Twist Bioscience Corporation

Friedberg reversal ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E126 · 2023-04-28 ▶ 1:03:37

Hundreds of millions of dollars, and in several cases, billions of dollars have gone into these systems, and it's very likely that these companies may need several more years and several billion dollars. We are going to get there. The technology is progressing. The rate of progress is a little slower, and it's a little more challenged, I think, than the first round of investors had hoped.

Friedberg reversal ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E89 · 2022-07-29 ▶ 1:12:49

But the industrialization, the amount of capital these guys raised and what they promised they would deliver on when turned out not to quite beat the economics, not to quite get there. And the market decisions they made about what products to go after, how quickly to scale up, building their own facilities. There was just a lot of strategic errors. And I think the storytelling got ahead of where the business was.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 📈 Zymergen's implosion impairs the whole synthetic-biology cohort E89 · 2022-07-29 ▶ 1:10:18

Zymergen being acquired for $300 million comes off of them having raised a total of $1.5 billion of capital from many investors, including SoftBank and then their IPO since they were founded in 2013

Chamath oppose ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E65 · 2022-01-29 ▶ 58:02

Whenever I see these grandiose prognostications of future progress and then see these companies raise exorbitant amounts of money, I have never found a single example where it's ever worked ever. In fact, every time I see a company raise an exorbitant amount of money in a Series A, I write them off in my head. ... And in fact, I've never seen a three billion dollar venture fund do much more than return 2X of money.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E65 · 2022-01-29 ▶ 57:29

And I think it speaks to what I highlighted as what will be the new frontier in biotech and will completely rewrite the course of humanity is if we can take drugs and for a short period of time, completely reverse the age of ourselves. ... And this technology and this is going to be the year I think this will be the front cover of a lot of magazines this year. As people realize that this is real and that it's getting commercialized.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E60 · 2021-12-23 ▶ 35:33

And I think that's really a moment that will inspire a whole new realm of industrial synthetic biology work, a lot of which I hope to kind of build and participate in pretty heavily in the work that we do day to day.

Friedberg support ×1 ▲ on 🤖 Biomanufacturing capacity is the bottleneck the US should own E56 · 2021-11-20 ▶ 1:05:32

What we need is the stuff that the free market cannot afford to fund and stand up, like next-gen nuclear power stations, like biomanufacturing, like large-scale on-demand 3D printing systems. These are the sorts of infrastructure programs that the United States and our workforce could benefit from government subsidies to help the private markets get stood up.

Friedberg support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Biomanufacturing capacity is the bottleneck the US should own E54 · 2021-11-06 ▶ 1:18:35

27 million tanks made out of plastic. You could probably get that stuff produced, you know, a couple billion dollars. Find a piece of land that's 25 by 25 miles, that's near some water and put a nuclear power plant there. And you could suck up all the CO2 in the atmosphere. ... If we want to invest in infrastructure, this is the sort of thing that both solves climate change, creates jobs, and has extraordinary economic return potential built into it.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 📈 Zymergen's implosion impairs the whole synthetic-biology cohort E43 · 2021-08-06 ▶ 32:12

So it's a bit disappointing to see, but it's really going to impact the industry broadly because now people are going to say a lot of synthetic biology companies are smoking mirrors and they're really not there yet. So a lot of folks in the industry are really concerned right now.

Chamath support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E32 · 2021-05-13 ▶ 1:09:53

This is why Ximergen and Ginkgo are two really important data points. ... And in that, you're going to have an entire generation of companies get built. It's super exciting. I spend time in and around these businesses without getting too specific.

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Synthetic biology's Netscape moment E32 · 2021-05-13 ▶ 1:05:42

And I think these two IPOs happening at the valuations that they're happening at and the capital that's going in, I think these are kind of like the Netscape moments for synthetic biology and we're going to see a tremendous amount happen over the next couple of years.

Friedberg support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 Biomanufacturing capacity is the bottleneck the US should own E31 · 2021-05-01 ▶ 57:34

I still think biomanufacturing represents this, this complete great domain where the United States could build and lead ... There's a hundred synthetic biology companies that are looking to produce fermentation based products from materials for clothing, to food, to animal protein, to new drugs, and they can't get the capacity to make this stuff. ... This is where the United States can lead because we can make every material, every drug, and every consumable that the entire world would use using biomanufacturing.