Today we get to hang out with Adina Mangubat, a friend of mine that I know from a salsa dancing, and also hanging out with computer hackers. She’s probably the youngest founder that I know. And she’s been running her company for almost a decade since starting it in college at age 22 called Spiral Genetics.
It could be considered probably the most advanced bioinformatics technology for population genomics. And what that means is DNA sequencing, massive populations, hundreds of thousands of people, if you can, and then correlating that data to see what can be learned about it. And it’s a huge frontier there’s so much that can be learned from doing this kind of work.
And Adina is really at the forefront of that. And so it’s a really fascinating conversation where she breaks down all that stuff: What it means, what DNA sequencing is about, the potential for bioinformatics, the potential for population genomics etc. So, this is the perfect episode for you. If you don’t know anything about it, because I’m asking Adina, a lots of dumb questions, you’re going to love it.
She’s also a super entrepreneurial and hustler which is very inspiring. Adina has built this company. She actually sold it to a large biotech company and then spun it back out on. And so she’s been through a lot as an entrepreneur and we’d talk about that a bunch.
And the other thing about Adina that’s super interesting to me is that she’s really committed to figuring out how you can create these transparent, high integrity, mission driven cultures in startups and small companies, and that’s pioneering work. It is really important and difficult work.
It’s unproven. We don’t know if it’s even going to work, but it’s so necessary to figure out how we make better companies. Some people have to be the ones to try that. And so we talk about that and I think there’s a lot to learn at the end of this episode. Adina and I talk a little bit about adoption and parenting and I am kind of deep into that, having adopted a child and raised her to age 14, so far seemingly successfully. Adina is kind of early in that cycle. And so if you’re interested in that sort of thing at the end, there’s a conversation about that. I hope you guys liked this episode and get a lot out of it.
Pablos: You seem to be possibly the youngest Founder/CEO that I know. I know other people who are young. You might not be the youngest now, but when you started, you were the youngest.
Adina: 22? I know some people that are younger.
It’s not common. I know people who started younger but they did not succeed at keeping it going for very long. You started at 22 and you’re still at it, which means you’re tenacious.
Maybe also stupid or crazy or all three.
I’m curious about that. First, I want to know how that happened for you. I don’t know if the track you’re on now is what you had planned. When you were a child, were your parents trying to convince you to be an entrepreneur?
No, definitely not. My family had planned on helping me out with grad school if I wanted to do that. I was like, “I don’t want to do that. I want to start this company instead.” My dad wrote me a tiny check and he slid it across the table. He’s like, “This is going to be the hardest and most educational year of your life.” I was like, “Really?” He was like, “Yes.” My mom was supportive but worried. She would call me every couple of weeks and be like, “How’s it going? Are you thinking about applying for a normal job?” After a while, she figured out this was clearly not a phase and that I was going to be okay.
I gathered later that the reason why she kept on asking is because she had started a company when she was young. She ran up a CPR business, a training business, and trained a bunch of the Secret Service. Back then, she had connections and you could roll up to the White House at midnight and be like, “Can I get a tour?” They would be like, “Yes.” She’d had to go through the entire process of starting a company back then. She knew that it was going to be hard.
Were they right?
Yes, it’s hard.
Do you think that you believe them or you didn’t believe them?
I didn’t. The blessing and the curse of being a newbie is that you’re so naive that you don’t know what you don’t know. If I knew everything that I know now if I were given the option of starting this particular company, I don’t know. I wonder about if I move on to another company someday…
If you’d have the guts to take it on?
It’s a big one. I’m clear that I have a reasonable business acumen. There are a lot of other companies that I could start that would be easy by comparison like stuff that is not this complicated. I have fantasies about easy companies. The reality is that I get bored after running a festival earrings company or something like that. That’s an idea that has been sitting around for a long time.
One of the things that’s missing in our vernacular is a way of describing the difference between entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship because you could start a Taco Wagon or a festival earrings company or something that will be entrepreneurship but it’s something that’s been done before.
There might even be more fine-grain definitions because I think that we have something to describe that there are “lifestyle businesses,” which is the Taco Wagon or the festival earrings company or whatever where the intention is to build a company that is going to feed your lifestyle and be fun generally. There’s then tech entrepreneurship, and it’s tech entrepreneurship of stuff that is hard but not bonkers hard. If you want to make enterprise software or a Fitbit device but for your animals or your pets, things like that. Things where you’re basically you’re taking off the shelf technology and you’re retooling it to a particular vertical or something. You’re doing some innovation but it’s not hard and never ever been seen before innovation.
I call the hard stuff deep tech now. All that other stuff, I call it shallow tech. If it’s iPhone apps or enterprise software or modified Fitbit’s, shallow tech. I don’t know if that’s going to stick but that’s how I’m thinking about it.
It’s unlikely because a lot of people feel like, “My tech isn’t shallow.”
It’s revolutionary and it’s sprinkled with blockchain. You went to college and you finished college.
It’s nothing related to this. I got my degree in Psychology with a focus on Bio Psych.
Do you feel like you know about the brains of people?
I do. At the time people were like, “What on earth are you going to do with that?” It turns out that a lot of things in life have a lot to do with humans that have brains. Understanding how humans work and how they tick and all of that stuff is ridiculously useful.
That’s why I like computers. I just reboot them if things go wrong. They mystify me. You finished college for your parents. Was that here?
Yes, at UDub.
The plan was like, “I’ve got to find something to do and I don’t want a job.” How did you end up deciding to start a company?
I’d been involved in two companies while I was in college as an intern. One was a smart grid company that was looking at like, “How can you optimize the usage of energy that come from green sources like wind energy.” Essentially, it was how can we use big buildings as batteries? If you know that the wind energy is spiking at a particular moment, you can overheat or over-cool your building a little bit. If it’s a large enough building so you can use that.
Did it seem it would work?
It seemed it would work. They had a good run but didn’t end up making it in the end. It turns out that the tech for building control is ancient and terrible. When you’re trying to integrate with that, that’s more complicated and there were a variety of reasons. I was involved in that company. I did a bunch of marketing related stuff for them, initial business strategy sales.
How big was the company at the time?
Seven people, maybe.
The curse of being a newbie is that you're so naive that you don't know what you don't know.
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That’s cool though, as an internship, especially because you get to see pretty much every part of the company. If you go be an intern at Microsoft, you get to see one dime and you don’t get to see the whole operation.
You learn about management, what works, what doesn’t work and all of those pieces. I was involved in that company and before that, my first job was an internship with a company that did home automation. Turning your lights on and off with a control panel. This is before cell phones. They were in direct competition with Control4. They did pretty well up until the housing crash. Nobody was looking to outfit their homes with cool smart techs.
I had a lot of friends because lots of my friends are nerds, especially when one of them leaves the company or sells their company or ends up with some free time, they dive into home automation and they try and install everything and they tell you all about it. It’s all amazing. They’re spending full-time integrating their home automation stuff. A year later, I’ll ask them about it. They’ll be like, “I had to tear all that shit out.” You’re going to be a sysadmin for yourself for your home light switches.
At some point you’re like, “I’m going to open the blinds by myself like an adult and it will be fine.” Another very interesting experience, they were larger, probably 30-something people. I learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t work. Back then, I was doing video creation for them, teaching people how to use the product and stuff like that. I took it to see the whole operation and have direct contact with all of the “upper-level management.” I was involved in those.
After that, it seemed like, “It’s easy to start a company. I’ll do that.”
No. It was cockier than that. It was like, “These guys are doing it wrong.” I had a whole thing about how people were managed. Especially as a psych person, I was like, “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Some of these people aren’t fulfilled.” I feel I could do that better. It turns out that that’s hard and complicated and they were doing it for the best that they could. There are definitely best practices but that stuff’s hard. That was part of it. I took an entrepreneurship course at the UDub Bothell because UDub Seattle wouldn’t let me into the normal course because you need prerequisites like accounting and stuff like that. I wasn’t going to do accounting for taking one class.
Do you wish you had now?
No. Accounting’s not that complicated. If you need deep accounting, you can call somebody that loves that, which I don’t. Somebody else can do that. That’s cool. I need to know how much money do I need in order to get to X and make sure I don’t run out of it before then. I commuted 40 minutes each way 2 to 3 times a week to take this class. Bothell is a very interesting campus because it’s got a lot more diversity in terms of its student population. One of the people that was up there, her name is Becky Drees and she was a non-matriculated student, Molecular Biologist, PhD at Berkeley. She had been the industry for years and ran one of the labs at UDub.
On the first day, the way the entrepreneurship course works is you get up there and you either picked your skillset, which is what I did, or you pitch your idea because I didn’t have an idea. She pitched this genetic analysis company that was very similar to a 23andMe style company these days. Her ultimate pitch was if we are going to be able to impact disease, we have to understand the code of who we are. For me, that was compelling both from an intellectual perspective but also from a personal perspective. I’d had people in my life that had been significantly impacted by things that are entirely genetic in basis. Cancer is quite literally the disease of the genome. I’d had my grandfather pass when I was thirteen from lung cancer. I remember at the time when that was happening.
Mine too. I was eleven.
Where was he located? Was he in Seattle or no?
No. I grew up in Alaska but he was mostly in California. That doesn’t seem that much in the way, but it was still my grandfather and it was hard. It was the first person I lost.
What was striking for me at the time was like my dad is a doctor. He’s a surgeon but when you’re thirteen, you don’t differentiate between surgeon and oncologist. You’re like, “Doctors should be cool,” and it wasn’t. As I got older, I learned that in large part it was because they didn’t know what to do. Even now, to a certain extent, if you get diagnosed with cancer, there’s a super over simplification. They’re like, “You have this, we have X number of drugs that could be used to treat that. We’re going to try this first one. If that doesn’t work then we’re going to try the second one and we’re going to try and hope that we get the right one before it’s too late.” Becky’s basic pitch to me was if you could see what’s going on in there, then you could pick the right one the first time. That for me was far more interesting than any of the other companies that were being pitched. I didn’t want to do Fitbit for your dog or any of that stuff or a concierge service.
It sounds like I should go pitch my crazy ideas to the entrepreneurial class and I can pick up people like you to run with them.
People have a very interesting relationship or opinion about young students because I was 21, 22 at the time. I went back. I’ve maintained a good relationship with the professor that teaches it, Alan Leong. He now teaches at the UDub proper, the Seattle campus, but I’ve gone back and helped to judge classes and etc. Frankly, the younger they are, the better. I’ve even been in classes where there have been MBA students and freshmen and then they’re competing in a competition, a business plan competition together. I’ve got to tell you, the freshmen kick the MBA’s butts every time. The vast majority of the reason why, in my opinion, is that the older we get, the more we fall susceptible to thinking, “This is that way. This is possible. That’s not possible,” whereas the freshmen, they don’t know. They’re like, “Let’s try this thing.”
There are probably two escape hatches, either personality or naiveté. Have you ever hired anybody from one of these?
We’ve had bunches of them as interns. We’ve definitely hired some pretty young people sometimes.
I want to dive into the problem with genetics. What happened to the woman who had the idea that you heard pitch it? Did you end up working on it with her?
We were cofounders. She and I won a business plan competition and that’s how this whole thing got started. It’s 2009. If you recall back then, the economy was not so hot. Here I am graduating with a Psych degree. My options are stupid, boring, shitty job or go to grad school but I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t want to get a PhD because it turns out that I’m impatient enough that research doesn’t appeal to me or it was like start this thing. It seems like a very similar risk profile at the time. Find a job, make a job. I was like, “How hard could it be? That was my naiveté speaking. We went for it and we found our third cofounder Jeremy through a Japanese tea ceremony, which is how you usually find cofounders. I worked for Jeremy for a long time.
Maybe you should start with what you guys thought you were doing.
At the time we thought that we were doing essentially what is 23andMe now. 23andMe then came out and pro tip, don’t go head-to-head with essentially what is a Google-backed company. This was in 2009.
Was that when 23andMe came out?
They were even maybe right before 2009. I’ll have to look but they weren’t so big at that time. There were large enough announcements where it was like, “Somebody already doing this. Maybe we should pivot.” At the time, the plan was to do exactly what 23andMe is doing in terms of snip chips. There are lots of ways to look at a genome. One way is to look at the whole three billion base pairs. Another way is to only look at certain markers that you’re interested in.
That’s what they were doing at the time.
They’re still doing that for the vast majority of things. It’s cheap to do that, etc.
I met them in January of 2009. I’m one of the first 100 people on 23andMe. Now there’s all this cool stuff they can do, but my sample was done so long ago that they don’t have as much data about me. There’s a bunch of things they can’t do for me. I have to redo it again.
The chips that they were using probably at that point didn’t have as many individual markers but even now, at least the last time I looked, they’re only doing about 500,000 markers, which sounds a lot but out of three billion, it’s tiny. They’re single base pair. They’re also usually the most commonly varying ones. While that’s interesting from, “Are you a fast metabolizer of coffee and caffeine? What color your eyes?” It is relevant for some medical things BRCA1, BRCA2, the breast cancer genes that research is on lockdown. It’s very good. Whereas your risk for diabetes or other things, the reality is that you might have a single-base pair that has been changed that increases your risk right next to something that you didn’t look at that decreases your risk and you would have no idea.
It’s not high risk yet. If I go to a service that can do my whole genome because some of those exist, it could cost $2,000, maybe.
It’s $1,000 for chemistry, plus the analysis on the computational side.
That’s vastly less expensive than it was.
Back in 2009, it was $100,000.
If I did that, would I discover vastly more?
Probably not.
It’s because the analysis hasn’t been done on all those other things. The first 500,000 that the zillion people have done, we have a lot of data on.
The game that we’re focused on now is how do you figure out what the rest of it means. That’s what our business is focused on now. As a juxtaposition, we started out with like, “Let’s do a 23andMe-like thing.” What we do now is we make the software to compare large groups of whole human genomes. We’re going after the folks that are doing country genome sequencing projects, where they’re sequencing hundreds of thousands or millions of people and trying to sort out what’s going on in there.
Are they trying to do the whole genome for millions of people?
The United States is doing that.
Can you tell me a little bit about what that project looks like?
There are over 50 countries now that are doing this thing. A fun fact that most people don’t know about that.
If countries are doing it, what’s the example of a country’s project like?
The one that’s furthest along is England, the UK. They have this project called Genomics England. It started out as 100,000 people and they did all of that. They did it for people generally that had gone through most of the medical system, hadn’t received a diagnosis and they were trying to still assess out what’s going on. At that point, they were given an option of, “We don’t know what it is. You can either be at a dead-end or we can sequence your genome. It’s totally up to you. If we sequence you, you’re consenting to research.” They had 100,000 people say yes to that and they were able to solve 23% of the cases. It’s pretty good.
They were able to diagnose people who were unable to be diagnosed 23% of 100,000 people from genomic data.
Diagnosed, maybe we shouldn’t use that word. It’s like a candidate is what they call it, a candidate-able gene. They made a very large dent.
The essential problem then is even if you have the money and the people and you can do all these tests, it yields a ridiculous amount of data. How much data is sequencing three billion base pair are going to yield?
It’s 120 gigs per person. If you multiply that by 100,000 people, that’s a good chunk.
All the memory on my top of line iPhone would be full with my genome.
The raw data of your genome.
That’s just the raw data and it’s going to be more once I started trying to analyze it.
The older we get, the more we fall susceptible to thinking one way is the way.
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In terms of getting into the tech side, this is where there’s a lot of debate about how should you do the analysis because the vast majority of the industry right now tries to take that 120 gigs and determine what’s important as part of it. They go through this whole process where they align your genome against a reference genome, which is a Franken genome of Craig Venter and a bunch of other people. They do a big diff and then they output the diff into what is essentially a glorified Excel spreadsheet. What they try and do is compare these Excel spreadsheets against one another. There’s a bunch of technical issues with doing that. One, you’re not going to see everything that’s in there. Two, if you’re trying to align against essentially what is mostly a European white male reference genome, you don’t see a bunch of stuff. There’s a lot of interesting challenges in the space of diversity within genomics and how do you get representative information about what’s going on in an individual?
Are you making that up or is there any evidence that this is the case where people have gone back and said using the white male European reference turned out to make us miss out on this stuff though there are actual projects?
There have been multiple efforts to make custom reference genomes for specific ethnic groups. There was a whole Han Chinese genome effort. The Japanese did a genome that was specifically for theirs. There’s an error of reference genome that’s in the middle of construction. They did their first version. They’re trying to do a second run.
It seems that would be the thing that you would make by taking all the Japanese folk’s data, go find the stuff that’s the same in all of them and drop that out. It’s basic compression algorithm and then go looking into the rest. What am I missing here? Why is there work?
How do you figure out what is present in there? We’re going to have to get a little technical in order to get there. Let’s start with what does the data look when it comes off the sequencer? A lot of people have the misconception that when you sequence a genome, it comes off like a book. You read it from the beginning to the end. It doesn’t go that way. In a super squishy way, it’s like how they did the human genome project, which is why we know what the order of a human being looks like, but it costs a lot of money to do it that way. It was slow, etc. They did this innovation where it’s called shotgun sequencing. What they do is they take your genome and they duplicate it 30, 40 times. They chop it up into 150 base pair long chunks.
I’m glazing over a lot of technical details. For any of your technical readers out there, it’s not exactly that way but for the average reader, it’s 150 base pair long chunks. What the sequence reads is all of those 150 base pair long chunks. What comes off of the sequencer quite literally is a huge pile of text files. If you open up one of these text files, it’ll be 150 bases with a guess of the quality score for how likely it called that particular base correctly or not. That’s it. You don’t have any information about where that thing came from in the original. It’s the worst jigsaw puzzle of your entire life.
It’s 150 base pair and base four is the notation. It’s got something 256 bits of data or something like that.
Plus, the quality scores of how likely was the sequencer to call it correctly? Was it 90% sure?
Where does that number come from?
The sequencer generates it when it looks at it. It’s like, I’m 90% sure it was an A.
I probably could have 36 or 34 or whatever copies of the same 150 base pair in my data.
That’s how they fixed errors.
That’s my check sum that they are correcting there because if I find ones where that’s a few bits off, then it’s easy to fix. If I’ve got essentially a 256-bit key, ostensibly looking at a unique chunk of the genome or are there duplicates? There are lots of duplicates. I’m trying to figure out how to put them all together in the correct order if half the battle.
The reason why they use the reference genome thing is they take every 150 base pair long chunk and they look for the nearest match. That works great for small changes. In my 150 bases, if two of them don’t match the reference genome, that’s great. I know where that goes, but what happens when 50 of them out of the 150 don’t match? You then get to a place where there’s no longer a unique match. Where does it go? Does it go in this place in the genome or that place in the genome or this other place? What happens if the person has genetic code that didn’t show up at all in the reference genome, which totally happens? You can have a full 5,000 base pair of novel institution, which I know I do because I sequence my genome. You’re going to have this huge insertion.
How do you figure out where that goes? Do I have to go do it the old-fashioned way?
No, not exactly. What everybody else does is they try and do this process where they fish the things out of the garbage bin because when they don’t align, then they try and take all of the things that didn’t align. After the fact, they try and put things back together and figure out where it might’ve come from because there’s overlap with every little chunk. You could try and stitch it together and figure out where it goes. By then, you have already placed these little chunks potentially in the wrong spot. You’ve already biased everything against the reference. We try not to do that.
I have an idea. I got my 150 base pair but if I have it overlap by 50 on each side and it’s only 50 in the middle, it’d be really good, but now I’ve reduced the efficiency of my shotgun approach by two-thirds but then I should get the order of stuff for free at the end. Why can’t we do that?
They do a version of this. As I said, skipping over some stuff, it’s not 150 straight up. What they do is it’s about 500 or 600 bases. They read in from both sides of the chunk. There’s a gap in the middle of that they don’t hit. It’s about 300 bases. This is what is called a paired read. You have 150 bases, a gap of 300 where you don’t know what it is and then 150 bases. You can also get, to a certain extent, further with that because if one section aligns in this particular area and then this other one doesn’t align very well, then you can try and trace over that. It only works up into a certain extent for a 5,000 base pair insertion. It’s longer than the length of the overall chunk. The likelihood they’re going to have some error or dropout is relatively high such that you can’t assemble over it.
Now that we understand the problem, tell me why you don’t have that problem.
It turns out that there is another way of doing it. These little chunks are called reads. If you were to compare every read against every other read, you were essentially to create a probabilistic structure of how they could all go together without worrying about figuring out exactly how they go together. You could imagine that you could account for all of the possible paths and you’ll have a lot of information about what is more likely versus the other and you weight them. You could imagine that you could do that for one person. You could also imagine that you could do that for many other people and you could even overlay a lot of this information over one another. That’s part of the reason why population genomics is important.
That sounds the big data approach to guessing more or less what the likely structure this is. Is there metrics now on how well that works?
We’ve done testing a bunch of what are called truth sets, like golden datasets because one of the big challenges of knowing whether or not your stuff is good or not is how do you know what’s in there? There’s this one sample that has been sequenced a bazillion times with every single different sequencing technology out there. It’s run by this particular consortium out of NIST called the Genome in a Bottle Consortium. It’s very cutely named. They’ve done it with regular short-read sequencing, which is what we all described but they also have long read sequencing tech, which is much longer chunks like 10,000, 20,000 base for long chunks but it’s expensive, so nobody uses that at scale. Usually, it’s used for plant genomics, things like that.
There are other various chemical sequencing technologies that you can use to try and get at these golden datasets. We’ve done a bunch of testing regarding the golden data set approach. Other technologies can see about 33% of the genetic variations that a represent. If you look at on a base for base basis, we can see about 72% if you’re using any amount of population style data. If you think about it, it’s intuitive. The burden of proof for finding a variation the first time is pretty high, but if you’re looking for evidence of whether or not you’ve seen that thing that you’ve already seen before, then it’s much lower so you can pick out things.
If I do it the old school Craig Venter way, I get a complete and accurate genome. Is that right?
You’ll get about as good as you’re going to get.
That’s as close to 100% as we’re going to get. The best off-the-shelf technology we know of gets us to 33%.
If you’re going to identify variations, yes.
Your way, it’s 72%. That’s amazing.
You can characterize it like that.
Essentially the job of the company is to make the software tools to help us manage and analyze all this data at a large scale. What scale are we talking about here? How much data are you guys working with here?
It’s 100,000 people or 350,000 people. It depends on the country.
You guys have multiple countries you’re working with at this point. Is it a real business?
Yeah. I don’t think that people would keep giving me money if it wasn’t.
Is the customer is giving you money or investors?
Both.
If I understand all this correctly, we think that for a lot of the problems that people have, various diseases, different types of cancer and things, by analyzing their genome, we can probably at least gauge what risk they have of having this problem. In some cases, we might know. For sure you’re going to have this problem. I have the cilantro gene that makes me think cilantro tastes like soap. It’s pretty bad in Seattle because cilantro is everywhere.
That’s not the worst one you could possibly have.
It turns out there no other problems with me other than that. I got lucky. I suppose if we’d had a good analysis of my genome, I could have been more before the first time I had discovered that the hard way. What I’m wondering is if this is an important part of what we would want for this type of work. It’s tools that can handle the scale of the data that the testing is putting out and allowing us to analyze it in ever smarter ways. We would also want better testing or better ability to test a genome that’s more cost-effective. What else is missing? More research on what each of these markers would mean. That’s perpetual research project.
I would say that’s the research project now. To give you a perspective, at this point as a globe, we have characterized about 1% of all human variation and associated with anything. When I say anything, I mean high breast cancer risk, everything. That means that there’s still a lot of stuff that we don’t understand even a little bit. If you think about it, to a certain extent, it makes sense why because your search base is large. It’s three billion bases. If you do a study of 1,000 people, that’s not enough information to be able to sort out much of anything, unless you happen to be looking at something that is so strongly correlated that it’s going to be obvious. We’ve gotten some of those great, low-hanging fruit things like the breast cancer genes, BRCA1, BRCA2. Those have massive impact. You can discover that in a sample of twenty people, which is how it was originally discovered.
Is 100,000 people enough that we’re starting to feel confident or do you need 100 million?
It depends on the disease or the particular phenotype. For some of them, 100,000 is going to be sufficient. For some of them, it’s not and we don’t know yet. That’s a mystery that we’ll find out.
In some sense, to answer the question of to pick that mystery apart, you want to scale this up. In your life, what I suppose you’re hoping for is over the next 1, 2, 3 decades, we want to get from counting hundreds of thousands to millions or tens or hundreds of millions of people who we’ve got in the database so that we can start going after these things that have smaller that show up less frequently.
Sometimes you’re going to get those one hits. If you have this single base pair change in this particular location, you have this significantly increased risk. For a lot of it, it’s going to be something more like if you have this and this, then you have an increased risk. You’ve got to have all four.
You have to find all four to correlate them and that’ll take a lot of work. Do you think that the cases where we figure it out, what does that research look like? Is it lots of data and software finding it?
There are a lot of analysis techniques that people had to use when the datasets are smaller. Now we’re entering a time where there’s enough data that you can do things like machine learning or even deep learning. You could use that technology to be able to assess it out. Deep learning is a little bit more complicated because search base is large and the number of examples you have are lower. You have to be smarter about how you do the feature detection, but you can make some of that stuff work. All of a sudden, you don’t have human beings that are trying to do basic statistical analyses anymore. You have things that can look for much more interesting, subtle patterns that frankly our little human brains can’t.
In some sense, given enough data and desktop computers, we’re going to be able to set these things free and let them go find everything for us.
To some extent. I don’t know if it’s that simple, but yes.
Why wouldn’t it be? Can you think of a reason? What what’s missing from that?
Machine learning is complicated. It can over fit easily. There are a lot of nuances, I would say. Plus, biology is a lot messier than people anticipate.
I got interested one time. I saw this video of Danny Hillis talking about proteomics. He made a company called Applied Proteomics but his thesis was that cancer is a normal thing that your body does all the time. You got these cells mutating. Most of the time, nothing bad happens. They get flushed. Everybody is doing that. He is like, “Cancer shouldn’t be a noun. It’s more a verb. You’re cancering all the time.”
You’re pairing and occasionally you screw it up.
You don’t repair fast enough and things get out of hand and you end up with a tumor and then that breaks off and floats around your bloodstream and latches on to where it metastasizes and kills you. That’s the process. The way he described it was when we started the human genome project, we thought we were going to get the recipe for how to make the human. What we got after going through all that work and sequencing, the whole genome is more like list of ingredients but we still don’t have the recipe. The recipe is proteins and that’s interacting with your DNA. What he believed the next frontier was we need to go be able to sequence the proteins and figure out what they’re doing.
I would say that to think that you’re going to get the whole enchilada in just genomics is naive. Frankly, to think that you’re going to get it with just proteomics is also naive. You got to have the whole thing. It’s going to be a combination of all of the omics’, if you will. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, you name that. As I said, biology is complicated. Back to your question of like, “Can we have sort out everything? Can the computers work it all out?” Maybe if we gave it everything that it needed.
Eventually, it gets all the data but right now we don’t even get all the data.
It changes too. The genome, for the most part, it seems it’s stable-ish. It doesn’t change that much over the course of your lifetime. Certain cells might write the ones that become cancerous, but your proteomics and metabolomics, it changes by the moment.
When I was a kid, we didn’t know any of this stuff. Not only did I not know it, the scientific community didn’t. In the last few years that we seem to have gotten our heads around things like the microbiome.
To a certain extent, we know that it’s important. Do we know what any of it does? No.
It hadn’t even been discovered. We thought your tummy is full of acid and then it eats up the food and then you poop it out. That was the entire understanding as far as I could tell.
At this point, as a globe, we have characterized about 1% of all human variation and associated with anything.
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A lot of people still think of it that way. It’s way more complicated than that.
I don’t know that much about it but you start to learn, you’re like, “I eat food that feeds a bunch of microbes in my gut and then they spit out what feeds me.” There’s a layer of indirection in there that there’s no measurement for. My microbiome is different than yours. It changes over time and none of us knows what we’re randomly shoving in our mouths. It’s crazy.
It’s not that crazy. We have been doing it for thousands of years.
That’s why we’ve got thousands of different microbes in case we eat that weird thing. This is also simplistic but coming from working on computers, my whole career, I lived through these multiple progressions where we started out with. I got the first digital camera with a CCD in it in 1990 or ‘91 or around that. I’m the world’s earliest adopter. I would go take pictures on the thing. It had a little Post-it note sized screen. I could show people immediately the picture that I took of them, which blew everyone’s mind because they’d never seen anything like that before.
Times have changed. Before that, it was Polaroid. That was the only other option.
Even Polaroids were slow. You had to stand up and wave them.
Which apparently makes no difference, by the way. It’s detrimental. You do not shake a Polaroid picture anymore.
The thing that happened is that camera sucked and the photos were 16k or something. Every year, it got a little better but you had this global scale argument going between photographers saying, “That digital crap will never be as good as real photography.” That progressed all through the ‘90s and into the 2000s. This asymptomatic progression where as the digital cameras got better, cheaper, higher resolution and better color management, all that stuff. All those guys started keeping their mouth shut because what they don’t realize is the chemistry was the best technology we had at the time to make photographs. Now we have a better technology and at the beginning, it’s low resolution. As the sensors get better and the data collection gets better and we can collect more data and we can collect data at a higher resolution than essentially the thing we’re sampling, that’s exactly the same progression went with audio too. Computer audio sucks, CD-ROMs aren’t as good as vinyl and all that.
People still have that argument.
They don’t understand how it works. It sounds warmer because there are imperfections in the vinyl. We go through those progressions but at some point with a lot of things, you get to a point where the resolution is high enough that you’re now dealing with high-quality, meaningful data. We’re there with things like audio, video and these things but we’re not there with all the biological stuff in a human sample. We’re close. It’s amazing, the progression.
In the last few years, it’s been insane to watch because back then it was $100,000 to do one person. It would take 30 days of chemical churning to output the text files for one person. You had 30 days of computing to do the basic analysis to try and out, put the differences against the Craig Venter reference type style thing. At that time, the best sequencer in the world could do twelve genomes a year. Now the best sequencers in the world can do a whole genome for $1,000 and it can do 18,000 in a year. It’s been insane. It’s a different world. It’s been cool to watch it grow up. People have asked me like, “How could you even get into this field when you had no background in it?” It’s like, “No one had any background in it.” You think it’s one of those rare instances where if you get in early enough, nobody has a significant advantage over anybody else. That’s why I was able to do it.
I hadn’t thought about it but that’s what happened with me and computers. It’s that I got there so early. There was no one else to call but me. Do you think that you can see any other frontiers that now? What’s the equivalent of that if you were 22 now and you knew that key fact to latch onto?
Probably the AR and VR stuff. Maybe3 to 4 years back. Whatever’s happening now, I don’t know. It’s not like anybody has a ton of deep experience in how to make an AR or VR game. There’s some but there’s nobody that’s the premier expert that is taking out everybody else. If I was a young kid, getting into developing AR and VR games, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I could see that. I don’t know what the super new hot thing is that’s coming up. I don’t spend time with the young cool kids anymore to know that. You hang out with the nerdy genomics people instead.
How’s that going?
I like it.
Is it a class of humans, nerdy, genomics people?
They’re great. They party a lot harder than you would think too. Especially the people that study plants and animals. If you want a raging party, go to the plant and animal genome conference in San Diego. It’s held at one of the lamest hotels in the world but it doesn’t matter. The lights are still on for the conference center, blaring and bright lights. It doesn’t matter. The second the music goes on, the dance floor is packed.
I go to a lot of conventions for nerds, mostly computer nerds. One time I was at a conference called TiE, which is The Indian Entrepreneurs network. They’re like, “We’re the biggest entrepreneur club in the world,” because they’re from India and they have unlimited people. They have tens of thousands of members. I was speaking at the TiE conference. As soon as the conference is over, music comes on, everybody dances because they’re all from India and that’s normal thing for them.
Did they lead a dance? That happened at the plant and animal genome conference. Somebody got up and led a Bollywood style dance. Everybody participated. It didn’t matter. I was like, “This is amazing.” They do if you’re at the plant and animal genome conference.
If you go to the UDub to an entrepreneur’s class and talk to these folks, what do you tell them? Like, “I did it and I got lucky and you should get a job,” or, “Being an entrepreneur is hard but amazing. It’s like parenting. It will be the best and the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
It’s close to the second one. I speak to the UDub a lot. I speak there once a quarter, maybe three times a year or something like that. A bunch of people came and spoke at my classes and it’s one of those pay it forward things. It makes a huge difference. For me, I remember that there were certain people that came and spoke at my class where I was like, “That’s cool. If she can do it, I can do it.” She was the CEO of Modumetal. It’s cool. They do the super-thin layering of metals in a specific meshing way. It could make armored cars but for way cheap and it’s way more effective. I remember watching her and I was like, “That’s cool,” or other people that were young that were coming back through. They were the graduates from 2 to 3 years ago, etc.
I’m old now. I’m a ten-year veteran, which is bizarre. I go and talk to them all the time and the things that I say to them are it is going to be hard, so you had better pick something that’s flipping worth it. If you don’t and you’ve picked something because you’re only interested in it for the money or whatever, statistically you are way better off getting a job at Google or something. From a money perspective, in terms of expected value, if you’re in it for the money, don’t do this. If you’re interested in solving a particular problem, you’re passionate about having that particular problem be solved on this planet and you are willing to go through the pain suffering that will be required to do that, then you should do a company. Don’t pick something that you don’t love because otherwise you won’t stick with it when it gets hard and it will get hard.
Do you think that advice is at odds with finding people who are motivated to sell, which is a big part of making it less hard?
Motivated to sell what? Like the company?
Something to make the company make money. It does seem that’s one thing that a lot of entrepreneurs have in them that makes them successful and take investors in particular to see it go because a lot of startups, most of them don’t fail to ship a product. Most of them fail to sell it.
That is coupled with the advice of make sure you talk to your freaking customers. To be fair, when I started out, we had the exact same mistake of doing some amount of customer interviewing and then thinking that what you need to build and then building it without checking in with people. Being like, “It’s brilliant. It’s going to work. They’ll fall in love with their idea.” That has more to do with the inability to sell the product. The likelihood of burnout outweighs the likelihood of not being able to ship a product. I would say pick something that’s worth your life first and make sure you talk to your customers second, in that order.
When we think about what is hard, what are the experiences that come to mind?
Firing the first person that you ever have to fire. That’s a tough one. Maybe it’s not tough for some people but I care so much about people. In that moment where you’re letting them go, it’s easy to feel like a complete asshole. To think that you’ve screwed up or failed them somehow and to indulge in the conversation of how you’ve let them down, which you learn over time is not what’s happening and it’s not a healthy conversation to be having. The first time you do it and when you’re new to it, it’s an easy trap that pretty much everybody falls into. That one sucks. Running out of money for the first time, that one sucks.
I don’t think people talk about that one very often, but I don’t know any entrepreneur that has gone for something relatively risky that hasn’t gotten within days of running out of money or if it has run out of money. It’s not like it happens only once. It’ll happen multiple times and people never tell you that. I tell the poor little entrepreneurs and it scares some of them. Some of them think, “That will never happen to me,” and that’s fine. It’s one of the naiveté things and that’s cool but that sucks because then you had to lay off everybody because you as a founder, you’re financially on the hook for anybody’s salaries, if you keep them past, etc. That stuff is rough. That stuff’s the hardest for me personally because it’s all about the impact on the people. Other people might have a different answer to that.
I feel like I’m talking to my friends to go in with this crazy plan and when it doesn’t work out, I do feel I’ve let them down. One of the ways that I often let them down is by not firing people that I should because I’m very optimistic about people and I see the potential in them and those things. Especially as somebody who does care about people first, how do you end up getting through that and making decisions?
One of the biggest alterations that I made in my overall leadership, I say moderately early on, was finally being transparent about where we were from a financial perspective at any given moment. In the first few years, I thought that I had to have it all together and I needed to put up this strong front of like, “Everything’s fine and it’s great.” What I realized is that it led to situations where people were caught off guard and surprised when shit was not fine and we were three weeks from running out of money. At this point, pretty much everybody in my company can ask me at any time how much money do we have left and how many months of runway and all of that stuff. A lot of people don’t do that.
I can understand why they don’t do that. Maybe that does not work at scales of companies but for the scale that I’m at and for the risk that people are taking on now, I feel it’s the right thing to do because of exactly what you said. I’ve asked people to go with me on a crazy journey, crazy mission. It is highly likely to fail and everybody’s got a different risk tolerance. By not providing them that information, then they have no ability to choose for themselves about what’s going to work for their particular risk profile. For me, that’s where it gets irresponsible. If I provide them the information and they stick it out anyway, then they chose but they were choosing with full knowledge and then that’s okay. If we run out of money, it’s not a surprise even.
In some cases when that has happened, people have been willing to stick it out for long periods of time until we get it worked out. I’ve been shocked to a certain extent in the cases where that has happened by the ultra-low churn. You might lose one person or something like that. For the vast majority of the times, pretty much everybody has stuck it out and come back, which is crazy. It has to do with the fact that they also feel like they’re trusted enough with the information and that they’re a partner in it, not just a standard cut the check employee, which is what they would get at a normal place.
It probably varies depending on the scale of the operation because at my last startup, I tried to let the team not worry about money. I had to worry about it a lot, but I didn’t show them that because I wanted them to be able to focus on doing their job. It was probably the wrong way to go.
I can see it both ways because I also tried that approach too. I also think it depends a lot on the type of people you hire. After going about this for a couple of years, we started to place a very large emphasis on risk tolerance as a factor for when we were hiring. We include a question in every interview, which is, “What is the riskiest thing you’ve ever done?” If you don’t have a good answer for it, this was probably not the company for you. I had this one woman, she was super well-qualified for what we were trying to hire. Her answer to that question was driving in the rain was the riskiest thing. I was like, “This is not the place for you because we were going to skim the treetops multiple times and we might even crash land and I need to have people that can handle that and not freak out when it’s happening. I’m going to have other things that I’m dealing with when we’re dealing with the crash-landing situation.”
I’m making this up here. I don’t know if this will work but I imagined that I could tell people more upfront and say, “Here’s the situation. We’re trying this crazy mission. It’s probably not going to work. We’re probably going to crash land and all going to end up unemployed but we’re going to learn a lot along the way. We’re going to do the best we can. We’ve got some shot at getting through and if we do, it’ll be amazing.” I feel like if I could provide all those disclaimers upfront, then it wouldn’t be so bad on the day when I got to either fire them or lay them off or shut down the company or those things.
We do that for people that are coming in that are new because we’re interviewing right now. Before we extend you an offer letter, it’s like, “Just so you know, this is how much money we have left. This is what you should expect.” I tell people upfront, “I cannot guarantee you employment past X date and you have to be okay with that. Clearly, we have been around for a long time and yes, there have been some bumps and it’s unlikely that you will be completely out of a job and you are joining a startup. It is a risk. Make sure you’ve had a conversation with your significant other if you need to do that before you accept this job.”
Do you manage to scare anybody off that way?
Yes. As I said, at the moment we’re dealing with an emergency landing situation. They need to be able to put on their own oxygen masks first. I can’t do it for them.
You talked about this earlier but if you could do anything else, what would you do?
Real companies or fantasy companies?
Anything. Not even accompany to go on and walk about?
I’ve considered that. I would walk about for about three months and then start another company.
I tried to go on vacation for three days and I was stir-crazy.
On the vacation front, it’s good for me. It’s very important. Long periods of time not creating something, not building something, not having a team, team is important for me. If I didn’t have a great team. I don’t know if I would put up with all of the crap that I’ve dealt with. I totally have fantasies about like, “Someday when I have achieved my mission, I’ll sell and then I’ll go and become a yoga teacher in Bali.” There’s nothing wrong with Bali, but I would get stir-crazy quickly. I don’t know what it is that I’m here to do. This is more life philosophy stuff but each one of us are here to contribute something, whatever that is. One of the things that I’m here to contribute is to create leadership and lead and inspire others to create great change in the world. That’s what I think I’m here to do.
Genomics is a huge arena that I want to play in. At some point, neural augmentation would be cool. I’ve thought a lot about that. We’re still way too early, so I’m waiting for the market to mature on that one. A Matrix-like thing, I don’t think it’s completely insane. The other area that I’m passionate about is entrepreneurship and having people be supportive throughout the journey of it because entrepreneurship, this stuff can get lonely sometimes. Even if you have a great team, if you are the leader of the organization, there still is sometimes stuff that only you get to worry about. I have been good myself about building myself strong networks of people where I can go on talk to other human beings that get the thing I’m dealing with. Some human beings will never have the experience of payroll and some will. I participate in things EO, Entrepreneur’s Organization. That one’s great.
I went to an EO event and I couldn’t believe how fun these people were.
They’re a great group. The events are awesome but the thing that’s most valuable to me is that I meet with a group of people. It’s up to ten people in a forum, that’s what they’re called, and you share the highest stuff and the lowest stuff. It’s a mandatory attendance. You can only miss one a year. To get CEOs to work it out such that you don’t, you have to be committed. It creates a space where you can share anything personally or professionally, whatever it is that you’re dealing with. The vast majority of entrepreneurs don’t have something like that. While EO provides that for people that are at a level because you have to have raised an amount or have a certain amount of revenue in order to be part of that.
There’s an absolute necessity for that for the people that are starting out. The people that are coming out of the entrepreneurship class that have won the business plan competition or whatever. They don’t have the network. They don’t have anybody else that understands what they’re dealing with. I remember what it was when I was first starting. Not that many of my friends were going down that route. I had some but not a lot. I had a number of my friends that were like, “You seem stressed out. I know this recruiter friend at Amazon, we could get you a regular job. You wouldn’t have to stress out.” They’re trying to be helpful but it’s in that moment it was the opposite of what I was looking for because you’re already doubting yourself enough at that stage, not that ever goes away.
You’re still doubting yourself and your capabilities enough at that stage that’s the exact opposite of what is helpful. There’s a real need to have some network or space where people can be around other people that are dealing with the same thing. That’s important not from a sanity perspective because entrepreneurs also deal with a lot of mental health issues and there’s lots of statistics to back that sucker up. People would be more successful if they had other people they were around. That’s part of the reason why you see things the YC effect because I went through Y Combinator.
How was that?
It was awesome.
You did that ten years in your company.
We were acquired and then we unacquired ourselves. This is a reboot to focus entirely on the population genomics side and YC is what we took it through.
It’s a restart. You applied to Y Combinator. You got in. What was the program like?
You meet on specific days of the week. They’re large enough now that it used to be always Tuesdays but it’s now you’re either in the Tuesday or the Thursday batch.
Is it just in the Bay Area?
I went down every week. They usually ask you to move there. I did the math and the flying there every week versus living in the Bay Area, it’s cheaper to fly.
Entrepreneurship can get really lonely sometimes, even if you have a really great team.
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How long is the program?
Three months or ten weeks. I joined late. I originally wasn’t going to apply at all because I was like, “I’m a ten-year-old company. They’re not going to touch that.” A friend of mine said, “Ginkgo Biosciences joined YC when they were seven years in and it worked out well for them, so you should apply.” I did three weeks after the program had already started and I had an interview and then they flew me down and then they told me yes. The next day I went to my first thing. I don’t know what the beginning is like, so I can’t provide any information about that because I wasn’t there. What it is going forward is you have a group that you meet with every week.
You have office hours with your YC partners. You’re assigned 1, 2 or 3 partners. You work with them and you’re looking to achieve specific metrics and improve those over time. They prepare you for fundraising. I would say that is the arena where I got the most out of it. I’ve done a bunch of fundraising successfully before. I’ve raised $5 million before without doing YC. What I can tell you is that they have that down to an art form. I was making a bunch of mistakes that I didn’t even realize. The primary one being that when you’re so down deep in the weeds, you think that everything’s important. I would have conversations with investors and try and tell them everything about how the sausage is made and they don’t need to know that.
I thought I’d already scaled it back. The reality was that no, I was still telling them way too much information. That, for the most part, would scare people off because they were like, “It must be so complicated. I can’t possibly understand. Therefore, I can’t invest because I’m investing in an area that I don’t understand. I’m going to make a stupid mistake.” How do you tell your story in a way that still gives them all the information about what’s going on but doesn’t freak them out?
I had that problem too. I want to explain everything. I’ll tell you for seven hours if you’ll listen what my plan is. Did you go raise some money after YC? Is there any way to characterize where you end up? What’s the size of the pitch for investors now? Is it like I do the whole thing in twelve minutes?
They get you down to two minutes.
How long would it have been left to your own devices when you started? Was it two hours?
The shortest that I would ever do were maybe eight minutes or something like that. There are further diligence talks, etc., but I would try and give them all of the information upfront. The art is no, you provide them with all of the information that they would need to be able to say, “Yes, I’m interested,” and create a compelling case. You can feed them the pieces of information that they want as they request it, but don’t give it to them unless they ask for it. Otherwise, you’re just confusing them. The art of the two-minute pitch is incredible. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched YC demo day pitches. They’re amazing. What you put together so compelling. I listen to my pitch and I’m like, “Damn, that’s good. They’re great.”
That’s one of the biggest things that I got out of it and they have a huge network of other entrepreneurs. It’s one of those things where you’re part of it for life. You are now in a place where you have access to a network of 4,000 founders. You can post on their internal forums for virtually anything and get responses back in hours. I asked for crazy stuff. I was like, “I’m looking for the introductions to the Ministries of Health for the following countries.” I got four introductions in four days. I was shocked. I was like, “That is more business development action than I’ve seen in the last six months.” It was crazy.
That network and that collective experience is needed not just in the work part of the entrepreneur’s lives but also in the living part because also people go home. I don’t have this problem with my particular significant other but I can tell you having been at EO, for the vast majority of people, their significant others think that these people they’ve married are crazy. How do you have an environment that has those people be supported too? There’s a whole missing ecosystem. Back to your original question of what else would Ito work on, I think I would like to work on that and I have a lot of ideas about how we could solve that but one thing at a time.
I was thinking as you were talking, being on a team is important to me as well. I don’t think I’ve been as good about crafting that over my career as I would have liked. I’ve been fortunate to have been put on some good teams.
What do you think is necessary to craft one?
I’m trying to figure that out. Looking around, the way society works, we have a lot of hero-worship. Even people who are sports fans, you’re a fan of a team but that’s not even a team. That’s whoever they hired this season, you’re more of a fan of the logo and maybe a fan of a player. You follow that player or rock stars or Instagram people or whatever. It’s not a team that you are observing. It’s not team worship. There are probably exceptions. You might be a fan of a company that makes a product you or something, but you don’t get to see teams. Even in reality TV, you see a lot of stuff where people are against each other but not teams. Things like a TV show or a movie or a company or everything, it’s all stuff created by teams. There’s some disconnect there. I always was wanting to be on a team, but figuring out, how do you make that and how do you make it good. That’s all stuff that nobody knows. You have to figure it out through trial and error.
It’s clear that I have capabilities in that area because they seem to be able to do it. I’m trying to figure out how I would articulate like, “What is it that I’m trying to do exactly? What makes it work?” Safety, it’s one of the biggest ones and you can see research on this too. Psychological safety in workplaces, etc. There’s a whole Harvard Business Review thing about this. Psychological safety is also what breeds innovation, as it turns out, because if you feel you’re in a safe enough environment where you can throw out that crazy wacky idea and not get shot down for it, that obviously encourages you to do that.
I would say safety is one of the biggest ones and safety shows up in a lot of different arenas though. It’s not safety to be able to say whatever it is that you’re thinking but it’s also knowing that you’re going to be the person that’s leading is going to make sure that you’re taken care of. I’ve asked people about this because honestly, sometimes I’ve gotten confused in the past where I’m like, “Why are you guys still following me? We have gone through some serious crap at this point. Why are you still here?” For them, a lot of the answers have been like, “I know that you’re going to have my back and I know that you are doing everything that you possibly can to make sure that we’re taken care of. I trust you to do that.” That’s the biggest thing that I would say if I had to point to anything around.
I sometimes wonder if people who aren’t performing well, does that same things still apply? I’m making you feel safe. You’re not performing well but you’re getting paid. There’s no job security risk here. If I tell them that you need to step up and perform better or there’s no job security anymore, how do you reconcile that? It’s one of the things that I should to figure out.
My opinion is that when people aren’t performing in jobs, something else is off. They’re either feeling confronted and they’re not willing to ask for the help that they need or they have something going on personally. Creating enough safety such that they can be like, “My grandfather is in the middle of passing away,” or, “My mother was diagnosed with cancer. I’m going to need some time.” Let me think about the times when people have been underperforming. It usually has to do with they’re dealing with something personally with their health or somebody significant in their life is dealing with something health-wise or they’re afraid of looking dumb so they don’t ask. Those are the places that I’ve seen the most non-performance. It rarely is that they don’t understand. I am working with people that are very smart. For me, it hasn’t been a lack of understanding or lack of capability. It almost always is people dealing with their own internal conversation about how their work is good enough or not good enough and the fear of being able to put it out there or not. That’s what I have found.
Have you got any questions for me?
I have tons of questions. How did you get to be the way you are? You’re a very unusual human being.
What do you think is unusual? Don’t hold back.
You’re obviously smart. You have gotten to a place in your life where there’s a certain, “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. You are very confident in whatever it is that you say and you don’t seem to care if people are like, “That dude’s overconfident,” because I’m sure that people say that to you and you clearly don’t care. You have this huge, bizarre diversity of interests, including dance, which I can get because we both dance. I know a lot of smart people from the computer science side or etc. and they don’t usually come in your form factor, if you will.
One of the things you’ve said, like why don’t I give a fuck?
Is it that you don’t or is it that everybody thinks you don’t?
No, I do. I care about a lot of things. I don’t care about a lot of other things and I’m adamant about not caring about some of those things. You could say part of it is I’m older than a lot of those other folks that you know that are computer nerds. I grew up in Alaska and there was nobody for 1,000 miles who knew any more about computers than me and I couldn’t learn from anyone else. I was learning in isolation. I literally learned how to program by reverse engineering 6502 assembly language. This is the machine language for the Apple II. It’s not how you learn to program. I’m a shitty coder because everything I learned was before software engineering was a thing. I was so excited about computers and I would try to get other people interested in them.
Did that work?
At first, no. I would try to convince everybody that, “This computer is going to be amazing someday,” and nobody believed me. I was in a small town in Alaska. It was lost because but I had a bottomless enthusiasm for it. That is part of what got me to trying to be able to explain things. I was trying to explain these complicated technical things to people who not only didn’t understand but didn’t care. I had to be able to simplify very complex concepts. In some sense, I’m still doing that.
You do a fair amount of speaking gigs and that’s what you do all day.
Also feeling like an outsider, a loner as a kid because I wasn’t into sports or electric guitar and the normal stuff. I had to be okay with not being cool.
Do you still think that you’re not cool? I think you’re cool.
Revenge of the Nerds. I don’t feel that so much anymore but that’s part of one of the things that’s amazing to me about dancing. Being a salsa dancer, you show up and I’m on the same level as the Mexican dishwasher. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, how smart you are or what you’ve done in the past. No one gives a shit. You’re there and you’re not cool. I’m very specifically not cool when I show up dancing. You get a little bit cooler over the years and as you get better and as you get shirts with buttons on them and shoes that are not dirty, stuff like that, you can get slightly cooler in the dance community.
Do you think that’s the key, the shirts with buttons and the cool shoes?
Definitely. The salsa black belt is every year you advance levels by getting one less button. The guy who’s got a deep V with one button at the bottom, that’s the best dancer in the room. You can see it.
I have to test this theory. Does it only apply in salsa? Do you think it applies in another dance?
It probably carries through at least bachata but these are Latin dances and I don’t know. Those things I’m describing pretty much hold worldwide. As you know with Zouk and the very niche dances, you end up with these very strange communities with their own idea of what’s cool. There is always something. I get a lot out of that. It’s a different type of society. It’s a different angle on the world. It’s a level playing field so you meet people from all walks of life. I don’t bring anything into that room that makes me cool. I have to be a good dancer and I have to be cool to the people I’m dancing with and those things that’s how you got to do it. That’s good for you. It’s hard. It sucks.
Especially as a lead, you have way harder of a job. I have tried leading. It is so much decision-making. That’s why I liked being a follower because I make all the decisions in my job. This is the one place where I’m like, “I’m not make any decisions.
It’s a different role. It’s a different art form. They’re both cool but being a lead, even now, I’ve been dancing years and I’m not the best dancer but I’m competent. I show up in a new town or nobody knows me and I do this all the time, traveling for salsa, “Who’s the weird guy with the glasses on?” “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before.” “Do you want to dance?” “No, thanks.” You’re at the bottom again, every time. Those things are good for me but one thing I was thinking of is just because of the way events played out, I didn’t go to college. I didn’t get a degree. I’m not qualified for any job on earth. There’s no job I can apply for and get. I don’t think I’ve ever done that in my life.
If you’ve got, I don’t know that you would like it.
Maybe not. I don’t think we’re ever going to find out. At this point and up until few years ago, I almost felt ashamed of it. I didn’t do that work. I didn’t get that degree to get that certification to get trained properly as I was talking about software engineering. It was a little too early. Universities couldn’t teach me much about computers yet and so I didn’t do that. Companies would pay me to buy a computer for them and so I did that but I always felt some of that imposter syndrome.
What would I know if I’d done that? It’s because I don’t know, those things. For a long time, I felt that was a liability. What happened is society changed. Nerds won. We built the most successful companies in the world and everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg now and parents want their kids to grow up and be computer programmers, not lawyers. All that’s amazing. There are all these fables in people’s minds because, “Steve Jobs didn’t go to college and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.” Now when I tell people that I didn’t go to college, they think, “You’re too smart. You didn’t need to go to college.”
I’m a computer hacker, which is like being a fake scientist. It’s like a scientist but without all the formal training and accountability. You can do whatever. No one’s expecting a computer hacker to be particularly diligent about anything. That has bought me a lot of self-assurance and freedom. I can sit down and ask you all the dumbest questions about genomics and I’ve got no professional reputation to protect because I’m a computer hacker. I’m already suspect. That worked to my advantage. That’s why those things you described that you see in me, it comes from having to make my own way.
I’m not counting on anybody to give me anything. I’m not counting on that degree or certification or job title or anything. I know that I’m going to have to earn everything I got myself and build it. Second, the other thing you described, the don’t give a fuck thing comes, it’s important to me to be beholden to no one. I want to be only beholden to what’s technically true. What is the truth as best as we know it, not what is politically correct or not what’s in vogue or not what other people’s opinions are? That’s important to me. If I can’t do that because of the company I’m working for, the job I have, or the society on part over whatever, then I can’t be a part of those things. I maintained a lot of independence because of that.
Where do you think that came from?
A part of it could be Alaska was a weird place to grow up. Everybody there was an immigrant. It’s like Israel. Israel’s a fake country that all of a sudden, many years ago it was a startup and people moved there from everywhere and it’s this melting pot. Alaska is like that. Right before I was born, people moved there for the oil industry. There wasn’t a lot of people there before that, or at least not a lot of any kind of people. There were certainly Alaskan natives and stuff. They’re all Americans but they’re American immigrants. It’s a state full of people who came to Alaska to get away from somebody or something. It was hard living. The conditions are hard.
People had to work to get by day-to-day. You have to shovel a lot of snow and it was dangerous. That attracted people who were very independent and felt they could make it all work and didn’t, so they had that attitude. I suppose, I grew up appreciating that aspect of those folks. Alaska is tamed now. There’s drive-through everything and everybody there have a suburban and drive-throughs. The Starbucks has a drive-through, the dry cleaners have a drive-through, the restaurants and everything you can drive because it’s snowing and cold.
They didn’t have pizza delivery when I was a kid. You go get the pizza or you stay home and make one. That rubbed off on me some and then also I’ve been at it long enough that I can see how other people’s life choices have played out. I can see the way people chose to play it safe. They chose that college. They chose that degree. They got that job. I became a dentist. The first day of your career as a dentist, there’s a spreadsheet that will tell you exactly how much you’re going to make over your entire career and how much to put into 401(k) and how much to put in a mutual fund, what to do. That plan is safe. That appeals to people. People are over-optimizing for safety. You get those predictable results and it’s not all that safe anyway.
I don’t want to make those choices. For me, I always tried to make good life choices, but I didn’t optimize for safety and security. I ran out of money a lot of times. Almost no company I ever worked for still exists. IV exists. That’s one. There are two. There’s Blue Origin. It’s a company has got thousands of people building rocket ships but it’s not a real business yet. It’s a weird one. Other than that, no company I’ve ever worked for still exists. They all went out of business because I was too early or the idea was too crazy or whatever. The amazing thing is I’m fine. The Silicon Valley mentality. I come from the Silicon Valley of the ‘80s. That was very much about using a startup as a vehicle to invent a new technology, bring it into the world, create a market, make something people didn’t even know they wanted.
All that is what I grew up with and what I believe in and what I want to be a part of and what I want to do. That’s been diluted and eroded by a lot of what’s happening in the tech industry now but that’s still what I’m for and what I want to do, and so I did. I worked for startups, so a lot of them either I started them or my friends started them and I worked for them and even so they’re often too early but every single one of them, all those technologies exist now. They all exist in the market. We were right about every one of them. We’re ten years too early.
Do you think you’ve gotten better at being able to predict when it’s too early or do you think you’re still just as bad?
Now I know the difference. I’m not better at predicting but I know when I’m too early and I don’t make the same kinds of bets on things. I wouldn’t start a company that’s ten years too early again.
What do you think is ten years too early right now?
All kinds of things. Fusion reactors, quantum computing, probably a startup based on CRISPR, all things that are ten years too early or they still need research. They still need economies of scale and cost reduction. They need a market demand. There are so many things. You can’t create all of those things all at once as a small little tiny startup. You have to pick one. It’s like, we got to get lucky about one thing, not a Rube Goldberg machine of seven things that all have to line up. The companies I start are quite pragmatic. They look a little deranged from now outside because of how I described them. I’ll use technologies that I’m comfortable with but the rest of the world isn’t.
I’m obsessed with rearchitecting entire industries using machine learning because this is a superpower that we have that we can use to change almost everything that humans do. It’s scary to everyone except for the handful of people who understand the technology. It’s hard to get your head around that but I don’t have those same problems. For me, if I can look it up a business or an industry and understand how it’s structured to understand its problems, then I can use those tools to radically reinvent how it’s done. That to me is exciting.
What for you is the next thing? It sounds like you’re interested in that particular aspect. Is there a particular field that you’re thinking about yet?
I’ve got obsessed a long time ago with these ideas around automating apparel manufacturing because this is a very manual industry. It’s a massive industry. The numbers, I say these almost every day, “Somebody but $2.4 trillion a year apparel, that’s almost as big as the oil industry or cars maybe.” This is a big industry. Every human on Earth is a customer. In 2019, we made 100 billion garments not for the 7 billion people on Earth but the 1 billion people who buy them. Twenty-five percent of those are in the landfill already. Of those, 30% of them still have the tags on. This is one of the most wasteful industries on earth. It’s sad because it’s responsible for a massive amount of freshwater depletion. This is a major natural resource for humans that we’re depleting. We’re running out of fresh water and it’s not easy to make more. It’s an industry that is polluting rivers and killing off all the life in them. The cities where your jeans come from in China, everyone has some kind of cancer. They have lesions on their skin. Everybody is suffering from this industry and we keep making it bigger and keep making it worse.
What do you think the solution is?
A big part of what I do is I try to understand problems and this is an industry that’s full of problems. They collected every problem and then they didn’t adopt any technology. They haven’t installed Windows 95 yet. This is an industry that they’re sticking their heads in the sand about the technologies we have that could change it. To me, that looks like a ripe opportunity and a chance to rearchitect the industry without all those problems.
What do you think the biggest thing is? Part of it, to me, based on the statistics you said, it sounds like there’s a supply-demand issue and that they are not very good at predicting what’s going to be interesting in fashion.
The way I think about it, they have got to have the lowest cost labor, which means you’ve got to do it in Asia, which means you have long product cycles. Six, seven, eight, nine months is normal for the fashion industry. That means you’re doing speculative manufacturing.
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It’s definitely not just in time.
Just in time is a ‘90s term that means all of the components from the supply chain land at the factory in time to make the batch.
Not like it’s produced at the time that you need it.
On demand means I produce it after it’s sold. At the moment when I have a buyer, then I produce it. I’m trying to rearchitect the apparel industry beyond demand. That’s what Bombsheller does. That’s the company I built to prove that concept. Now that the concept is proven, I want to go do that at a larger scale. Anyway, that speculative manufacturing drives all the problems in my mind because they’re producing stuff and then discovering later whether they guessed right or not about what would sell. In 2019, H&M burned $4.3 billion worth of clothes. H&M is the bottom of the market already. There’s nowhere you can take it, “It didn’t sell at H&M. Send it to TJ Maxx and sell it for 50% off.”
No, they’re already the bottom. There’s a liquidation after H&M. It’s obscene and it’s bad for humans. It’s bad for the world. It’s our responsibility to clean these things up. Historically maybe we didn’t have that opportunity, but we certainly have it now. In my mind, you’re responsible not to go use these technologies to solve these problems and we can do it. That one looks easy to me. That’s not hubris. We’ve already proven a lot of this with Bombsheller but it is still work. We have to build a company and build a brand to build factories and ship a lot of products and then get the rest of the industry to copy us.
What you’re looking to do is you’re looking to be the demonstration such that they have to deal with and compete with you and then they copy. You’re like, “My work here is done.”
By then, I can be the apparel equivalent of Tesla or Uber. The way that they’re structured is different. They aren’t in a position to make the change. I can take over the industry. We’ll see.
I am curious about you being a dad, the choice to do that and what the whole process has been like. I have people in my life now that have tiny humans that are getting less tiny and I’m curious your perspective on that whole thing.
My daughter was adopted from Ethiopia. Her mom and I were married at the time and we’re not anymore but when we decided to adopt, you look at these different kinds of adoption programs and the most popular ones here in the US are Eastern Europe. The reason is because you get white kids. It’s not politically correct but there’s higher demand for them. It’s unfortunate because a lot of the adoption programs in Eastern Europe come with a lot of problems. There’s a lot of fraud, lots of fetal alcohol. These kids are in fetal alcohol syndrome. There’s lots of abuse in the orphanages and things. These kids have it rough. You get over there to pick up a kid and find out they have siblings or find out they have Down Syndrome.
Everybody has a horror story. It’s a sad situation but you still want to do the best you can for those kids. That’s one class. American adoption programs within the country are popular but most of those are set up so that you meet a pregnant mom and work out a deal with her. You can take the baby home when she has it from the hospital. She gets two days to decide if she wants it back. Those are the two craziest days of her life with grandmothers and aunties breathing down her neck. That didn’t sound like the stress I wanted. I made a spreadsheet of all the different countries you could adopt from. It’s not every country, it’s like fifteen countries.
That has a paved route for adoption to the US. We did a comparative analysis and figured out, “Ethiopia sounds amazing,” and it was. Ethiopia, they don’t even drink. The country is dry by choice. In fact, the emperor back in the ‘70s tried to get them to start drinking and have bars as a way of improving tourism. It’s almost no alcoholism. There’s no drug abuse. The orphanages are happy places. Ethiopians are super genteel people. It was amazing. That worked out. It paved the charts for all the things we wanted. Those other things like, “Can you choose the gender or the age of the kids you get.” We went through all that, and you do nine months of paperwork and then you get a kid. That’s the start of it.
It’s also very fraught with anxiety and there’s a moment along the way where you get what’s called a referral and that’s where they match you to a kid. At that moment, it becomes so real. I got a little photo of the size of a postage stamp of my kid who I’d never met halfway around the world, sitting in a third world country, waiting on paperwork from the government. That starts to get hard because I’m like, “Let’s go get the kid.” We had to wait another four months. That gets hard. I go into commando mode. I’m like, “We’re going to parachute in and extract the kid.”
How old was she?
She was eight months old when we got her. She was, undernourished, had scabies and Giardia and couldn’t sit up. We went to pick her up in Ethiopia. We spent a week or so there and every day we’d go to the orphanage. She’d spend the day with us a part of the day with us getting used to us. She goes spend the night there and they had nannies and all this stuff she’s used to there. She wouldn’t take a bottle from us and it started to get a little nerve-wracking because we know we’ve got to get on a plane for 33 hours to get her home and she’s not taking a bottle for us. I would go to the orphanage. I would get the nanny, the baby and a translator. I would say, “She’s not taking a bottle for us. Can you show us how you do it?”
The nanny is an Ethiopian woman who would grab the baby, stick the bottle in, everything would work fine. It was amazing to see. Even at that age, even at eight months old, she knew that you don’t take a bottle from white people in black clothes. It’s black people in white clothes. She had that and it was amazing. After a week, she started to finally take the bottle from us and all worked out fine. It was things like that are amazing. We got her home and even flying home from Ethiopia, up until that moment the year before, you wonder about everything. You wonder like, “What’s it going to be like being a parent but also what’s going to be raising a black kid in a white neighborhood? What if I don’t like her?” I got other things going on.
How are the hormones that are going with? How’s that going to work?
By the time we landed the plane in Seattle, that kid was 100% my daughter for life. I was completely in love with her. I will never leave her, everything about it. It’s incredible. No question. That was years ago and not a moment of hesitation since. Another weird thing and this is an interesting thing about Seattle. You would think it would be a little bit weird sometimes. You got this mixed-race family, your daughter’s got an Afro. Am I doing a good job of keeping the braids in it? There might be some moments where it’s awkward. Never once. Nobody’s ever said anything disparaging about our family or even mildly awkward. That’s one of the amazing things about Seattle. That’s not true in a lot of places in the world. It’s not true where I grew up. It’s not true in a lot of places I’ve traveled to. We’d be weird. Here, it’s no problem. Everybody’s supportive. Everybody accepts the whole thing the way they should. It’s cool. Anyway, so that’s the origin.
How old is she now?
She’s in middle school. She’s super precocious. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Dating’s coming up soon.
For her. Maybe, I don’t know. It’s extreme. Every stage of it is extreme. Every stage of it is overwhelming and you can’t believe how much work it is.
What’s something that you didn’t know where you’re like, “No way?”
They evolve to command all your attention. She’s a survival of the fittest rock star already from the day I got her. She was abandoned in Ethiopia. She’s not going to let me leave her for dead. She commands all your attention and it’s how she’s evolved. It’s hard as a parent because it’s relentless. You don’t get a break. Anything else you can be like, “Fuck off. I’ll call you back tomorrow,” but not being a parent. She’s on your mind, 24/7. Especially as a baby, you don’t get a break all day. When they’re a year old, you’re like, “We fed her. She’s had her nap. She peed. We changed her diaper. Everything’s fine. She’s playing with a thing. I can call the electric company and pay my bill.” That’s about as much attention as you can get and then you’re anticipating it.
How do you run a business in the middle of all of that?
It’s your wife who watches the kid and you get away. That’s the way to do it. Don’t be a mom, be a dad because that’s the winning strategy. Moms, I could never do that job. It totally consumes you because my daughter’s mom, her brain is fixated on the kid’s needs at all times. She knows when Sion has to pee about a month before Sion knows she has to pee. She’s focused on it. It’s an amazing and wonderful gift that she’s given up her entire life to be a mom. It’s intensive. I got a break for a few hours a day where I could go to work and get away. It’s insanity on a parent.
How do you think that people do that? Here’s the thing. One parent stays home isn’t an option for the vast majority of people, at least in the United States, because of the need for double income. How do you think about that?
When you’re on a farm, kids are an asset that can work for you. In a city, kids are liabilities that are going to cost you almost every dollar you’ve ever made. You should not have kids. That’s the right answer. If you can’t get away with not having kids, at least adopt a kid and try to keep it to one so that your because your life ends and the little kids’ life takes over. That’s not an economical thing for most people. We’re lucky to be able to afford to raise our kid in the city and do okay. The right way to do it. I had a friend from Zambia. She grew up in Africa in a village where it’s a whole bunch of kids. Some of the moms have died of AIDS. You have a kid and pop it into the village and the village raises all the kids in a giant swarm. It takes a village. She told me, “She can’t imagine raising kids in America.” If she has kids, she’s going back to Zambia because she needs a village and you can’t get one here.
This is an interesting question. I’ve been thinking about the whole village concept when it comes to entrepreneurs and families. I’m very interested in co-housing and all of that stuff. How do we reinstitute the villages? Do you think that there’s anything that’s fundamental with our society that is preventative of villages? Do you think that it’s fell out of vogue and now we’re realizing how much we’re paying the price for it and now it’s going to come back into vogue?
We’re definitely at the point where we’re realizing we’re paying the price for it. I feel that way. Even where I grew up, my family was small. I had a brother and my parents. We didn’t have any direct relatives in the state. My ancestors were in other states. My ex-wife’s family was big. They also had immigrated but they have big family concept. There were five kids. Most of the kids had kids and there’s a whole tribe going there. They all hang out at grandma’s house on weekends and it’s a village thing. They get a lot of support from each other. Grandma helped raise the kids, all of them. She’s amazing, I don’t know how they do that.
There’s that thing that’s possible. Family, you can never get away from. Even though you abused your family members by making them babysit your kids and stuff like that, they abuse you by making you babysit their kids and stuff. It all keeps going. With friends, in my life, I optimize for friends more than family because I liked being able to choose. My family is good and all but I like to be able to choose people who have shared interests and things. It’s very difficult to build a relationship as deep and significant as a family member with friends because they’re here in the city for a while until you get a job offer in the Bay Area or vice versa. People are coming and going and you can’t abuse them the same way. My friends didn’t babysit my daughter too much.
Is that a willingness issue or is that a willingness to ask issue?
It’s a willingness to ask issue. That’s part of it. I don’t want to babysit anyone’s kids, so don’t ask me. That sense of community has eroded so much in modern life because we don’t need each other to survive. Up until 50 to 100 years ago, a person couldn’t survive on their own. You had to get married, you had to have a family, and you had to have somebody helping you out. Now, anybody can survive on their own. You can get a job, even if it’s a lame one. You can pay rent and you can buy food. You can get by. I’m not to disparage anyone who’s got a tougher situation but the point is your neighbors, I don’t know my neighbors. I know the one guy over here a little bit. The folks in the building, there are three neighbors. I don’t hang out with them. I don’t know anybody else who lives in this immediate neighborhood. Upper Queen Anne over there, I know people because my daughter goes to school there.
What do you think that is? As I said, I’ve been thinking about the co-housing thing a lot and I live in the Pike Place Market. There’s a very interesting community aspect that happens there, more so than other places. I’ve been there for years now.
You do know some neighbors but you’re the type of person who would know.
I am the type of person that would try to know their neighbors.
We got team-building and leadership stuff all starts to kick in. What’s happening is we’ve homogenized on a few life patterns, let’s say. That’s what people are growing up looking forward to and expecting. Humans are only good at doing what they’ve seen done before. We’ve only seen a few things. We’ve seen them become an old maid cat lady. We’ve seen get married and have a kid and then get divorced and then fight. There’s that pattern. They’ll get married, grow old together, and have nothing in common and don’t get divorced because it would look bad to the kids. There are a few patterns. I’m being disingenuous but basically, we have a few patterns.
You notice there are not happy ones in your list.
They’re off for a little while but I’m not being totally disingenuous. The truth is a lot of them are happy for a while. I was married for twenty years and a lot of them were good years and I’m not sorry about that. It was successful for a long time but it wasn’t something that would work for our entire lives. We’re already out living the median lifespan of a human. Those first 30 years, if a long time ago, let’s say, I got married at twelve and had babies by 13, 14, 15, died by 30, you’re doing pretty good. You don’t have time to get cancer. Cancer isn’t going to catch you if you died at 30. Now that we’re living to 70, we got a lot of problems and some of them, it’s hard to maintain those relationship structures for so long.
Do you think that that’s fundamental or do you think that we just sucked at figuring out how to do that well?
It’s fundamental but we suck at figuring out what to do because we’re trying to do what we’ve seen done, whether it works or not for us. The answer is you got to run a lot of experiments. This is one of the amazing things about Seattle, San Francisco, being on the West Coast.
We are running lots of experiments.
Co-housing doesn’t sound like a crazy thing. If you show up in Indiana or Tulsa, Oklahoma and talk about co-housing, I don’t think people know that work. No offense.
You’re going to be like, “That’s some weird hippie stuff.”
It’s especially going to fail and a lot of it does fail because it’s not a fair experiment. If you start an experiment, you don’t get equal support for this experiment that people doing the traditional thing would get, then it’s a doomed experiment. You have to have societies that are willing to allow people to try things like having multiple partners or having co-parenting situations or cohabitation situations or different kinds of things to figure out what works. Sometimes those things do work and I’ve seen a lot of them because I used to live in San Francisco and there’s some weird shit going on and everybody plays along and we’ll try to be supportive like, “What happens?” “There are three people in this couple and we’re trying to send them a wedding invitation but do we put Mr. and Ms. and Mrs.?” We don’t even have conventions for these things.
Every time you don’t have a convention, it’s one more thing that makes it hard on the people and experiment even if they had something good going. These are very difficult things to solve in short order. They take a long time but overall, what I try to do is give people the benefit of the doubt, let them try the craziest thing that they can bring themselves to try and see if they discover something that can work. Don’t judge them based on whether they lived happily ever after. If it worked for a while, that’s pretty good. If you can take care of somebody and be good to them for a while, a good place to start would be better breakups.
That’s totally possible. I’ve seen some amazing ones.
I’ve heard some great breakups. Great divorces even. Those are things people should strive for. That should be part of your model and say, “We’re going to do this until death do us part or until we have a good breakup. Let’s try and get ahead of that.” That’s not usually what’s in people’s vows but if you can’t do that, you’re going to do more damage to each other, to kids, to people around you. We already know marriage is long in the tooth as an institution. It’s great for people who want to try it. It’s good for some people for some time but lots of them are failing. You have to accept the statistical probability that it’s not going to last forever. Don’t make your only way out raising everything and burning it to the ground. It’s sad to see that happen. It’s damaging to a lot of people. I don’t know what the answers are but the way to find those are through lots of experiments.
I can keep asking questions all day long. We did good. It’s not so bad.
We’ll let you go. Thanks for doing this.
Important Links:
- Danny Hillis – TEDx video
- Y Combinator
About Adina Mangubat
Adina is the CEO and co-founder of Spiral Genetics, a leader in bioinformatics for population genomics.
At Spiral Genetics, she leads complex sales to highly technical audiences, drives business development and product vision, and has built a diverse team of highly talented technical and scientific individuals to develop the world’s most advanced bioinformatics technology. In addition, she is the primary catalyst for creating a transparent, high integrity, and mission-driven culture.
Early in her career, Adina worked with two other high-technology companies wherein her role included team development, brand development, marketing, channel development and sales for complex technologies.
A graduate of the University of Washington, Adina holds a B.S. in Psychology with a focus on Entrepreneurship and was recognized by the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association as one of the 2013 Women to Watch in Life Science. Additionally, she was featured in Forbes 2013 “30 under 30″ for Science and Healthcare. In 2017, Forbes named her as one of the All Star Alumni for the 30 under 30 in Science and Healthcare. Adina’s passion for world-changing technology, coupled with her adept entrepreneurial focus and clear team development skills have enabled her to bring Spiral’s technology to the forefront of bioinformatics innovation.
Recorded on May 1, 2019The post Into the World of Genomics ＆ Entrepreneurship — Adina Mangubat appeared first on .
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