 Let's just start with a big idea and the big idea is that biology gives us the potential to create atomically precise Infinitely scalable technologies that could address some of the biggest most planetary scale problems But also opportunities for creating public goods. That's at the limit at the moment. We're really far away from there so what I want to do is just talk to you as a member of a community that's trying to get us to that limit and How we're so excited to be growing this community with your support I'm going to start a high and then we're going to go into the tangibles And so the core thesis here is that we're at the ideas limited regime of forming climate tech Meaning that there's people who want to work on it. There's there's more there's funders that want to fund it There's just not enough good ideas. So our theory of change is to build that critical mass of funders doers and scalers in To accelerate that critic crime positive biotechnology so I Want to give you one of my biggest mental models for the way I think about growth Which is that the greatest feeling in life is having great ideas and the ability to act on it And I think what's so cool about this as well as if you think about it that great ideas and the ability to act on them form a virtuous circle Meaning that sometimes when you have a really good idea that inspires you to build the skills to build it But also once you have the newest skill to build something that exposes you to new great ideas that were previously opaque and that's true for individuals But I think the most productive communities also have this as a necessary condition and this is what I'm going to be talking about Now before we go into too many like broader details I need to introduce myself and I'm kind of a weird mutt. So I'm going to fly through this really quick But I was a PhD dropout at Stanford. I got to work with the amazing fey fey Lee. I Started drifting way too far from people So I went to the other extreme where I worked in the in product design And I built an app with Elmo and I was the great firm idea as an entrepreneur residents my mentor And I there spun out we created a mobile app company called mobile data labs Which created a product called mile IQ and then I realized that all my greatest heroes in life are the people that pick One thing and spend decades on it and by a mixture of luck and timing and whatever else they end up making an impact And so the answer for me was to go back to academia because I wanted that to be neuroscience for me So I got to work with the amazing Ed Boyden worked under George Church and another hero Sebastian song And we built a first of kind technology We were able to visualize rich and from the molecular information inside intact brains But this thing happened to me in 2019 where my friend Sarah sclar sick put together this negative emissions technology workshop And there was a big there was a very big moment because suddenly climate Was reframed in my head for is no more just like looking at photos of dead polar bears It was reframing it as a set of technological challenges and technological challenges is what I do So let's just briefly run through this. What's a negative emission technology? Well, it's something magic that just draws carbon dioxide out of the air Everybody says we're gonna need this But when you think about what this looks like at scale Well, if you were to draw down a billion tons of carbon dioxide if you put it into the density of dry ice It would be roughly as big as a World Trade Center building That cost a trillion dollars if we can scale linearly and probably even more unrealistic it tastes 10% of the world's energy So we have a lot of work to do And so I've got no interest in trying to sound cooler than I am I went super arrogant when I first started going into this So I thought okay I'm just gonna map the space of carbon dioxide capture and that's what I'm gonna do and it'll be done and The more I worked alone the less I did and I became really frustrating I was just writing these reports to myself and there was the one thing that I learned is I just need to Be engaging with people more and more and so as that grew We came across something called the MIT climate grant challenge and since this is a since this is a funding themed Event I think it's really important to tell you guys about this model because it's very impactful for me And also very impactful for the community that end up growing and so it's a very simple idea MIT said let's just give a hundred grand for early-stage teams to write those same white papers I was writing to myself But to then make a two-page letter of intent you can then share with the community and then from there that you Use that money just to make the bigger pitch. What's the larger project that you could do? What this meant is that people became came together to collaborate and so for me as my friend Paul We knew each other from the beginning of our media our PhD days and also people like Professor Lauren Luger who's one of my heroes from neuroscience Also trying to get in the climate tech. So what this meant is that we would go to these different talks These people who got this hundred K and I've been in a lot of entrepreneurship I've been a lot of science environments I've never seen people so collaborative because the scarcity was taken away with everyone had a little bit of this money And what came from this is we made this monster, you know, 30 PI proposal It didn't get funded, but a lot of other good came out of it. And that's really what I want to share with you guys so The first thing that came out of it is I was able to get out of writing reports and just being in my head And I was able to do the most important thing which is actually try stuff, right? So we took rocks we dropped acid on them and we wanted to see can you weather these rocks and like a lot of These things like what's important from there as we began to build intuition and stuff that we were really good at in Our lab like microscopy actually was giving us some sort of useful signal that we could imagine future technologies But the most important thing is that a community grew from this So in the beginning it was just us in the Boyden lab and the church lab And you can just see that there's just a few of us chatting on slack when the climate grand challenge came in We had this hundred K and this reason to be interacting with their labs We had a little bit of growth were now was dozens of people and then something magical happened around December 2021 we're just sort of getting this organic growth and This is where I think a lot of the joy and value that perhaps is unexpected now it becomes like totally clear We had this online community that was very rigorous and warm and people are just throwing around ideas. We're making lectures You know and you get these very very highly technical conversations, but people coming at it from a lot of different angles So an online community was created, you know an offline community was created as well And what came from this and I think what we're most proud about in this community is we have a high-trust rigorous culture And this is what we want to continue growing Now we can take a pause here. We're like, okay. Look we've got something We've got this community of over 200 people that really know what they're doing Everyone's trying to have some sort of climate positive impact. Well, this is what we need to be mindful about the way We grow and a good question asked here was like what are the elements of a most productive community? This is also I want to give you a little bit of my personal background because you're gonna see this So I think it's six elements and let's be let's start with one which we all know really well So in machine learning what feifei did is by creating image net is she created a hyper productive community Where you everyone's got the same platform to just try things everyone's got a laptop and they can download code Once you have something that kind of works in computer science The path to scale is obvious and that's a really big thing that happened in the early 2000s We had these common goals, which everyone agreed on was hard Everyone and there's this idea of enforceable honesty, which is like just as you say something it doesn't matter You have to be able to prove it Playbooks for outside success were created with things like my combinator and then what does it take to try and experiment? Well, you just need enough food to you need enough money to eat ramen And so I we look at this I think is a hyper productive community now I was in Stanford 2009 and computer science. I saw this change. I was in biotech in 2015 I saw the exact same cultural change So when Jennifer Dwadna created CRISPR, we saw the same shift where this biotechnologists in Like PhD students were now using phrases like product market fit, etc But it's the same idea. Everyone had the ability to download like everyone has tech cells Everyone has the ability to get plasmids everyone has the ability to test on the same goal in this case It was cure rare monogenic diseases and this is a hyper growth community because they're end up being outsized Impacts that had the people had the ability to scale now Here's one that probably nobody was expecting which is I think I'm not here to bro out about jujitsu But I've also been in the the community for decade over a decade and what's so cool about this is it has the exact same model Everyone's got mats everyone's got friends and the whole idea of jujitsu is it's based on the idea of the spar Which is a hundred percent effort people trying to like take each other out and that tests techniques And the best techniques have risen to the top and the sport looks totally different than it was a decade ago There's also the idea of outsized impacts where people who make really good techniques are now making millions of dollars So with this idea of what are hyper productive communities What about the biotech community that we're trying to build? Well We don't yet have common platforms. There's not the equivalent of the hex cell or the github Our common scale-up is not quite there either. I mean huge shout out to Stripe For what they've done in building and they've done these advanced market commitments But it's still not this idea where anyone can just pick up and start scaling Common goals. I mean we have like the idea that okay. We want to draw down carbon dioxide. We need a hundred dollars a ton I mean, that's kind of a made-up number. It's a community agreed upon made-up number But we have a lot of work to do on that same thing like how do you know what you're actually drawing down? That doesn't that's in progress So it's not this is not a criticism This is just like a very honest snapshot of like this is where we're at in time And we want to build a hyper productive community, but we've got a lot of work to do and I think a big part of our thesis and why I'm here today is that I a very important starting point on this is to Focus on the funding and if you guys are interested in this of there's a public write-up on it This is why we formed homeworld so homeworld is the nonprofit to start supporting the activities of this community of planetary biotech We've got a fantastic team with a lot of really important perspectives And now we want to start supporting the community tangibly Now I'm going to absolutely rip off one's innovation chasm because this is a big motivation for the initial way We started thinking about it which is that in academia There's an optimal scale and then industry needs a certain point to start running and when we think about the innovation chasm We think about that gap between academia and industry But there's a really like important other part and the focus where we want to stand is that while there's a lot of funding Innovation happening industries going earlier into science as Ella was talking about and academia is figuring out how to scale up with things like focus research organizations, everyone listen to Anastasia There's what we identified is there's nothing before the publishable result that pre-proof of concept you need something to get funding That's crazy So what we want to focus on is building this community of this bottom-up science We want to support people trying the very early ideas that have potential but nobody else's funding and this can take two ideas right this can take scalable mature ideas from other domains and apply them in the context of climate tech or We want to make sure that if you're trying something and it fails that at least of like the community grows somehow and part of my PhD was in these giant labs where you know in a lab of 80 people there's going to be that person who's tried everything already and Really really good ideas just failed because biology fails sometimes and that knowledge gets lost because it doesn't leave the walls of that Lab but this these are problems that people have talked about perennially and I think that if we can fund this thing the right way We can start capturing this as well. So What is what currently serves this will fast grants for huge innovation that happened about two years ago and Fellowships have always been like the canonical way like let's fund the person not necessarily the idea I think those are great. I think we can do even more there so This is where I think we're at currently in climate tech We're at the limit of Technology now like we can't just scale up what we already have we need like brand new ideas And one way to just measure that briefly is that if you look at the climate tech unicorns only recently Do we start getting the academic spinouts everything else is scaling up things like innovations from the like battery Manufacturing from Tesla or of applying a computer science solution You know into something that's relevant to climate But I think now we really need brand new ideas and this is what home world is trying to support the community to build One thing that we've discovered a lot is that good ideas are stuck on the shelf meaning that people have had ideas for a while But there's no way to fund it Networks need to be built and that's what we've been doing for a while And I can unpack a lot of stories where some fields are more adept at than limber funding and others aren't Geology is a little behind the curve whereas like things like computer science is very nimble and Then I think most importantly is it's more than just the tech idea I think you need to do you can de-risk the science, but you can also de-risk the path to impact So this is the three main questions that we ask when we think about how do we support brand new first of kind ideas The first thing is what's the frontier? What are you actually even steering for and then and that can be determined by the community the second question is What's the first experiment? How do you know that's a good idea and what do you learn if you can do that experiment and Then the third thing which I think is underappreciated in academia Is the idea well even if that's true how do you navigate the path to impact and I think that's the role of the scalars The people have seen this before the senior leaders that have the 30 years experience that has some patterns to apply Now this is stuff that what I'm saying here is stuff that funding 1.0 can't Accomplish there's just a misalignment for academic trajectories to think about translational science Especially in the context of climate that is There's this idea that we select against ambition because a lot of these coolest ideas are zero like they're zero or one They either work or they don't and that doesn't really fit when you're trying to apply for these grants To take a year to apply for and then you like that's going to be multiple years So something has to kind of work and I guess last yeah, so this is what we're trying to do We're trying to create a fast grant format for early-stage Climate tech and I think it's really worth saying that this has to be beyond Raman neutral Like a lot of these experiments when you do biotech or something adjacent to that is you're talking at least like 50k Just in the reagents much less than the person actually eating Now we want to be as efficient as possible So we talked about this idea of doing selectively tronch research where if you come up with something That's just too wild a great. Can we just de-risk it a little bit before you before we fund you and Then more than just the money. Let's make sure that you're getting paired with the mentors that can help you navigate that path to impact now We are starting with biotech, but there's many other fields that would follow the same the same pattern There's more things to like interesting things to talk about than like the the format But I think a lot of this is just going to be intuitive where one do a very minimal format And we're gonna frame it like the what's the big if true right the big is Determined by like working with the mentors to say this is your path to impact and the if true comes from the scientists We're trying to validate that with their first experiment We're creating a idea of peer reviews So the people who are applying are also going to be reviewing other people And I think one thing that I want a person want to see change in in science is to do non-anonymized De-anonymized peer review one thing that we've learned in the community is people are they can be viciously rigorous But that's productive because when you know who that person is is criticizing your idea They're gonna be generative too and from the other side from working with anonymous peer review in science It can just be a nightmare So these are things that we want to actively innovate with and we're trying things today now The big question is like okay like climate is this huge problem Like what like what specific parts do you want to focus on and so the spirit of what we want to do is want to be Supporting bottom-up science meaning that there's going to be people that are going to roadmap things to other very top What are the most important problems and all the individual parts or the other way to do it is like? Let's just come up with a nucleation points and the fund the mechanisms for people to work on it And then let the science be done from the bottom up And so in this service we create we're working on something called the benchmarks So that's the thing that I gave myself an impact certificate for which kind of feel Maybe somebody else should have given it to me But this is a product like a project that I thought was gonna be really easy And it's turned out to be really hard, which is like let's just like image net for computer science. We had a very clear score We need these same ideas if we want to get climate tech or biotech To have agreed upon goals that people can be innovating around and so we made a list We have 11 so far, and I'm gonna be really honest like this is a work in progress There's some things that are good about it, and there's some things that are bad What's good is that we can start putting numbers on the like numbers on the board and this like some of these things Can be motivating people to do experiments in a lab, but other things like $100 co2 capture for example That's really hard to do in a lab. You can't like all you can do is do a small experiment to make an argument About why that might scale So this is something that we want to be engaging with the community on and so and I think this is I Think this is in the the early stage of an exponential impact where if you get good benchmarks Good benchmarks lead to good sub problems good sub problems lead to good infrastructure for people to be doing experiments rapidly And so let me give you an example of what this can create so We we publish these benchmarks in the community and then two people came back like two groups came back with an Interesting idea, and this is like this follows the format of what we want to see It's like okay cool if you want to start really drawing down carbon dioxide cows are produced three gigatons a year one of the biggest leverage levers We have biotech has gotten really good approaching design so can we take gold standard medical grade biotech and can we then apply that into the cow rumen and So the people working on this are also the exact kind of people you want to engage in terms of you've got an RPE expert and you've got a successful biotech entrepreneur that's seen things scale before and want to steer them towards this And so all that what they need is the funding just to try that first experiment and One thing that we have also in our community is this path to impact support So when we ask like what do you need they're like? Oh, we need animal health experts, and we need synthetic biology leadership to scale up these ideas It's another idea The idea of Synthetically fixed nitrogen is perhaps a little bit opaque to people on the outside But it's crazy that we're having the we have such a huge carbon footprint for producing nitrogen when maybe we can just make the Plants do it themselves. This is another thing where you can take world-class stuff from medical biotech And you can apply it in the climate tech space And so this is an idea that was kind of shaken out of the tree by these benchmarks And then the guy that has proposed this project is a world-class crisper screening guy And so we want to see if we can improve the way plants fix nitrogen using cutting-edge biomedical techniques And same thing like what do you need to scale this like if you know big if true Let's do the if true on the science side, but then who can validate the big and help navigate that path to impact So these are two kind of projects. There's a whole bunch more of these things coming. We need to be funding them So we're aiming to support a portfolio of ideas like this on the order of 10 to 25 of them And the reason we want a portfolio is that we want to start seeing what the scale after they get to the proof of concept Is and I think we just need the like we need we need the portfolio to see like where different projects can go The other thing is that we need to get gold standard Tool builders in the software world to help us support this I think a lot of people that are here are focusing on building new stacks for science and This I think what we're doing with planetary biotech I think is a perfect edge case for these things that you need more funding than just ramen so let's figure this out and Like you know the community that we've built of 200 people is going to continue growing and we also want to be engaging with People who really know how to grow a cultures mindfully because what we love so much about our warm rigorous open culture We need to preserve So this works. We're gonna go well. We can do more than biotech We can explore earlier and faster financial support. We want to you know, I think we were talking about this and 50 years was talking about this as well Which is that we want to be able to train self-advocacy for the practitioners And so we've seen I've seen computer scientists learn how to say the phrase product market fit I've seen biotechnologists now how to use the word product market fit Potter market fit when you're talking in planetary, you know climate tech and biotech is way much more difficult So we want to be supporting that next wave of entrepreneurs And then we want to imagine like what the future of of science Institutes looks like and it's funny that this start this whole thing is starting online and remote and distributed So there's a lot more to say but I'm gonna pause it here And I just want to say thank you guys so much for having us over here I can't wait to talk to you guys more in this community and see how we can collaborate on this So thank you guys and talk to you soon