I’ve been consuming electronics my whole life, thanks mainly to my dad. Despite being a real estate salesperson, he was a fervent believer in technology, though he didn’t spend much time trying to understand it. He was interested in how it could make him more money.
This proximity naturally led me to tear devices apart- iPhones, PlayStations, and Microsoft computers, building mining rigs, and the fastest RC cars helicopters on the internet. That paired with a ton of LEGOs, chemistry kits, and flipping electronics on eBay through my Mom’s account (since I was below the age of 16 and couldn’t have an account), I learned how to build and sell on the internet.
After building software software companies for ~6 years in my 20s, I wanted to do something different. I moved my stuff back home, spent a year traveling, then spent 6 months building more software and electronics, like a small bioreactor, AI-native glucose sensor, GPU accelerated variant pipelines, and other projects that taught me about applied biotech. Part of this was going to a ton of meetups, conferences, and events.
I learned a lot from this period of wandering, but two observations stood above all:
- Why is everyone building for big pharma?
- Where is all the dreamy sci-fi for biotech? Where are our flying cars, reaper drones, humanoid robots for biology?
I think it is two-fold. When you think of biotech, you primarily think of science. The industry is steeped in reputation and other credibility proxies- alma-mater, paper submissions, name brand companies as clients, collaborations. But none of these are the thing, they are merely things around the thing. What matters is results from the thing.
This is holy and sacred in the world of engineering. We do not care where you come from, or from whom, or why. We usually don’t even care about how. What we care about are results- can the thing you make successfully achieve some objective? Can it satisfy multiple constraints? Can it work iteratively? Can it be simplified enough to be manufactured?
This is what is missing most from biotech. It’s the culture of the creator- the engineer, the hacker, the artist, the painter, the programmer. Defense (now with SpaceX and Anduril), cryptography, AI, e-commerce, even fashion (!), etc all have this culture, but I have yet to see it as a core identity of biotech. And that is natural when the stakes are so high and the knowledge is so limited.
But as the worlds of AI, generative chemistry, consumer electronics, and biology all come together, there will be an intense storm of invention and creativity. One that will most likely resemble the great technology and artistic movements of the past. After all, I can’t think of many industries where you create one product that touches millions and produces trillions in revenue.