiration to magically strike. He had spent his 20s as something of an artistic thrill-seeker, notably BASE jumping off bridges and antennas, before he turned to jiu jitsu, at which he has competed quite seriously, and still does, as a purple belt, 140-pound super featherweight. This all makes him something of a mystery; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. He has done only a few interviews. But then, nothing is normal in the new biotech; it’s inherently cross-disciplinary and purposefully attacks preconceptions of what can’t be done. So perhaps Gupta’s story is not an outlier and is in fact representative of something essential: when it comes to using biology to disrupt industries, one’s moral philosophy and vision is more important than one’s resume.

Don’t die

The 13 startups in Indie Bio’s seventh class, just two weeks old when I meet them, face long odds in the years ahead. But for a moment, let’s pretend they all succeed. The world would be different in all manner of ways. A billion tons of CO₂ would be converted to animal feed instead of going into the atmosphere. Children on track to develop autism would start to receive treatment for their brain differences two trimesters before they are born. Common blood tests would take minutes, not days. Your white blood cells would eat cancer. Some cancer tumors would be starved into not growing at all. Almost nobody would get cavities. Hemophilia would be cured. Colon cancer would always be detected early. In medical emergencies, trained personnel would find you in minutes, wherever you are. Bioreactors would be as common as desktop computers. Late in life, as our brain cells go on the fritz, we would just add new ones.

“Will they work?” Gupta asks, rhetorically. “We’re here to find out.”

The prior six classes were equally high-reaching. Some people would laugh at the startups’ sheer audacity; on a bad day, even the founders can feel like Sisyphus. On an emotional level, IndieBio exists to make those founders feel normal and not undermined by doubt. Almost all them use their four months at IndieBio to take advantage of a lab stuffed with bioreactors, fluorescence microscopes, and liquid chromatography equipment that purifies proteins. This is how startups make the jump from academia, without having to raise the funds for their own equipment.

The week I spend at IndieBio is packed with seminars, panels, deep dives, and a constant trickle of visitors. On Monday, Gupta teaches a class in structuring a venture deal. One of his insights: startups should already be bringing in loans known as bridge notes from VCs even if they’re months from ready for equity deals. “Rule One: Don’t die,” he declares. “Rule Two: Get the terms you want. But if that doesn’t work, refer to Rule One.” Every day, Gupta drags a startup upstairs for a deep dive into its science, or for a session to build a “Reverse Income Statement” — a P&L imagining they’ve hit $100 million in revenue, breaking out all likely costs, to calculate future margins. Four venture capitalists stop by, as do three IndieBio graduates willing to consult with a startup in their market.

Fridays are tonally bipolar, by design. The morning begins with Gupta leading “Killer of the Week,” where a small trophy is passed to the startup that has made the most progress in the past seven days. Then the day finishes with “Journey Talks,” where three founders must stand before their peers and tell their personal story, complete with photos of their childhoods. This baring of their soul creates bonding among the class, forcing the founders to be in touch with their emotional core.

Gupta oversees it all, both as grandmaster and continuous participant. What becomes immediately clear is that, even though he didn’t spend a decade in venture capital or a decade as a bench scientist, he has learned the equivalent in three years on this job, by shepherding 81 startups through this process. As we tour the lab, he teaches me the thermal cycling process in a polymerase chain reaction machine used in gene manipulation. In a deep-dive hour with a gene-therapy startup, Serenity Bioworks, he brings to bear his past experience with another startup, Prellis, which uses little sacs called liposomes to deliver drugs in the body. Making the most of the hour, Gupta helps Serenity’s founders frame their story to investors, recommends a business model, and pushes them to tweak one of their experiments, which they will do the next day.

Gupta doesn’t have to play catch-up. In fact it’s more like everyone has to catch up to him. His counsel is constant and he asks the startups strategic questions so fast they barely have time to answer him. Having had a dozen cellular agriculture companies come through IndieBio, Gupta draws on their experience to advise companies in this class that are working on bioengineered pork sausage and fish feed. In the same way, Gupta and the team at IndieBio have gained wide experience across gene delivery, stem cells, the microbiome, disease prediction, medical devices, brain-machine tech, and age-reversing mechanisms.

Startups have constant access to a staff with as much variety as the gang in Ocean’s Eleven. Taylor Sittler is a physician and co-founder of Color Genomics. Jun Axup is a biochemist from Scripps; she went through IndieBio in its second class with the startup MYi Diagnostics. Alex Kopelyan has a PharmD degree and is an expert on business models. Parikshit Sharma is the quant, an analyst and data scientist. Maya Lockwood programs the leadership track with Kopelyan; she’s trusted to make sure the entrepreneurs don’t lose touch with their soul in the process.

Young computer engineers are expected to stay up all night and have the code by morning. They’re well-prepared for the high-speed, build-and-test cycles of startups. That’s less true for molecular biologists, MDs, and lab scientists, who have learned the slow and careful method of academia, where, you might have a great idea what to do next, but first you must write a grant application. A year later, you receive the grant — and then you have to do exactly what you wrote in the grant. If you had a better idea in the meantime, you might be able to jam it in. Writing papers for publication is critical to the process, but time consuming, and often feels like giving away the discovery, both to nobody and to everybody.

“I really care that what we do here, in these 16 weeks, adds real value to the companies,” Gupta says. “It’s possible what we do doesn’t matter — that we’re just really good at selecting the best applicants, with the best science and the best co-founders. And they would do just as well without our program.” To me, this is a sort of straw man self-interrogation. It’s plainly obvious the startup founders need the scaffolding, and that if the accelerator program didn’t exist, few would have left academia, where life was slow, but safe. It simply would have been too risky, the chasm too far.

More than that, it’s likely no investor would gamble on them, either. Until IndieBio and its kin emerged, biotech innovation was only getting more expensive. A typical Series A biotech investment to do preclinical discovery might be $20 million, in milestone payments, with $5 million up front. VCs need to feel fairly confident to bite, which filters out thousands of scientific possibilities that don’t meet their standard. IndieBio, meanwhile, can take on science that is a little more risky, while spending only $250,000 and four months. IndieBio can fund 20 companies for every one that Sand Hill Road funds. This widens the funnel and provides career paths for postdoctoral scientists that didn’t exist before.

Another way to think about this is from a chronological perspective. IndieBio is able to test the commercial potential of certain threads of scientific inquiry roughly three or four years before they would be ready for traditional biotech investment. “A year ago, at Stanford, when we discovered our method was working across a variety of cancers … we were so excited that I didn’t even want to publish a paper, I wanted to file a patent,” says Xiyan Li, cofounder of Filtricine, which intends to treat cancer with dialysis. “But we drafted a protocol to continue our research. There were all kinds of regulations and funding issues. It was moving too slow. Even if we had waited for the grant, it would have been at least a couple years to test it in mouse models.” Frustrated, he and his team applied to IndieBio. Already, just three weeks into the program, they are performing those very tests on mice.

Subhadeep Das, co-founder of the startup Convalesce, which transplants stem cells into the brain, tells a similar story. He finished his Ph.D. in Mumbai just a year ago, and his co-founder, Amrutraj Zade, is a year from finishing his. “Even though we have a patent, if we stayed in academia, the science alone would take three years before we could think of approaching biotech,” he estimates. He had one meeting with a pharmaceutical CEO last spring. “He said, ‘Whoa, you’re starting with the brain?’ He wanted us to start with something smaller, below the neck. They wanted us to go slower, not faster.”

Gupta is careful to clarify that IndieBio’s sprints are only for the early phases of biotech innovation. When it comes to FDA approval of safety and efficacy, those phases will go at normal speed. “I will run towards regulation rather than away from it,” he says.

The utter emptiness of cash

Gupta grew up in what he calls “a house of knowledge.” His father, Rishab Gupta, was from a town outside New Delhi, born to a family of wealthy businesspeople who made sugar cane machinery. Unlike his brothers, Rishab was fascinated by the biology of sugar plants, and went on to get his Ph.D. at Rutgers in microbiology, then settled in Los Angeles as a professor of surgical oncology at UCLA. As a kid in Van Nuys, Arvind Gupta was athletic, playing quarterback for his high school football team and pole vaulting for the track team. “He was not the top athlete, but he was always the team leader,” says his younger sister, Anita, now an ophthalmologist in New York. “He always got everybody together. In the Boy Scouts, when he received his Eagle Scout award, there was a challenge involving getting a pile of rocks up to the top of a mountain. I remember his rallying everyone to get those rocks there.”

She vividly recalls when their father had a heart attack and needed angioplasty: “That procedure was a huge deal back then. Not like now. Mom was terrified.” Her brother took her to the biomedical library at UCLA, and they read articles on angioplasty. “He wanted us to be less worried, and more understanding of what would happen to dad. That was always Arvind’s way, to not rely on others and find answers yourself.”

Gupta attended UC Santa Barbara, where he did bench science in the lab of biology professor Eduardo Orias. “Even then, I was frustrated at the disparity between the speed of thought and the speed of a shaker flask,” he recalls. Gupta had a grand idea to modify the genome of E. coli to contain the enzyme cellulase, and then secrete it into the human intestine. Cellulase would allow humans to digest wood, much like termites, and that would solve world hunger. “Even then, I was oriented around human value,” he says. “I didn’t want a prize for discerning the structure of cellulase.” Majoring in genetics was a means to an end. Orias’s lab studied the freshwater protozoa tetrahymena thermophila, abundant in lakes and ponds across many climates. It’s perhaps one of the most complex single-cell eukaryotes in nature. It has seven sexes; its cells have two nuclei and 275 chromosomes; and it can survive both symbiotically and as a pathogen. Work on tetrahymena has led to two Nobel Prizes, for the discovery of catalytic RNA and telomeres. “But my work was slow, from just a mechanical standpoint,” recalls Gupta. “It would take three months to prep the DNA.”

Hungry for life at the speed of thought, Gupta had a second major, in economics, and took that path after college, defying the expectations of his family. He landed at the Pacific Exchange in San Francisco as a market maker in Microsoft options, back in the days of open-outcry transactions. “The exchange was adrenaline charged, you had to fight to get noticed to get the order. Arvind had an edge to him, and he really stood out,” remembers a friend, Peter Kim, who was one of Gupta’s co-workers. One night after leaving a restaurant, as they stood on the street corner, Gupta looked up at the brick building. The next moment, Gupta was climbing the bricks two stories above the street, “with just his hands, like a Spider-Man character.”

Kim says Gupta was “going through an internal struggle at that time. Outside of work, he lived a nomadic lifestyle.” As Gupta remembers that period: “I watched other guys buy things with their money that they didn’t need. I recognized the utter emptiness of cash, the vast soullessness of trading your life for money.” When the Pacific Exchange adopted electronic trading and moved to Chicago, Gupta and Kim stayed behind. Gupta didn’t work for the next two years. Almost as an antidote to the culture of his former job, “I was interested in living without any care for money,” he says. “To see where that took me.”

He lived in Berkeley near campus with his sister’s boyfriend, in a one-bedroom apartment. By day he hung out at Caffe Med, the former meeting place of the Beats and sixties activists, reading Herman Hesse and Flaubert, then going over to Moe’s Bookstore to read physics. He wrote poetry and painted. “We called that ‘his Blue Period,’” says his sister, referencing three struggling years of Picasso’s early life. “He was trying to figure out who he really was.” Gupta would meet people at the cafe and invite them to come live with them. The one-room apartment became a home for six.

Rock climbing led to skydiving, and skydiving to BASE jumping. He did hundreds of jumps. “I would die every time he went,” says his sister, who by then had moved in with her boyfriend and her brother. “It’s a selfish sport, but something maybe he needed.”

The person who steered Gupta to design was a fellow jumper named Stefano Moris. “I met Arvind one night at a drop zone in Lodi, California,” Moris says. “There was too much wind, and we ended up getting drunk on a plastic bottle of wine. Many a night we drove across California to jump sites, having long discussions about the meaning of life. It was kind of a shared adolescence.” Moris was a graphic designer and filmmaker. “I impressed on him that design is not drawing. It’s just solving problems.”

That stuck with Gupta. “I stopped base jumping because I found purpose in life through design, and my life was no longer expendable,” he says. He applied to the School of Design at San Francisco State. Classes for the semester had already started, but Gupta convinced a professor of his passion. And then before he even graduated, he was hired at IDEO.

Dave Blakely, who ran IDEO’s smart products business group, still remembers how Gupta arrived on the scene. “IDEO had this design director, the late Paul Bradley, who was a real cynic and very hard to impress. He rarely had a good thing to say about anybody. But one day he said to the group: ‘I just met this guy. He may be the best intern candidate I’ve ever met in my life,’” Blakely says. For his IDEO job interview, Gupta brought some mechanical toys he had designed and two cuts from films he had made — one of BASE jumping in New York City, the other of a city as living organism. “Arvind showed up with tremendous talent and native intelligence, but more importantly, he was committed to having a point of view,” Blakely says. “Design at its worst is flaccid. You show the client options without your own opinion. That wasn’t Arvind.”

Gupta was renowned at IDEO for mastering software rendering packages in one night, “by thinking the way the software thinks.” Blakely says Gupta would go unconventionally deep into a client’s technology, both to understand it and work with engineers on their level. “But what really impressed us all was when he went to Shanghai to take over the China office.”

The way Blakely tells it, IDEO at the time applied its design thinking methodologies to Chinese corporations, a “let us teach you how we do it in Silicon Valley” approach. Gupta sensed that for IDEO to succeed in Shanghai, it needed a cultural basis to its method. He considered the way Chinese firms were known mostly for imitating Western products and websites, a process known as “Shanzhai.” Gupta saw that as similar to the way fine artists during the Renaissance trained by making exact copies of the works of masters. Shanzhai, he preached, was just an entry point to creativity. The first thing you do is duplicate, then you move laterally. “He embraced Chinese culture,” Blakely says. “His thinking was so original.”

In 2011, Gupta co-authored a paper in the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology on the possibility of applying design thinking methodology to scientific research and development, “to increase the speed, inventiveness, and vitality of their output.” “I started thinking about applying what I’d learned to my first love, biology,” Gupta recalls. He was aware that so many of the procedures that slowed microbiology research down when he was at UCSB were now automated, fast, and inexpensive. “It was getting cheap enough to run like an IT company,” he says. “I wondered if soon, you could run a biotech company like an IT startup.”

Soon after, Gupta met Sean O’Sullivan, founder of SOSV, the venture firm that eventually would become the parent company of IndieBio. It now operates six accelerators around the world, across hardware, mobile technology, food, and life sciences. Gupta was mentoring at Hax, the hardware accelerator. “It was obvious from the first days that Arvind was of great help to the startups,” O’Sullivan says. “His emphasis on human-centered design, and his focus on service in support of others, was at the core of what SOSV was also about.” As O’Sullivan talked to Gupta about joining SOSV, Gupta argued for “doing what had been done in software for life sciences.”

When they built the IndieBio website and activated the application form, Gupta had no idea if scientists around the world would find them and apply. Eighty did, and from those, the first class was born.

Gupta may have an unusual background, but it’s clear that from all of his experiences, he extracted some valuable DNA, and now, like an enzyme, he passes those snippets into the startups he cultivates. Even though he rejected high finance, he honed a nimbleness with time-vs-money equations that he applies to venture capital. While BASE jumping, he learned to bring control to something widely perceived as uncontrollable by being obsessive about eliminating risk. From his “Blue Period” in Berkeley’s cafes, he developed a devotion to having a higher purpose, orienting his life to making our world better.

“We are responsible for the future of our own species,” he says. “At this point, it’s not happening to us; our future is defined by our own actions.” Wryly, he adds, “Everyone talks about going to Mars. Sure, but, let’s take care of the planet we have.”

IndieBio even takes something from jiu jitsu, Gupta’s sport of choice today. “Startups win against huge corporations the same way a lightweight martial artist, like me, goes into the ring against a much bigger combatant. I leverage my entire body weight against one joint, one tendon. If a startup can apply 100 percent of its energy to one problem, and nail that problem, you can disrupt an entire industry.”

When it’s time to worry

There is one more interesting trend that’s been driving the growth of life sciences accelerators. Academic scientists have nicknamed it “The Postdocalypse.” From 1998 to 2003, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled, from $13 billion to $26 billion, fueling a rapid expansion of bioscience research and a corresponding increase in the number of graduate students in labs doing that research. Since then, NIH budget growth has been slow — it’s now at $37 billion — which has provided fewer opportunities for scientists. “Only 1 in 5 postdocs get highly coveted jobs in academia,” according to a National Academy of Sciences committee. The others end up in industry, doubling their salary, but that route often involves a step back from the cutting edge. Life science accelerators — and the companies they create — have expanded the career paths in science. “But this is harder than any other options you have on the table,” cautions Ursheet Parikh of Mayfield Fund.

How much harder? “I lost 10 pounds during IndieBio,” laughs Chaeyoung Shin, CEO of Sugarlogix, a graduate of the fifth class. “Making cold calls on customers was one of the hardest things for me as a scientist,” said Carlos Araya, CEO of Jungla. “I thought I could easily learn the business side, that it wasn’t a big deal. It is a big deal.” Todd Huffman, CEO of 3scan, started his company before IndieBio existed, but has undergone a similar journey. “I thought business and marketing people were slackers who didn’t work very hard. I didn’t value the work that was done. 3scan is my third company, and my first one imploded because of my lack of understanding of those skills.”

Being forced to sit elbow-to-elbow, sharing desks in a way that’s reminiscent of an Army boot-camp bunkhouse, generates peer effects. The startups overhear bits of each other’s phone calls and conversations. When one receives a term sheet from a VC, the others all know about it, and that incites them to set up more meetings. They try their pitches on each other. One startup was having trouble getting stem cells fast enough from a commercial vendor; another startup came to the rescue.

Gupta and his team repeatedly emphasize results. One of the reasons startups fail is they celebrate hopeful situations; their bar is set too low. “Having a few meetings is not progress,” he says. “Emailing people is not progress. You should be worried if you didn’t make a major decision this week.” Making decisions brings the company into focus, and focusing energy is the most important lesson he hammers home. One of Gupta’s favorite aphorisms is, “If you have a problem, you have a company. If you have two problems, you’re dead.” By this he means a startup that is trying to solve two problems at once won’t have enough focus to succeed on either. Set your next milestone — make sure it’s a milestone that will bring in more funding — and execute. Alex Lorestani, the CEO of Geltor, from IndieBio’s second class, says: “Arvind was better than anyone at collapsing down all that shit into a simple statement: what do we need to do to get to the next round. The word ‘milestone’ almost cheapens it. Arvind made sure we understood this was survival for us.”

I could see that pressure during the third week of the class. There was so much for these startups to do that it was hard to know what to do at any given moment. But results were achieved almost every day. Two startups received term sheets from VCs; two others were selected as finalists for a year-long mentorship by Andreessen Horowitz; another secured licensing from their former university; data from trials came in; decisions were made about which product line to focus on first; 3D printers cranked out the first components for assembly.

The implicit question that hung over the week was how IndieBio will do without Gupta as a constant presence. He still will be running both the New York and San Francisco programs, and he will visit — but he won’t be there every morning giving hugs and fist bumps, delivering blender pulses of cheerleading affirmation and incisive criticism, reminding everyone that “technology is not a product.”

O’Sullivan of SOSV is sure the rest of the team will fill that role because the surgeon’s “SODOTO” mindset — see one, do one, teach one — is embedded in the organization. “That’s how Arvind learned, and that’s how those who follow will learn.” On the job. Doing it. Not studying it.

I have the sense that, officially, Gupta would agree with this, but it would also rankle him, because he’s put his heart into these startups. And yet that’s the job as he designed it — to pass the DNA along, and trust the code will not drift.

Arvind Gupta’s Jiu Jitsu Makes Biotech Move at Silicon Valley Speed was originally published in proto.life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is me on the cover of Wired in the summer of 1999. The most important word here is “equity.” Silicon Valley’s primary way of unlocking innovation value was giving the employees equity. When employees could own the upside, and were on a vesting schedule that locked them in for a few years, they dared to try things, and worked harder at it, than if they were simply paid income.

About five years after that, Internet 2.0 released the power of platforms that had users generate the content, insight, and value. And in so doing, it kind of distracted us from that older part of the Silicon Valley engine, even if it was still fully operant. Today, the art of entrepreneurship is far more granular than just holding options; entrepreneurs take in cash between pricing rounds with SAFEs, and try to resist investor demands for liquidity preference and most-favored nation status, all to avoid dilution and maintain control of their company. They take heat when they top up the ESOP, but any good entrepreneur knows the ESOP is necessary for hiring and keeping great talent. Equity — upside — continues to be the most important piece of value creation across a wide variety of technologies being reinvented by Silicon Valley.

So, it’s just a little off-key that Silicon Valley is becoming an incubator of the movement for Universal Basic Income — as a future solution to employment displacement when robots and artificial intelligence decimate labor markets. Not equity. Income.

I am not trying to be critical. I laud the vision and the effort put into pilot experiments with UBI around the world. But as a futurist, when I try to envision UBI actually becoming national policy, I see huge social clashes, disinformation tactics around Big Government, and both consumer and corporate rebellion. I see marches in the streets, boycotts, offshoring, and billionaires called to Washington for interrogation. I keep wondering if we need more imagination.

We’re headed towards a world where those who own the best robots, and the best automation systems, end up with a lion’s share of the money. Anytime there are network effects in an industry, it becomes a winner-takes-all economy. I’m glad we have so many tech leaders willing to give back so much of their earned income to benefit society. But I have to wonder: what if, instead of giving back a share of their income, they instead gave consumers a share of the robots?

Let’s use Amazon just as an example. Amazon is one of the companies that’s investing way ahead of the market into warehouse and delivery robots; their cost of capital is very low and network effects are sweeping them towards world domination. We have decidedly mixed feelings about it; we’re instinctively wary of any world-dominator, but we sure like how fast our orders arrive, and we like binge-watching Bosch. To quote one CMO I’ve worked with, “Amazon is a mouse trap. But the cheese tastes good.”

Now, imagine for a moment that Amazon took some chunk of their equity — not all of it — and set it aside for customers, pro-rated by what each family spends on the site. Sort of a hybrid of what REI does and what the State of Alaska does. REI is a customer co-op where, at the end of the year, members get a check for their share of the profits; typically this is set at around 10% of your purchases. Since 1982, Alaska pays everyone in the state a dividend from rights to oilfield mining in Prudhoe Bay — this year, the payment is $1,663. If Amazon did this, they’d unlikely give customers a check, or even a credit to be used against purchases. They need to hold on to that money and reinvest it. So rather than giving you income, they’d give you an equity-dividend. Imagine you had earned a mere $10 equity-dividend in 1997 from your purchases that year; it would be worth about $9,600 today. And so on ever since.

The actual financial gain you’d receive isn’t the point though. Rather, it’s how this would affect our perception of world-dominators, both today and in the future, when job displacement becomes more disruptive. Network effects, as they approach the end game, generate conditions that lead to an Us vs Them mentality. The 99% vs the 1%. Conflict feels inevitable.

So many Fortune 500 companies are fond of saying their customers are “co-owners” of their brand. They’ve soaked up Internet 2.0 ideology and are desperately trying not to be transaction companies; they want a long-term relationship with the customer. But with the exception of REI, we are not co-owners at all; member points are not equity. They’re using the term “co-owners” metaphorically without ever considering what if it wasn’t just a metaphor.

This is where the Big Disclaimer comes in. I am not proposing Amazon, or any other company, actually do this particular idea. The idea has obvious flaws; it’s useless in business-to-business markets, and even in consumer markets, equity dividends won’t offset or placate people who lose their job and way of life. I only want you to think about it. It’s merely one mechanism, among many, that fall under the conceptual umbrella of Universal Basic Equity. We have about a decade before the displacement really starts to throw people’s lives into disarray. Micro-transactions, thin slices, blockchain fractional ownership — they’re all likely part of the solution. My general sense is that Silicon Valley is not being inventive enough in saying “we know displacement is coming, so the government should give everyone a basic income.” We do need to protect entrepreneurial upside –without it, innovation vanishes. And to grow, startups need real capital, not just Kickstarter advances from future customers. But our economic system needs to find other ways to reduce the polarization into haves and have-nots.

Wallet activism can be extremely powerful. Normally, the energy is not focused; we disperse our power across so many good issues we’re concerned with. Ocean preservation, microplastics, renewable energy, #metoo and Times Up, equal pay, LGBT rights, animal welfare, political party affiliation, country of origin, sustainable wages. The punching power of a single individual is increasing, but it’s possible that job displacement policies will just become one more thing that makes our priority list even longer. It’s also possible that new jobs will emerge fast enough that the displacement isn’t so severe, and so we don’t end up in a cultural war. Right now, truck drivers are heavily in demand because the volume of shipping has increased so much. Right now, grocery stores can barely hire enough stocking clerks. Retail has millions of jobs unfilled. Winery vineyards have to bring in grape-picking robots, because there aren’t enough seasonal workers to hire. We’re sitting in a lull, enjoying near-full employment, making it all too easy to not think about what’s coming. To some extent, this is temporarily useful: we can somewhat focus on equal treatment and the environment. But I worry.

A century and a half ago, the Gilded Age brought the fastest economic growth in history, but also created extreme income inequality. Unions emerged; corporations bonded together in trusts to fight back. Labor strikes were violent. Company towns paid in company scrip that could only be spent in the company store. Conflict escalated until the Progressive Era brought reforms. Today’s corporate leaders don’t want society to unravel like that again. They want their business to benefit society. They want customers to like them, not hate them. But they need a more robust toolkit.

Right now, corporations run two sets of books, in a sense. One uses the traditional financial measuring sticks required by investors — i.e., owners. The second uses the neotraditional KPIs that quantify the customer — repeat visits, customer acquisition costs, click-through rates, mileage points, scrolling behavior metrics, net promoter scores, even emotional microexpression readings. In theory, the second informs the first, and maybe it’s fair to say the second set of books drives growth, while the first set of books pegs margin. “Our customers are our evangelists,” is the common wisdom. “They’re our best salespeople.”

And no doubt, we are entering an era where alternative currencies are expected to hybridize into real currency as the next generation takes over. I’m not talking crypto necessarily — the same way I swapped lunches at school as a child, the next generation was raised to think very flexibly about what constitutes cabbage. The currency of mid-childhood is “screen time,” dispensed by parents in moderation much like the Federal Reserve sells T-bills to loosen the money supply. Monthly data limits are the currency of pre-teens; so are Spotify Premium logins, and HBO passwords. Video game “coins” and barely-worn sneakers convert to cash in secondary online markets. In microtransaction tipping, they’re inventing the mother of all exchange rates, the normative value, in dollars, of human actions that make us feel good.

It’s only a slight logical leap to imagine an economic model evolving that blends the customer and the owner into a single set of books. A 3-dimensional P/L. Where the customer and the owner are on a single spectrum, with many who are both.

Gen Z is doing more than killing cash. Gen Z is killing malls. They’re killing magazines. They’re not just going to kill cable bundling — they’re going to kill the very concept of a television channel. They don’t want the channel, they just want the show. They’re way smarter and more resourceful than any anthropologist gives them credit for. I don’t see them blindly getting into driverless Ubers, without some serious investigation into where the jobs will come from. I don’t see them blindly giving Jeff Bezos every penny, on the hope he’s going to give them a monthly stipend of Amazon Bucks if they run out. The reckoning is coming; policies and standards for labor displacement need to be in place.

Universal Basic Equity was originally published in ATTN: FWD on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.