- Reshma, co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, spoke to a group of women about the power of biology as a manufacturing platform.
- Ginkgo Bioworks designs microbes and organisms to spec using biology as a substrate for engineering.
- Reshma's interest in biology and engineering led her to merge the two disciplines in grad school at MIT.
- Reshma and her colleagues fell in love with the idea of engineering biology and started experimenting with designing organisms.
- They realized the potential in engineering biology but were limited by the available tools and technologies.
- Instead of pursuing academia or industry, they decided to start a company to solve the problem of engineering biology.
- They were inspired by Saul Griffith's advice that their skill set as students who knew how to live cheaply made them ideal for starting a company.
- They started Ginkgo Bioworks with the mission of tackling the problem of engineering biology.
- Reshma believes that the most important thing when starting a company is defining the mission.

- The most important thing when starting a company is to have a clear mission statement
- Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer
- They started with no product, technology, revenue, or customers, but had a strong mission
- They built their first biology lab with secondhand equipment and government grants
- After several years of testing different hypotheses, they found a market in cultured ingredients
- They raised funding after proving their business model
- The company has been focusing on diversity in hiring, but still has room for improvement.

- Ginkgo is not yet a sustainable business and needs to prioritize becoming one.
- The company wants to avoid having a poor representation of women and underrepresented groups.
- They have started discussing what a diversity initiative should look like.
- The founder was inspired by the movie Moneyball and wants to apply a similar approach to diversity.
- By valuing and recruiting people who are undervalued by the marketplace, Ginkgo can have a competitive edge.
- They are thinking about diversity early on and believe even a small number of hires can make a difference.
- The founder is hopeful that their efforts have already led to some improvement in diversity numbers.
- They encourage others to think about diversity when starting their own companies.

- Reshma, co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, spoke to a group of women about the power of biology as a manufacturing platform.
- Ginkgo Bioworks designs microbes and organisms to spec using biology as a substrate for engineering.
- Reshma and her colleagues started Ginkgo Bioworks to solve the problem of engineering biology.
- Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer.
- They started with no product, technology, revenue, or customers, but had a strong mission.
- After several years of testing different hypotheses, they found a market in cultured ingredients.
- The company has been focusing on diversity in hiring and discussing what a diversity initiative should look like.
- By valuing and recruiting people who are undervalued by the marketplace, Ginkgo can have a competitive edge.
- The founder is hopeful that their efforts have already led to some improvement in diversity numbers.
- They encourage others to think about diversity when starting their own companies.

Ginkgo Bioworks co-founder Reshma Shetty speaks at the YC 2016 Female Founders Conference in San Francisco, California

So first off, I'd like to thank both Jessica and Susan for reminding me to be here today.

It's a real privilege and honor to speak to such a talented, amazing group of women here.

We're a biotech company based in Boston, so not from Silicon Valley.

I wanted to first start by asking you a question.

Does anybody know what the most complicated piece of technology on this desk is?

So if you think about it, this plant is capable of self-replicating.

And it can assemble structures with about a nanometer degree of precision.

These are all traits that other engineering disciplines can only dream of, but biology has it all inherently.

And this is what makes me so in love with biology, right, is that it's capable of all these things.

So in my mind, biology is the most powerful manufacturing platform on the planet, And it's what I want to be able to use to build stuff.

And so for us at Ginkgo, what we're excited about is that this next century is going to be the place where we learn how to design biology, Where we learn how to program DNA, program biological systems.

And so we think the next generation of designers are gonna be designing biology, and that's what we're all about.

We were founded in 2008, so we're about 8 years old now.

And basically what we do is design microbes, design organisms to spec.

And I thought basically what I'd do today is just give you a little bit of our backstory.

How did we come to be where we are today?

So Gingko started Officially 8 years ago, but I think it really has its roots quite a little bit longer ago.

My house is like just actually off to the side of this picture.

I went to the University of Utah and I studied computer science there.

But at the same time, I also worked in a biology lab.

And it was a really interesting experience because I, on 1 hand, would study programming, computer science, you know, operating systems and so on in class.

At the same time, I was working in a research lab learning biology on the fly.

And the reason I did this was, quite frankly, I found biology classes boring.

They were filled with pre-med students who just wanted to memorize stuff.

And I was much more interested in engineering and hacking.

And so working in a biology research lab and studying computer science was a nice mix for me.

And so then I decided to try to actually merge the 2 halves of my life when I went to grad school.

And that's where I met this person here on the slide.

Tom basically has a legit claim to inventing the internet.

He was involved in the early days of the ARPANET.

This is him on the left there, standing next to a Lisp machine.

You can see from the pants that it kind of dates back to the 70s or so.

And then, but about 20 years ago or so, Tom said, you know what?

This computer stuff's getting a little boring.

There's a lot of people involved in it now.

I don't need to really think about it so much anymore.

I'm going to start studying something else.

And he decided to basically go back to school for all intents and purposes.

He would take biology undergrad classes and pair up with the freshmen in freshman biology labs and learn how to pipette and do biological research.

But Tom brought a very interesting perspective when he went to biology.

He brought an engineer's perspective, a hacker's perspective.

He thought about, well, how can I take biology and simplify it?

How can I introduce ideas like standardization and abstraction?

All sorts of concepts that we take for granted in engineering, but apply them to biology.

So I met Tom pretty early on when I got to MIT.

And being a young, naive graduate student at the time, I said, you know what?

We use the substrate of chemistry as the basis of chemical engineering.

We use the substrate of physics as the basis to design of our computers.

Why can't we use biology as a substrate for engineering?

And so I was fortunate at MIT to meet not only Tom, but these folks over here.

And they were also fellow graduate students with me at MIT.

And we all basically fell in love with this idea of engineering plus biology.

This is a photo from about 2006, where we engineered some bacteria to smell like bananas and wintergreen.

Had no actual purpose whatsoever, except that it was cool and fun.

And it was actually a team of undergrads who did all the work here.

But it was cool because it was our first experience saying, hey, let's go design an organism souped to nuts and have it actually work.

So it was an interesting experience at MIT, because I basically found my calling.

I fell in love with the idea of engineering biology, knew I wanted to keep working on this.

And if any of you out there are either graduate students or have done a PhD, you know that you kind of come up at the end of your PhD, and the way you know that you're ready to graduate is because you can't stand the sight of your thesis work anymore.

But you also kind of go through this crisis of what am I going to do next, right?

And so for us, the question was, you know, hey, you know what, we think there's just so much potential here when it comes to engineering biology.

How are we going to go make this happen for real?

Because we were incredibly frustrated by the fact that we had all these ideas for organisms we wanted to engineer, systems we wanted to build, but we were limited by the tools and technologies we had available to us.

The complexity of the systems I could engineer was limited to how well I could clone, basically.

And the typical path and the obvious path for us would have been to go become a professor, do a postdoc, become a professor.

And in fact, that's usually how things are presented to PhD students.

And I think that's really a false way of looking at things.

Really what I think is a better way to think about is what is the problem you want to solve, and then go figure out the best way to solve it.

And so for us, we knew that this is the problem we wanted to solve.

How are we going to make this whole engineering biology thing happen?

And we had toyed with the idea of starting a company.

Jason, in particular, had been interested in this for a couple of years.

We even tried to enter the MIT 100K competition.

It's a startup competition that MIT runs every year.

We never made it past the first round, right?

They would always kick us out immediately.

And so we're like, OK, this is probably not going to work.

But then we had a conversation with this fellow here.

Saul was a graduate student a few years ahead of us at the MIT Media Lab.

And when he and his buddies graduated, they basically started a company.

They were like, we have a lot of ideas for different cool technologies.

And they just started a little incubator and basically got some consulting gigs on the side to pay the bills as they sort of worked on their company.

And the most useful piece of advice that Saul gave us at the time was, when you're a graduate student or even a student coming out of undergrad, you have the most amazing skill set for starting a company, which is that you know how to live cheap.

This is the thing that can best qualify you for starting a company is if you can live on small amounts of money.

Because it means that by just bringing in a little bit of revenue or a little bit of money from whatever source, you can pay your bills and keep going.

And so what Saul said really resonated with us.

We had a lot of ideas of stuff we wanted to work on, things we wanted to do.

And we were willing to continue living on the cheap.

And so that was really the thing that clicked for us, believe it or not, and that made us start Ginkgo, was we said, you know what?

We think a startup might be the best way to go tackle this problem, So we're going to start a company.

And we're going to give ourselves a year to try to get it off the ground.

I think starting a company, the hardest thing is figuring out how you start.

I think A lot of people think that maybe you need to come up with some idea or invent some technology.

That's certainly the common wisdom around MIT, that you need to invent a technology, you license it from MIT, and then you go raise venture money.

And that's the only way to start a company.

Others say, oh, no, you should build a prototype.

It's cheap these days to build a prototype.

And then you get some traction and you go from there.

Others think the first thing you need to do is raise some money.

And I'm here to tell you that none of these things are the first step in starting a company, in my opinion.

I actually think the most important thing you should think about if you're going to start a company is, what is your mission?

And believe it or not, we actually got this from a Harvard Business School case called Building Your Company's Vision.

And basically what it talked about is how all the great technology companies, all the ones that really changed the world, had a mission statement.

They had a core thing that that company was trying to do, that no matter what changed in the world, no matter how their business might change, that mission always stayed the same.

It's basically your compass for how you go forward.

And so we decided after reading this that, you know what?

And so we sat around in a conference room in the Stata Center at MIT, this funky, geary building over there.

And we talked about what our mission should be.

And we had lots of ideas about what our mission should be, because we were excited about engineering biology.

And so maybe we want to democratize access to biotechnology, make sure everyone has access to it.

Maybe we want to solve the world's energy problems.

And we brainstormed what our mission should be for several hours.

And where we finally landed was that Gingko's mission was going to be to make biology easier to engineer.

Now, the important thing to understand about this mission is this is not what our business model is.

This is not how we're going to make money.

And we said, this is what's going to be at the core of Ginkgo.

And then we're going to go figure out everything else after that.

I truly believe that this is the most important thing to do when you're starting your company for the first time, because starting a company is hard.

Like, I would actually never recommend that somebody become a founder, because it's really hard.

The only reason to start a company is if there's a problem that you're passionate about, that you want to solve, and you have a mission you want to go accomplish.

And if then you decide that starting a company is the best way to go achieve that mission, then you should become a founder.

Because it's that mission, it's that larger goal that gets you through the ups and downs of starting a company.

So for the first year, we were basically virtual in 2008.

We actually sort of squatted at MIT for the first year as we were just sort of trying to bring in enough money to just pay ourselves a meager grad student stipend.

And during that time, it was actually pretty convenient because it was 2008.

So it turned out that a lot of biotech companies were going out of business.

We didn't even bother to try to go talk to investors to give us money, but even if we had, I'm sure that they would have said no, because we had no product and no idea what our product should be.

But what we knew is that we wanted to work on this mission to make biology easier to engineer.

And we had ideas about what was going to be necessary to achieve it, right?

We had ideas about what were the important technologies to go develop.

And so during that year of basically being a virtual company, we would go dumpster diving.

So any time a biotech company would go out of business, we'd go by and try to buy up their equipment for $0.10 on the dollar.

Anything they were getting rid of, we'd pick up.

And so this is a picture of our first biology lab.

We basically put together the whole thing for about $150,000 or so, give or take.

Literally everything you see in this picture was secondhand.

Even the trash cans we picked up for free from a company that was going out of business because we didn't want to spend money on trash cans.

MIT labs were packing up and moving, so we'd go by and pick up their glassware and whatnot.

And when people heard that we had done this, they were dumbfounded, right?

Because the conventional wisdom, certainly around at the time, was that creating a biology lab of this kind cost at least a few million dollars.

So the fact that we did it for an order of magnitude less was like crazy.

But it was how we did what we had to do with the money we had available to us.

And for the next few years, we basically just looked for product market fit.

We tried to make something that people wanted.

And the basic approach we took was, for all intents and purposes, using the scientific method.

We'd come up with a hypothesis about what our business model should be.

It would have to be a business model that was aligned with our mission to make biology easier to engineer.

And then we'd go talk to customers and see if they would actually buy something from us.

And we went through hypothesis after hypothesis.

To be honest, this took us about 5 years, OK?

Where we'd bring in government grants and contracts to help pay the bills so that we could build out the technology platform.

We made that platform sufficiently general that we knew it applied to a lot of different problem areas and markets.

And then we basically followed all the steps in Steve Blank's book for how to figure out a repeatable business model.

And so it wasn't really until we signed our first customer in, I think, 2012, and then we started seeing multiple customers in 2013, that we really felt that, hey, Maybe we actually have something here.

And what we basically figured out was that there was a market around what we now call cultured ingredients.

So cultured ingredients are ingredients that are normally produced from plants, plant extracts.

So they're things like rose fragrance, or vitamins, or flavors, or sweeteners, and whatnot.

These are all ingredients that show up in common household goods, right?

Things you buy on the supermarket shelves.

They're normally extracted from plants, but we could instead make them from yeast.

We could basically brew them in a process not dissimilar from brewing beer.

And it turned out, much to our shock, because we had no idea this market even existed when we started, That this turns out to be a pretty decent market of about $3.5 billion in plant extracts, just in the raw materials alone.

And we basically figured out that, hey, there's an opportunity to replace those plant extracts, which normally take a multi-year growing cycle and have all sorts of supply chain issues with a five-day fermentation process using yeast.

And we started getting customers, and we basically proved to ourselves that there was actually a market there.

And so on the back of that, we said for the first time after being in existence for about 5 years that we'd actually raise money.

Because we never really wanted to raise venture money before that, because we didn't know what our business model would be.

And I think sometimes you hear about stories of investors and founders at odds with each other over the future of the company.

And I think a lot of that strife and tension can often come from the fact that sometimes when you pitch an investor and you raise money, you don't necessarily know what your actual product should be.

You might not have yet achieved that product market fit, and so you have to change course.

And the investor may or may not agree with how you're changing course.

And so we very deliberately waited until we felt we had a very clear picture of where we're going, what our market was to be, what our customers looked like, and even had traction with customers.

And that's how, then, in 2014, we joined YC.

And then coming out of YC, we were able to raise about a $9 million Series A, and then more recently, a $45 million Series B.

So that's sort of our story in a nutshell.

I wanted to take the last few minutes to talk about a slightly related topic that I've been thinking about a lot, and that's 1 of diversity.

This has come up recently for us because we've basically been doing a lot of hiring since our series B.

So we were about 35 people or so when we closed our series B and have roughly doubled or so since that time.

And it's interesting because this wasn't a topic I explicitly thought about a lot prior to just recently.

In some sense, it's a tough 1 to think about as a female founder because in some sense I'm already breaking the mold, right?

Most technology companies don't have necessarily much female representation.

But I think it's also 1 that's very important to talk about.

Because if you look at our stats, We actually have pretty similar pathetic stats when it comes to female representation as to most technology companies, right?

And actually we found when we finally looked at this just recently in the past few months, that after we raised our Series B and started hiring people, our percentage actually went down when it came to job offers.

So once we started ramping up our hiring, we were actually seeing a drop off.

And honestly, When I saw this, I was kind of ashamed.

Because on 1 hand, Ginkgo is not yet a sustainable business, I'll confess.

And so our top priority has to be making Ginkgo into a sustainable business.

But at the same time, if We actually succeed and do what we want if we actually become the Intel of biology like I want for us if we look like just every other technology company with a pathetic representation of women and underrepresented minorities and other underrepresented groups that would kind of suck To be honest, And so it's 1 that I'll confess folks on our team actually raised in the past few months.

And so we started just talking about it internally at Ginkgo.

What should a diversity initiative look like?

What was realistic for a company of our size?

Because usually this is not something you talk about until you're much, much bigger than us.

And so it's been a hard 1 for me to wrap my head around, to be honest, because I care about this.

I want Ginkgo to have a diverse workforce.

I believe that we will be stronger for it.

But at the same time, I'm very cognizant of the fact that we have a lot of work to do in terms of turning Ginkgo into a sustainable business.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Reshma Shetty Speaks at Y Combinator's Female Founders Conference 2016