The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#120
VC-Backed Bacteria Domestication for Low-Carbon Manufacturing – Dr. Sarah Richardson, CEO of MicroByre
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Sarah Richardson, Co-founder and CEO of MicroByre. MicroByre makes pets out of bacteria. Yep, those are their words, not mine and if you love great copywriting, you'll love their website. They domesticate naturally occurring bacteria and introduce them to industry. They enable customers to efficiently produce bio-derived chemistries at or below current petrochemical economics. Newly cooperative bacteria can replace ancient biomass, such as petrochemicals with renewable biomass think lawn clippings efficiently and economically. They're backed by leading climate tech investors such as Prime Impact Fund, MCJ Collective, and Earthshot Ventures.
02:09
Sarah has a PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and was a distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow of Genomics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she worked on massive-scale synthetic biology projects in the integration of computational genomics with experimental genomics. But of course, I think we all did that last Tuesday.
Anyway, in this episode, we talked about what it means to be a germ wrangler, which is how she describes herself on LinkedIn. How they are bringing about biomanufacturing at scale. The 95 plus percent of bacteria that we don't yet understand and the potential that represents to tackle of humanity's greatest problems. Why it's important to learn how to learn. Yes, that's not a typo.
The role of luck versus skill in growing a company. How to truth tell when on stage, let's say, or advising young entrepreneurs and maybe how not to get invited back yet the audience loves you. More to come on that. How she overcame the challenges of raising venture capital. Why they've assembled a team of microbiologists, chemists, molecular biologists, data scientists and computer scientists to automate the collection and curation of bacterial data. I mean, wow and lots more. Hope you enjoy it and please give Sarah and MicroByre a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Sarah Richardson, Co-founder and CEO of MicroByre, welcome to the podcast.
Sarah Richardson:
Thank you very much for having me.
Chris Wedding:
It is a wonderful spring afternoon on a Friday, at least it is in North Carolina. Maybe it is in Berkeley too. I want to start us off with a tantalizing paragraph on your Who We Are page, so the audience would just bear with me for a second.
04:08
“Imagine a future where your compost and wastewater and even the grass clippings from your backyard are too valuable to discard to rot into methane because they can be used to ferment life-saving medicines or the chemicals used to make your cell phone.” I mean, how could you not, Sarah, want to get up and work really hard all day long with that kind of tease, with that kind of potential?
Sarah Richardson:
There is so much potential there. One of the issues is that it's going to take us a long time to get there, but yes, it's the goal I get up every day and my team gets up every day to try to achieve.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so that was the hook. Let's go to, what is MicroByre, Sarah, then we'll back up from there?
Sarah Richardson:
MicroByre literally means the bacteria barn. Byre is an old English word that used to mean cow shed and it's the source of the word barn and bower. It's a place where you breed domestic animals. So, what we do is domesticate bacteria, and just like domestication, which is a powerful analogy and concept in everyone's mind, we understand domestication very viscerally. The difference between a dog and a wolf, the difference between a wild strawberry and a grocery store strawberry. We're doing the same thing, but with bacteria.
Identify the ones that can be imminently helpful, just incredibly impactful to manufacturing, to bioremediation, to carbon sequestration, to climate change. Then look at why they haven't been adopted into our processes already, and figure out how to bring them along, how to pull them into the stable, how to make them happy and make the concessions as a society, as a technology company we need to make, to get them to join us in the walk towards being able to use lawn clippings as compost.
Chris Wedding:
Yep, perfect. So, your LinkedIn title is like no other, Germ Wrangler. How do you all decide which of these wild bacteria to wrangle?
Sarah Richardson:
It really is about where we have the best chance of leveraging biology to have an impact. Biology is not going to be the answer to everything. Even bacteria are not going to be the answer to everything. Sometimes plants are the right answer. Sometimes it's fungi. Sometimes it is still going to be chemical synthesis.
The goal here at MicroByre and the reason they call me the germ wrangler, is because that's the skill I have. It's microbes and we have to respect other people that are going for the plant fungi forward solutions. Our specialty, my specialty is microbes and there's a lot to love about them, just a lot. They're the most alien form of life, I think, on the planet, and they are capable of achieving incredible transformations that our physics and chemistry knowledge still can't quite model, that we're still not quite sure how they do it. So, there's a lot of potential there, just so much potential just focusing on the bacteria.
07:17
I am enamored, I have favorites, and they call me the germ wrangler because I truly believe that any of them could be domesticated. The important part is to pick the ones, especially early, that we can bring on the fastest for the most impact that will allow us to continue to walk that road to bio-manufacturing and convince other people that it's a road worth walking. So, chemicals, especially in the short-term.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, awesome. Before we hit record, I was just sharing my experience in learning to love bacteria and their magic 25 years ago, where my senior honors thesis was looking at a pseudomonas genus that could eat, biodegrade, metabolize fossil fuels. In this case, fossil fuels at the site of a rig and the spills that naturally occur, and how those bacteria could be harnessed for things like cleaning up pollution. Just looking at the glob looking disgusting, but just being amazed like that little blob right there can do things that modern technology almost can’t conceive of without a lot of heat, beat, and treat to accomplish the same goal. It's pretty amazing, huh?
Sarah Richardson:
Evolution is an amazing engine. It's really hard to conceptualize or understand or embrace just the scale of time it took for organisms to find the most effective, efficient, survivable way to do the kinds of transformations you're talking about. Yes, they're better at it than us in many, many ways. And attempting to catch up to them, chemically, expensively with brute force is not the way forward in most cases. We're going have to embrace that blob. Yes, it looks disgusting, but biologists never say ew, we say ooh, and then we put gloves on.
Chris Wedding:
Nice. It's all in where the accent goes, I guess. Right?
Sarah Richardson:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. All right, you said you had favorites, right?
Sarah Richardson:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
What are some examples of favorites that you like?
Sarah Richardson:
There are so many bacteria where when I describe what they do, it can really snap people who have not been in microbiology into attentive interest. One of them are bacteria that make magnetic particles. They live in freshwater and you can isolate them with magnets. It's not that hard, but they make perfect little magnetic particles, so they are attracted to magnets.
Thinking of organisms that do that for a living, it's like why? Why are they doing it? There is a reason. Evolution is a messy engineer, but it's totally stochastic, and the stuff that sticks is the stuff that helps exploit a niche. So, there's a reason and that's a great puzzle. There are bacteria that can convert ammonia through hydrazine to ladderanes. All these fancy chemical names can basically be summarized as these bacteria turn pee into rocket fuel on its way into storage.
And they're the kind of transformations that we do chemically. Just the idea that biology figured out a way and had a reason to do it is mind boggling. Those are really interesting bacteria. They're difficult to approach in the laboratory right now and again, for domestication, you have to have a really good reason to change your methods, to change your society where we asked dogs to come join us. We said, “We will change the way we work our society because the benefit of you coming with us is so great.” And so, domestication has always had to think, we're not going to domesticate zebras, we have horses. There's no reason to go do it. It can be done, but is it worth it?
So, some of these bacteria that I love, they're a while away from being worth it to us, but that promise, even though it's not so flashy, some of the bacteria beneath our feet, just every day in the soil, are doing things that would stun you. Something that doesn't sound as sexy is nitrogen fixation. So, humans like to add nitrogen to plants by chemically producing it as fertilizer, putting it on the plants. But before humans were coming along with these plants, that bacteria were doing it and only bacteria, feeding it directly to plants.
So impactfully that after the last ice age, when the glaciers were retreating over really depleted, abused soil, plants that were able to symbiosis with bacteria, specifically the bacteria pick their favorites were able to dominate and move into that soil that was so poor and account for something insane. Like 45% of the pollen was directly attributable to that one species of bacteria picking its favorites. So, bacteria rule this planet. I always have favorites. Some of them don't sound as cool as the others, but all of them are incredibly impactful and the reason we are able to live on this planet. So, how can you not love them?
Chris Wedding:
How can you not love them? Obviously, this is a podcast, so there's no video piece to it, but if folks could see, I think the energy with which you express this business you're building based on this science you've spent years perfecting, it's contagious. Which reminds me of a website which now goes by the acronym IFLS, but children cover your ears, which stands for I Fucking Love Science. I think that's how I especially felt in undergrad doing the sciences. Anyway, I feel it right now for sure. So, Sarah, it seems like there's some like equation that you-all must think about, which part of it is like, how innovative slash impactful is the bacteria? Then the other is, how easy is it to domesticate, right?
Sarah Richardson:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
It's like idea versus execution in a sense. How do you all think about those two buckets as you decide, well, of all the solutions we can work on, good idea or good bacteria versus good execution or how easy to domesticate, how do you balance those two?
Sarah Richardson:
It's really heavily weighted towards impact, honestly, because we're in a crisis. We're in a climate crisis. I feel the only skills I have to contribute to the climate crisis in a meaningful way are to bring biomanufacturing online in a competitive way. We have to be able to provide compelling reasons to drive investment in biomanufacturing. We need subsidies on the scale that oil and petroleum were given, but we're not going to get those unless we presented some really good, really strong arguments for why this is an alternative. So, we have to compete on cost, we have to compete on impact. So that is a major driver.
14:21
Then the bacteria we discard are just the ones that are literally too fussy to work with in the laboratory and that is a smaller list than you would think. There is a reputation bacteria have for not being able to grow in a laboratory, it's a myth. They're not eating moonbeams and stardust; you can grow them. The question is how fussy, is it worth the time and how quickly can you un-fuss them? So, it can be done.
There's another question embedded in there is, how do you know which bacteria do what in the first place? And that's largely unsourced. You people will go pull things and say, “We're looking for something that can reduce this,” and they can go run an assay on a soil sample and say, “There is something in there”, but that's not the same kind of broad assay of what is possible in bacteria or in fungi. So, we're missing a lot of that information, even about potential microbiome set up to figure some of that out as well.
We do look at the markets. So, the company is set up as an ecosystem, really important. If we're going to be biologists, we have to be an ecosystem. If we're going to succeed at biology, we have to borrow their best trick. Its best trick is synthesis and the intersection of specialty, what we call specialization in trade, absolutely.
So, we have business development associates who specialize in looking at understanding the needs, the markets, the spaces where we can actually help people be successful in adopting biomanufacturing. We have chemists who understand which chemicals are going to be impactful, how we assay them, how we evaluate them, how we make them safely. We have biologists whose job is to understand the microbes, what they can be pushed to do, and then push them to do it directly with genetic modification.
So, we have the busies, we have the benchies, the chemists and biologists, and then we have all these computer scientists. We call them our codies, and our codies job is to make sure that all the data aggregated from our observations, from our work and from the research done and the information gathered by the busies and the benchies, all of it is put into this massive data structure that accelerates our progress and helps us in for places where we need to go look next.
So that is a major engine that we use to drive to pick targets so that it's a multifactor optimization problem where the biggest factor is the closest possible biggest impact we can have in the amount of runway we have as a venture back corporation.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Multi-factor optimization. Love that. Easy to say, hard to do. So, let's see, you mentioned the word potential a little earlier. Can you remind us what percentage, let's say, of bacteria are, discovered is the wrong word, but understood enough such to the point that you could say, “Well, yeah, okay, we have this library representing X percentage of all bacteria out there, now let's just pick,”? It's not quite that easy slash comprehensive, right?
Sarah Richardson:
I hate to give you such a scientist answer. I'd have to convert to an engineering answer with margins of error, but there's a massive amount of bacteria out there that have not really been seen, let alone surveyed. We can go look at environmental samples and say what is happening in there chemically. We can get genomes, but associate all of those in a single full package, it's hard. There are people who spend their whole career doing that.
18:04
So, knowing how many bacteria are out there and how well they're assayed is also made difficult by the fact that for very good reasons, the biggest effort put into microbiology and human history was in human health. We needed to survive pathogens in order to sit here recording a podcast and not be dead of the plague. So, that has also biased our understanding of microbes in a serious way. I'm not trying to be upset about it, but we also have to break our way out of some of our biases about bacteria.
Growing them at the same temperature, we tend to grow everything, even E. coli, one of the workhorses that I'm seeking to retire, E. coli grows at human body temperature. And so, we tend to grow the bacteria that we're bringing in and the ones we're studying at body temperature is of a massive bias in the industry towards bacteria that can be cultivated at that temperature. So yeah, what was the question?
Chris Wedding:
It doesn't really matter. Part of what I was after is that, pick a number, 95% plus.
Sarah Richardson:
Oh, right.
Chris Wedding:
If there’s a number they're still yet to be discovered, so who knows what can be involved in biomanufacturing basically?
Sarah Richardson:
There is also to be considered that unlike macro biology, where it's pretty easy to differentiate a rhinoceros from a hippo or even two rhinoceros’ species, bacterial species are hard to define. So, bacteriologists will argue over which one gets which name and why, but in MicroByre, we tend to care more about the function. It doesn't really matter to us what the name of the species is or even where we got it. Although where we got it is important to understanding how to grow it, but we're more concerned, as I said, with that impact.
So, we care about who's doing what, but not what their name was. We care that they were incentivized to specialize in this. How many different species is great, but we haven't really taken time to worry about how many there are, because it's just important that there are some that do this function and that we can pull them into the laboratory. I know that's a wishy-washy. If I was going to throw a number out there and have to be braced about it and I know we're like 50 years from the answer, I would say that we're basically dealing with less than 10% of the bacteria that are out there are ones we've actually surveyed or grown. I'd be comfortable making that bet. I'll be just as wrong as the people who were trying to guess how big the human genome was. You were really wrong.
Chris Wedding:
Right? Yeah. Well, let's just say a couple of PhDs hanging out on Friday to noon, surely, we’re right? Ha-ha-ha. Hey, so you also alluded to a lot of different specialties, skill sets at MicroByre and yes, those are different human beings on your team, but a lot of the expertise is part of your training, and I think your training is atypical. I believe you've described it before where you're not necessarily the best in, pick whatever of those sectors we're talking about, but to be able to see the connections between those different specialties, biology, chemistry, genomics, coding, et cetera. Can you say more about either in your training or in building organizations, the importance of being able to build a meta, if you will, to see the connections versus the deep dive experts?
21:41
Sarah Richardson:
Oh yeah. No, I got to hire deep dive experts, say no more and are more into practicing it than I am. I have the vocabularies. I have enough expertise to be able to recognize expertise and hopefully then hire them and have them tell me that what I was doing before them is serviceable. That is my highest aspiration that I hire an expert for something I had been doing myself and they come in and go, “Okay. You know, all right, it's all right.”
When we were a smaller company, my job was to be the first or second best at whatever had to be done and now at our size, my job is to be the fourth best at any skill that has to be done. They tell me that, they remind me, which is good because the other part of it is giving them strength and confidence by my confidence in them. I hit them because they were the best and what am I telling them if I'm getting up in their business or I'm telling them they're wrong because I have some ego about it?
No, I'm not good at anything except understanding ontologies and vocabularies from different specialties, and being able to help them align their ontologies. Help them understand that when a cody says this word, it means this word in chemistry or in biology. And helping fill in where there's gaps in those vocabularies, but then my biggest job, get out of the way. Build that bridge, just the scaffold of it and let them finish tiling it in. I got to get out of the way of the experts and then find other things to do. What do I do all day? I don’t know.
Chris Wedding:
First of all, that's beautiful and I think that resonates with lots of folks. Real quick aside, it's really funny. Outside of our day jobs, we talk to normal human beings that are not living in climate tech venture or whatever. I happen to mention that what I do as part of my day job is I work with three dozen venture-backed climate CEOs across North America. This person was like, “So, what exactly does a CEO do?” The way he asked, I'm like, “I'm pretty sure you think they don't do anything.” He's like, “Well, I mean--” Anyway, I was trying to take up for you guys, you know?
Sarah Richardson:
Thank you. I always thought of it as being the one who's responsible for the mistakes. If you're going to take on the executive hat, then you are the one who has to make the hard decisions and be responsible for the fallout. That means you want to not have to have that fallout. So, it's really important to resource the experts, give them the authority and then listen to them.
When they say, “Don't do this,” maybe you should not do it. And they say, “Don't do it,” and you have to anyway, work with them. It’s like your lawyers, that you make sure that you're as covered as possible for the down case because it's going to be on your head. So, I think that's probably where we spend our time is making decisions and talking, talking to externals, being the face of the company. But it does feel different from being responsible for writing the code or growing the bacteria, for reaching out to customers directly, it feels different. So, I hope that the culture we're cultivating here of expertise blended, it is also including respect for whatever it is I do. I think it is.
25:12
Chris Wedding:
I have high confidence. All right, so we both mentioned the role of venture capital in the kinds of businesses like yours that you're building. Maybe say more about your path to convince them, “Yeah, you should back MicroByre because there's this future.” What's that path been like for you raising capital to realize biomanufacturing at scale?
Sarah Richardson:
Well, the first problem I had was realizing what it even was and what it meant. As I continue to learn, I have a lot to learn, I try to learn as fast as possible, but it strikes me as a big difficulty in general for innovation that there's really three ways to start a venture. One is to just be really rich, not just rich, wealthy, to be an organization that can afford to just have a spin-out or an R&D department or to be a high network individual who can just go do it.
The second way to do it is to have a bank back you, but banks don't understand new technology. They understand retail. They understand restaurants and so if you are a tech company, you're probably not going to get funding from a bank to start up. The third way to do it is with venture capital and they cannot do all the things. They need to do their due diligence and see massive returns. They need to see massive impact and that's just the way it is.
So, there's stuff and good ideas could define companies, but fall into the gaps here between those three methods of funding. So, I didn't even know what those were though, when I left grad school or when I left my postdoc. The first step was to figure out, well, what idea do I have? I believe it's world changing. I believe it's insanely valuable, but how do you frame that not in a technical way, but in an economic way to the stakeholders who can fund you for it?
As someone with a technical background, a PhD, and then four years of postdoctoral work solely in biology, how do you also present yourself as understanding that and having that be true to people who are going to suspect that your first skill and your bias is towards IFLS?
Chris Wedding:
Mm-hmm, right.
Sarah Richardson:
Right? And so, that was one more language I had to learn besides computer science, besides applied mathematics and supercomputing and molecular biology. I also had to learn that. So, the more code switching and that was something that I only was able to do with the assistance of Activate, at the time it was called Cyclotron Road. I was in the third cohort and their mission was to take promising technical people and put them through, they would never call it a boot camp, but the analogy is a boot camp or testing their idea and learning what venture capital and family capital and government capital, SBIRs and stuff were to see if they had a shot. If they were aligned properly and they could learn how to communicate it. So, they specialized in taking IFLS and turning it into, “We can make a billion dollars.”
28:41
Chris Wedding:
What did it feel like to get your first investor backing?
Sarah Richardson:
I had someone very wise tell me, the first one's free, the next one is hard. It just gets harder and harder and harder, but it was intimidating, especially immediately after when you execute your hiring plan and now you have more people who are betting on you for the next round. So, it felt like stepping off a cliff, like an Indiana Jones, where you've stepped off and it's under you, that was the first funding. But instead of going to the other side of the cliff on the way, or you get to the other, and there's going to be another one.
So, it felt like the first step on a journey that was not going to end anytime soon. The way I get through it, don't tell my investors, no, I’m kidding, is basically, a phrase my wildest friend said to me, drive it like you stole it. Then I added, but if you make it to the border, you get to keep it. Just there's more borders ahead.
Chris Wedding:
[Crosstalk – 00:29:48] fun analogies there, goodness. Yeah, it's like to grow a venture-backed company, it does require so many skills, but the one thing that often those founders are not taught or not trained in is how to raise capital. Which depending on the year or whatnot, it could be 50 plus percent of a CEO's time as talking to investors, existing, new, closing a deal, et cetera. It's almost like being a parent is pretty important or being a good spouse is pretty important or managing personal finances is pretty important, but we're not trained in any of those things. We just learn on the job, right?
Sarah Richardson:
Yeah, which is scary.
Chris Wedding:
Totally scary.
Sarah Richardson:
It's scary because you never know when it's a mistake or how impactful that mistake is going to be, so learning the hard way. My father used to tell me, “Why do you always have to learn the hard way?” I think that's probably how I ended up here.
Chris Wedding:
I was just going to say that, yes, there's probably some relationship to almost you can see an entrepreneur being born. She’s on her own route, essentially.
Sarah Richardson:
I did not mean to end up here though. It's funny to me. I didn't ever see myself being an entrepreneur. So, it's funny to hear people say, “Oh yeah, you had the material.” I didn't see it. I was not exposed to that, but learning the hard way, we'd always love for that to be avoided. So, I really appreciated the venture capitalists I've run into in the space where whether or not they can or would invest in me. Like they could, but they won't, that's fine. Or they can't, so they won't.
The ones who have a serious respect, they might not think of it this way, but as of an ecosystem. That they occupy a niche in the ecosystem, but it is not going to stay healthy or exist without nurturing other bits of the ecosystem. So, venture capitalists who can be honest and straightforward and help entrepreneurs, and I always say young, but I just mean novice, young founders avoid mistakes. They go pitch you and you're like, “Well, this would never, but let me help you pitch the next person. Let me help you get this off the ground if you can and get the fair shake.”
32:08
Chris Wedding:
Totally.
Sarah Richardson:
And so, meeting some of those people and seeing their genuine interest in improving even founders that they are not invested in, that’s how we don't learn the hard way or what we're supposed to do is make bigger, more novel mistakes.
Chris Wedding:
There you go. Yeah. There's an associate at a venture firm who, of course, I'm forgetting the name up right this second, but who wrote a very long piece on Medium about all the reasons why BC say no. I bet there's like 40 plus reasons in there. I think it's really honest and refreshing because so often the reason is not you. It's something about them. I mean, whether it's dry powder or investment period is toast or thesis or, who knows, not enough capacity for board seats or anyway, lots of reasons.
Sarah Richardson:
There are so many reasons and that's one of the things -- During Cyclotron Road, they were great about bringing in VCs to talk to you and no strings attached, bringing in former entrepreneurs, but one pattern I noticed was either a misunderstanding or a lack of discussion of luck, timing. So, one of the things I worry about a lot, it's timing. That I'm not wrong, but I am going to just hit at the wrong time and there's nothing I can do about that, depending on the timing, on this macro scale. And so, that's luck, and differentiating for a founder, for a leader, to differentiate between something they had control of or have control of and something they don't can really cause a lot of mental angst.
So, I would see successful people stand up and just say, “I put all this work in, I did these things, these things happened, I took advantage of them and look, founding a company is easy and fun,” and that's a lie. It's a lie and they might be lying to themselves, it's fine. They might be lying to you, it's less fine, especially depending on the audience. They succeeded and they succeeded because of their hard work and their luck and it goes the other way too. If you're not succeeding, it might be because you're unlucky and you should not chew on yourself because you ran into bad luck. Man, it's tough out there to figure out.
This is the only thing I can do for the climate emergency. This is it. So, I feel an absence of luck really keenly, but I am trying to make sure that if I am wrong, if there is a reason this isn't working, I want to know so I can go try to find another way to be as impactful as possible. I am doing this not for the money. No, I'm doing it for the money, investors, I totally am. We can make a ton of money doing this, but the reason I am putting myself through the stress, the long days, the work is because I believe this is a way to make a difference and I'm always seeking the counter argument.
I don't want to be in an echo chamber. I don't want to follow into a rut. I really need people to tell me exactly why it won't work and if that's luck, I ran out of timing, tell me. If it's been tried before and you're not changing something, tell me. If it's never worked before, that's not good enough.
Chris Wedding:
The luck versus skill on how I built this podcast, which is maybe just slightly more popular than [inaudible – 00:35:51]. Anyway, Guy Ross asked the founders, he's like, “What part of your raging success was skill versus luck?” It's really curious to hear the responses, but most admit there's some luck involved. I mean, there are many good ideas that give venture funding, but the timing is off. So, it's like, can you stay liquid solvent long enough until history catches up or the future catches up, you catch up to the future to be right?
36:22
Sarah Richardson:
Yep, and can you also survive if you weren't the one to bring it about watching someone else do it with better timing?
Chris Wedding:
Oh, let's not go there. That sounds painful. So, I want to ask you one more question about the business and then I want to switch to the Sarah portion of the podcast. On the business, who are your customers, Sarah? Who are you selling to?
Sarah Richardson:
We've got three or four kinds of collaborators. One of them at a very base level are people who have a waste product. They have an organic waste, it rots. If it rots, bacteria are eating it, if it's rotting uncontrolled, they're not seeing a return on it. They might even be investing money into getting rid of it, making it rot somewhere, moving it away. If they rot, something's eating it, and why isn't it working for us instead of just making methane?
So, having people offer us samples of their organic wastes so that we can partner with them to help them upcycle it, particularly if it's something they can do on site or develop partnerships with others who then want both that biomass and the thing that we can make with it, that's one class of collaboration we love to see come in the door.
Another is people who are using not one of our bacteria. They picked yeast or they picked E. coli or bacillus subtilis, they picked something that there's a broad familiarity with, but it's not a specialist. What it is, is something that is easily talked to and grown and therefore a safe default, but it hits a wall at some point when you're trying to do something big with it or something different to its evolutionary niche.
Overcoming that has been a massive source of pain for many grad students, many post-docs, many companies. And so, when they come to us, they can ask the question, well, what can we achieve our goals with? What species should we have picked? Maybe one we didn't know about, or maybe it's one we did, but we couldn't work with it, and now we're ready. We're ready because we're succeeding in every way, except in upscaling these bacteria. So, we love to see that come in too, because they have the market, they have the drive. They just need that missing bit of technology and we can provide that.
The third class are people who already have the right bacteria. They don't need to be told. They didn't need to go into yeast or E. coli and fill there. They have the right bacteria, but they don't have the consolidated skills of microbiome to understand how to domesticate it. And so, they can't quite wrangle it and we can help them wrangle it and again, they have their markets, they have their downstream customers, they have an understanding, an understanding we don't want to have to build in order to have that impact. So, we partner with them to make sure that they have a route to biomanufacturing without pain.
39:18
And the fourth class would be people who just want to function. They might not know about bacteria at all. They want a chemical. They might want some agricultural function where the bacteria aren't producing something that you then harvest. They're just in the environment doing something or in a pot doing something for the plant. They might want something in mining where bacteria are doing a lot of work, but they've not fully understood how to make sure they're doing that or how to optimize them. So, that's why I say function as opposed to chemical. Although I think the quickest return, the quickest impact right now is going to be in chemical. So, those are the four classes of partner that we are currently positioned to help.
Anyone though who has a bio issue, if they think it might have a bio solution, we'll tell you if it's a microbe or if it's going to be a print, we'll tell you. If you have a waste stream, we'll tell you, “Oh, wow, we're not going to be able to do that with bacteria, so seek a fungal company.” I encourage people if they have a hypothesis or a question, reach out to us, because we'll be honest with you because like I said, our goal is to have impact and we have to make sure we're doing the things that will help our customers achieve biomanufacturing.
Chris Wedding:
Love it. So, if you're listening and you fit one of those bills, MicroByre is your solution.
Hey, it's Chris. Just a brief message from our sponsors and we'll get back to the show. Just kidding, we don't take sponsors. On the other hand, I do have the privilege of leading the only executive peer group community for growth stage, CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. With monthly group meetings, annual retreats, and one-on-one executive coaching calls, our members help each other boost revenue, impact, capital raised, clarity, confidence, work-life balance, and team effectiveness. Today's 30 plus members represent over $8 billion in market cap for assets under management for climate solutions. If you're interested, go to entrepreneursforimpact.com and join the waiting list today. All right, back to the show.
All right, let's switch to Sarah, okay? All right, so looking backwards, if you could give your younger self some advice, what are a couple of tips maybe to be more effective, happier, et cetera, on this journey?
Sarah Richardson:
I spent a while just accepting authority. I mean, you should hold your parent’s hand while you cross the street. There are some things you don't have to learn the hard way, but as I trained, as I started getting interested in specialty, I just took a lot of what people said for granted if they were in an authority position, if they were more senior to me. That's not always the best way to figure out what's going on or to put yourself in a position to innovate. You have to be annoying and ask why. You don't have to ask them, but if you do ask them and it gets to the bedrock for them of, “That's how we've always done it,” that means there might be something to look at there.
If they can't remember why, this happens a lot too, like, “Why do we do it this way?” and they're like, “Don't know,” there's something that might've been overlooked there. So, I would try and encourage my younger self to question authority more, not necessarily to confront it, but to understand from whence their authority is meant to spring.
42:50
Chris Wedding:
Well, luckily our two teenage boys do not listen to my podcast, so they won't hear that, but I do try to give them rationale for why we have certain expectations.
Sarah Richardson:
That really helps. It really, really helps. I think that's one of the parenting things is, as much as you can, don't just say, “Because I said so.” That is not convincing, it's not helpful, and it will spark like, “We need to know why.” Giving them the reason, even if they end up disagreeing with you, at least helps them see you as logical and reasonable and that's not just kids, it's going to be everyone you need to convince to come on your side.
Chris Wedding:
Yep, for sure. How about on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, tell us some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane, and focused.
Sarah Richardson:
Oh man, I'm bad at that. I'm really bad at that, but I do love optimizing my computer usage. I am deaf on bad UI. I don't use a single built-in Apple app. I don't.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. Say more about that.
Sarah Richardson:
They’re not optimal. Oh, my husband will laugh at me because I'll go through four email clients that are not Gmail or Apple Mail to find the right one because the stuff will work, but it'll be feature poor. Most people, it's enough, but if you're really trying to squeeze out the effectiveness of your time, you need a different address book app. You need a different email app. You need a different task and reminders app.
One really great one I just discovered and I wish I'd had it four years ago, is Agenda. Agenda lets you take notes directly tied to your calendar. So, you're in a meeting and you can tie it to that meeting, take all your notes and it works with Markdown and then maybe you don't remember what you wrote, but you remember when you wrote it or you want to go review things, it's literally linked to the calendar. I love it, I love it.
Another one I'm always trying to ramp up my use for is OmniFocus and I use that for both professional and personal stuff. It's the best for writing down like your passport needs to be renewed in four years, put that in OmniFocus. Yeah, defer it. OmniFocus has so many nice features for making sure you're only looking at the stuff that's important right now, but you don't have to carry that haze of all this, oh, don't forget you have to -- Put it in OmniFocus the first instant you think about it.
Both of these might be Macintosh only things, so I'm really sorry if anyone wants this and they use Windows, my advice is one, switch to Mac. No, seriously, go to a website called alternative2.net and put in the software and then filter it by Windows to see things that have common features, which is how I get out of the Apple ecosystem for apps.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, that was just the right amount of geekiness that I was hoping for. Sarah, thank you. You delivered.
Sarah Richardson:
Now, Apple's never going to sponsor me.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. How about, you gave us some tools there, books or podcasts, quotes, et cetera, that you think listeners should pick out?
46:00
Sarah Richardson:
I am the biggest fan of Well There's Your Problem. Have you heard of that one?
Chris Wedding:
No.
Sarah Richardson:
It's a crew of pretty irreverent people, one leading the discussion is an engineer, and they just go through disasters of engineering throughout history. Like here's why that bridge fell down with a lot of education, a lot of digressions. It's a podcast with slides, so you can listen to it, but it's better if you can follow the slides along on YouTube. They're just, one, really knowledgeable, two pretty hilarious, but I learn a lot about history because of the amount of context they put into the disasters. So, it's not going to be for everyone. They are irreverent.
Chris Wedding:
Good. You've already sold them. Yeah.
Sarah Richardson:
Okay. I love them. I love them. Then there is something to read that I'm constantly pushing on people. I don't know how many of them actually do. It's Epigrams in programming. It's very short. It's something like 120 little epigrams. They were all written by Alan Perlis, P-E-R-L like the language I-S and he was the first computer scientist to win a Turing Prize I believe and he has a set of 120 epigrams that are gold. Even if you don't program, you can skip over some of them, but some of them are going to apply to life. They just are.
One of my favorites that I'm constantly quoting at my staff is never have a good idea you're not willing to be responsible for.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, right?
Sarah Richardson:
Just, if you don't want to be the one to do it, don't say it. There’s just so many good ones and if you are a programmer into computer science, they have an extra deep level and the ones where he specifically -- One of my favorites is you can tell a lot about a programmer by their attitude towards the continued vitality of Fortran. He wrote these epigrams in like 1982. It's still true today. They're just really brilliant.
So, I would go through them if you're not into computer science anyway, and skip the ones that make your eyes roll past and go for the ones like an adequate bootstrap is a contradiction in terms. Just sit on that. I love this, I love them. You can just google Alan Perlis epigrams and they'll pop right up.
Chris Wedding:
It sounds like the kind of thing that a Buddhist engineer would like.
Sarah Richardson:
Yeah. My husband has a PhD in computer science and he tends to be oppositional about some things. He just wants to have that discussion and so he came in ready to argue with some of them and it's so funny to watch him go, “I, I, okay.”
Chris Wedding:
Actually, it's pretty good. Yeah. I surrender.
48:55
Sarah Richardson:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
Well, Sarah, I feel like we should just cancel the rest of our meetings and just keep chatting. However, there are companies to run and CEOs to help. Hey, listen, we're rooting for your all success at MicroByre. Science is bleeping amazing.
Sarah Richardson:
Thank you.
Chris Wedding:
Glad you all are impressed.
Sarah Richardson:
So is engineering.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, there you go.
Sarah Richardson:
You got to give props to the engineers out here. The highest compliment you can pay an engineer is taking what they did for granted, like we did with domestication. Everyone who domesticated plants and animals, they didn't get to be called a bioengineer, but that's what they were. So yes, science is freaking cool. Engineering, really bringing it to the people.
Chris Wedding:
I love it. Let's end right there. Hey, have an awesome weekend. Talk soon.
Sarah Richardson:
Thank you, you too.
Chris Wedding:
Thanks for listening and if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits and deep work, then join the thousands of others who have subscribed to our Substack newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right, that's all y'all. Take care.
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