 So I'm going to talk about focus research organizations and really focus on founders. So this is a little bit of a stump speech that we've been giving about focus research organizations. But I think that this community and the community of scientists and technologists really can contribute by providing excellent and entrepreneurial founders. So public goods in science and technology. I'm not a scientist. Ooh, I'm hitting my mic. That's not a good thing. But there are these technologies or data sets that can facilitate advancement across a whole bunch of different fields. A couple of examples. This project, The Rejuvenome, we're running right now, is in longevity. It is a multi-omic study across many different interventions in longevity. Everything versus everything is a project we're developing, which is a drug screen across a whole bunch of different targets for human development and humans, which could be really useful for drug development or looking for side effects or potential uses for existing drugs. On the carbon side, how do you do measurement and verification when you do a carbon drawdown in the ocean? The ocean could be a huge carbon sink. We have not the technology right now to figure out how much carbon we're actually removing. Fusion, also really cool. So when you have a DT reaction for fusion, it throws off a neutron at incredibly fast speeds that is basically destroying whatever reactor it's in. So you could, rather than having each individual fusion company develop the material that would house the reactor, you could just do a project focused on what materials should we build reactors out of. All of these would kind of change their whole field. They have a couple of things in common. They probably need small, coordinated teams, either biologists or engineers or technologists of different kinds. They're expensive. It's like $50 million in five years of serious engineering effort. It's going to be almost impossible to capture the value from these projects in a short-term sense. So you'll release that data set and then what? Other people can use pieces of that data set to create valuable products, but the data itself is not valuable. And they're a bad fit for academic labs who generally do these kind of public good research because they're so big and they have a very bad dollar to citation ratio. They're bad for grad students. They're bad for postdocs. So kind of unique to this talk, I think what's really important is the executive leadership for these teams, people who are really inspired about their mission and about what they're building with these public goods. So, focus research organizations. What is a fro? Fro is the best way to say it. That's what the insiders do. It is a concerted finite duration, so like five to seven years' effort to build a specific set of technical milestones. It is research. So we're not building something that we know is going to work, but we're building public goods. There is risk. There is high technical or engineering risk. And it's an organization. It is probably 10 to 20 people working towards those specific milestones. If you look at research today in a lab, it looks like this, where there is one professor who has an area of interest and individual grad students or postdocs chasing down individual ideas. But if you want to build something, you need something closer to a startup. We have a CEO who's really inspired about what they're building and everyone is building in the same direction. VC and industry. I'm a huge fan of capitalism. However, as Dan mentioned, there's a bunch of stuff that can't have returns of the VC company's needs no matter how patient those VCs are. An example of a fro that exists in the real world. You could say that DeepMind's Alpha Fold was this because they had a very small strike team within DeepMind working on that specific task. Okay, so what makes a good FRO? Can't be done in academic labs either because you can't hire the engineers you need, you can't hire the texts that you need. It is bad with a number of papers that will come out. It can't be done as a for-profit because the length of time that you need to turn a profit is too long or it's just a public good. And it's high impact. We're not interested in projects that are incremental, that are 10% better on battery life or 20% more of this. We really wanna change fields. We think that we can find specific technical bottlenecks that can be put into the FRO format and really change the way that the whole field works. We also want those to be translational. So we even like designing the project, we think what is this data set good for? What is this technology good for? How would this go forward and change whole fields? You might ask where there are national labs, they're pretty big. DARPA does pretty big projects. I would actually say, so this is our stump answer of why these don't solve all of the problems. I point back both of these to that executive question. No one at JPL is the executive that one project and has kind of authority to pivot, to make new choices, to throw out all of the science, to bring in new science, to hire a new team. At DARPA, they're coordinating a bunch of different orgs. So there's a project manager, a program manager who is giving out grants or giving out contracts, but they themselves are not controlling the team in the science. So I actually think that this doesn't solve the executive problem. Okay, so what are we doing today? We have three FROs that are out in the world, E11Bio, Cultivarium, and the Rejuvenum, and a couple orgs that are supporting them. My slide's too big for this page. So all of these teams have founders who believe deeply in what we're doing. Adam and I, we're just stumping FROs all day long, trying to build them. Jed founded the Asteria Institute to work on transformative technology and moonshots. E11Bio, Todd is an exited startup founder. Andrew's out of Ed Boyden's lab at MIT. Henry and Neely are out of George Church's lab. Nick is out of Stanford, and Jose is an amazing online blogger. Everyone here is 100% committed to their projects and towards building these public goods. A little more about the projects that are actually running today. This is E11Bio. It is doing large-scale connectomics, or selective whole-circuit connectomics. So can you map an individual neuron throughout the whole brain? Right now, to map a neuron through a brain, you use electron microscopy, and you visually follow the neuron the whole way, which means that sometimes neurons run parallel, and you might jump onto the wrong neuron, you might lose that neuron. It's really very time-consuming and difficult. Instead, what we're doing is we're barcoding the neurons so that you can identify a single cell throughout the whole brain, and then using expansion microscopy, which is one of my favorite technologies. So visual light microscopes can only get so small. So instead of trying to look smaller and smaller, you just blow up the sample and make the samples bigger. Cultivarium is working with non-model organisms. So right now, most synthetic biology is done in yeast or E. coli. There's a bunch of very cool non-model organisms out there, and they're hard to use. So Cultivarium is basically developing a set of platform technologies to take non-model organisms from the wild. They could have a really cool trait, like they could help weather rocks for carbon drawdown. They could be used to grow synthetic meats. But they take like five years right now to domesticate in the lab. Cultivarium is developing a set of platform technologies to quickly bring those technologies, those microbes from the wild into labs or into industry settings. The rejuvenum I mentioned earlier is this giant data set around longevity. So we have right now academic labs look at a specific intervention and a specific kind of biomarker for aging. So how does rapamyazine affect eyes? How does rapamyazine or exercise affect the liver? But that full data set of all of the different interventions and all of the different ways and biomarkers of aging doesn't exist. So the rejuvenum is out of the Astera Institute. It's a $70 million commitment to build this giant data set that then is just gonna be released to the public. And every academic lab and every longevity company can look at this data set and use it for their own research. I spend a lot of time finding and launching FROs. So does my co-founder, founder Adam. Michael's a dear. But not only are we looking for new FROs, we're looking for funders and we're looking for founding teams. And this three-way matching problem is hard. We are basically looking for these very specific bottlenecks or technical problems that could change the world. So we spend a lot of time talking to academics and asking them what are the biggest bottlenecks in your field? What would you do with $50 million? Like how do you change how your whole industry works? And they all say more money from my lab. We're like great. Think about it in like other formats. Like what if you don't have to fund a project in your lab? What if you don't have to make a startup that is profitable? Now what? So we get really, really interesting ideas in that way. We also go the other direction where we care a lot about climate change and CDR. We care a lot about biosecurity, alternative foods. And we spend time talking to those communities trying to figure out what are the biggest bottlenecks from sort of a top down or problem down space. And then finding founders and founding teams who work on those problems. And then we spend a lot of time looking for funders. There are really excellent people out there who really want to make large kind of measurable differences in the world. And we think that this is a really great way to do it because it is a very specific project. And from that project, you can see how things develop. Yeah, so as I mentioned, you have a really great idea in academia. You kind of only have a couple options. You can do it as your postdoc or in your lab, or you can start a startup. We're really hoping to create a third option where you don't have to pretend like this thing is totally gonna turn a profit eventually and you just have to convince your VCs. And you can build team and have resources in order to do a larger project that can be done in academia. And we're really looking to co-design these with academic labs. And with scientists. And I am a very fast talker apparently and I'm done early. But we're actively looking for hires and for founders. So I think that Astera and Convergent Research are hiring incredibly quickly. I think we have like 15 or 20 openings across both orgs. And we're looking for founding and founding teams. Again, we have really great academics who are working on these projects. They're excellent scientific leaders. We are looking to flush out their teams with excellent people on the executive side and the leadership side. Cool, thank you.