Startup Series: MicroByre
Today's guest is Sarah Richardson, CEO and co-founder of MicroByre, which is domesticating novel bacteria and using biology to produce chemicals that can supplant petrochemical production methods.
Only a small portion of a barrel of oil is responsible for its petrochemical outputs. Most of a barrel is what you'd expect: fuel that's converted to gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, etc. But that small portion of petrochemical feedstocks is really valuable; by some estimates, it makes up to a quarter or more of the value of a barrel of oil. If we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels to slow down climate change, one of the ways to do that is to lessen the value of a barrel of oil.
MicroByre does this by looking to the natural world. There are microbes and bacteria all around us, eating things, producing things, and living in all sorts of environments, from the highest mountains to the deepest sea vents. There may be a trillion or more bacterial species out there, with 99.99% of them undiscovered by humans. And yet when it comes to domesticating microbes, the technology world has turned almost exclusively to yeast and E. coli.
We typically think of microbes as something to which you feed sugar and it outputs alcohol. That's fermentation and it's how we make sourdough bread, beer, kombucha, kimchee, etc. But on this show, we've covered other input/output combinations such as Zero Acre Farms which uses bacteria to produce cooking oils. So what combinations of bacteria, feed, and environment can produce valuable chemicals? And can these bacteria be genetically modified to do this even more efficiently?
These are the things that MicroByre is focused on. When we first started asking people about Sarah, more than one person told us that she was among the most intelligent people they'd ever met. Someone even said that they thought she'd win a Nobel Prize someday. After listening to her climate journey with bacteria, you’ll quickly realize why she’s highly regarded. We're thrilled to be investors in MicroByre at MCJ and hope you enjoy this conversation.
Get connected:
Cody Simms
Sarah Richardson / MicroByre
MCJ Podcast / Collective
*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on November 4, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[3:10] Sarah's background and early lab experience
[7:15] Her cross-disciplinary work at Johns Hopkins and the Department of Energy
[16:55] Differences between biology and chemistry in trying to manipulate and grow organisms
[21:33] An overview of biotechnology vs. industrial biotechnology
[22:37] Petroleum's role in chemical production
[24:40] Sarah's motivation for working on climate
[27:40] An overview of MicroByre
[31:49] The role of genetic modification in MicroByre's solution
[37:12] MicroByre's commercial business model
[40:07] The company's flexible approach to working with clients and managing uncertainty
[43:56] Some of the chemical compounds MicroByre is solving for
[47:22] The company's four client categories
[55:22] The types of talent working at MicroByre
[1:00:05] Funding to date and plans moving forward
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Jason Jacobs (00:00:01):
Hello everyone, this is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:00:04):
And I'm Cody Simms,
Jason Jacobs (00:00:05):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:00:15):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:00:26):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Cody Simms (00:00:40):
Today's guest is Sarah Richardson, CEO and co-founder of MicroByre, which is domesticating novel bacteria and using biology to produce chemicals that can supplant petrochemical production methods. Only a small portion of a barrel of oil is responsible for its petrochemical outputs. Most of the barrel is what you'd expect, fuel that's converted to gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, et cetera. That small portion that's valuable for petrochemical feed stocks is really valuable. By some estimates, it makes up to a quarter or more of the value of a barrel of oil. So if we want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels to slow down climate change, one of the ways to do that is to lessen the value of a barrel of oil. MicroByre does this by looking to the natural world.
(00:01:22):
There are microbes and bacteria all around us, eating things, producing things, living in all sorts of environments from the highest of mountains to the deepest of sea vents. There may be a trillion or more bacterial species out there with 99.99% of them undiscovered by humans and yet, when it comes to domesticating microbes, the technology world has turned almost exclusively to yeast and E. coli. We typically think of microbes as something to which you feed sugar and it outputs alcohol. That's fermentation, and it's how we make sourdough bread, beer, kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut, et cetera. Yet, on this show, we've covered other input/output combinations such as Zero Acre Farms, which uses bacteria to produce cooking oils. So what combinations of bacteria, feed and environment can produce valuable chemicals?
(00:02:09):
Once this is known, can these bacteria be genetically modified to do this even more efficiently? These are the things that MicroByre is focused on. When I first started asking people about Sarah, I had more than one person tell me that she was among the smartest people they'd ever met. I even had someone tell me that they thought she'd win a Nobel Prize someday. We're thrilled to be investors in MicroByre at MCJ, and I hope you'll enjoy the conversation Sarah and I have. I learned an absolute ton and hope you do too. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Richardson (00:02:38):
Thank you. It's nice to be here.
Cody Simms (00:02:40):
So you have been living and breathing this space for quite some time with a really deep academic focus, and now you're building what we all hope to be a monster business in this space. I would love for you to walk us through your journey from, if I remember correctly, dropping out of medical school, pseudo dropping out of a PhD program and-
Sarah Richardson (00:03:05):
No.
Cody Simms (00:03:06):
No, am I getting all that wrong? Okay, so there we go. I'm going to hand the story to you now, please.
Sarah Richardson (00:03:10):
It is a weird story and I have attempted to quit things. So I started working in molecular biology in high school. I was lucky enough to hear about an opportunity where the National Institutes of Health would add a Rider grant onto an existing grant held by a professor, where if they already had an NIH grant, they would get extra money to bring on an underrepresented minority student. So I wrote to all these professors in the area. I grew up in Baltimore and only one of them answered. This is a pattern for high school students trying to get into a research lab. I had one that I took, he told me he wrote to 100 professors. I was not a professor, but he wrote to the lab at Victoria I was in. So this professor wrote back and said, "Well, the study you want to join involves killing mice." I was like, "A dove. I do that all the time."
Cody Simms (00:04:02):
By the way, my partner, Jason and I, have a ... he has a real issue with my real dislike for gophers. So I love all animals except the gophers in my backyard.
Sarah Richardson (00:04:13):
Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any medical studies that require the use of gophers, so I can't even give you that comfort for their torture. No, he did let me into the mouse lab and he did let me ... I learned PCR when I was still a senior in high school, it was a really special experience. Now, I couldn't afford to go to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for my undergraduate work. I went to University of Maryland, go state schools, fear the turtle.
Cody Simms (00:04:40):
I'm a Kansas Jayhawk. I'm right there with you.
Sarah Richardson (00:04:43):
There's nothing like a state school education at all, big props. When it was time for me to apply to graduate schools, a professor, his name is Jeff Boeke, he's now at New York University. He told me, "Don't come to Hopkins. You should go someplace to get more diversity in your experience. However, if you come, we're working on a project where we completely resynthesize a yeast genome from scratch and we could really use your help." So I did apply. I did get into the Johns Hopkins, the school of Medicine for graduate school. The department I joined was human genetics and molecular biology, which is where the medical school part comes in. As part of that curriculum, I was required to take two years of medical school. I didn't drop out. That was all I had to do.
Cody Simms (00:05:25):
Got it, got it, got it.
Sarah Richardson (00:05:27):
It was simultaneously with the medical school, so it's a hassle, but it was interesting because now I know everything go wrong with the human body and not how to fix it.
Cody Simms (00:05:37):
That's sadly, the state of our health system in general is sick care, not healthcare, so it sounds like a pattern.
Sarah Richardson (00:05:43):
Yeah. It was wild to be in there with the medical students. They're extremely dedicated. They worked extremely hard then they partied extremely hard, way harder than the PhD students felt to party. As a PhD student, I had a stipend, so I was actually more comfortable, I think, than the medical students, but right there in classes with them, they would ask things like, "If you could get an MD, why are you getting a PhD?" I'm like, "I'm being paid. It's fine. Don't worry about me." I used to wear a shirt that said, "Not a doctor" on it and on the back it had a cross through a surgeon and this was trolling them a bit. I have to, in my later mature years, admit that I was being a wicked troll. So that was actually my email address, was not a doctor at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes. It was pretty funny.
Cody Simms (00:06:34):
All right. Well, I'm glad we've started here.
Sarah Richardson (00:06:37):
They were at pains to remind me sometimes, they're like, "Well, you can't call yourself a doctor," which is fine because I don't need to stand on that. Although I will point out that originally medical doctors were not called doctors. It was professors and PhDs were called doctors and the medical doctors needed it more. So we let them have it. It's funny.
Cody Simms (00:06:57):
For all the medical doctors listening, we love you and your services are incredibly critical to the survival of humans, so thank you for all that you do.
Sarah Richardson (00:07:06):
You need to remember that you are a body mechanic center, it comes right down to it, so have a little humility.
Cody Simms (00:07:12):
Okay, thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Richardson (00:07:15):
What happened next was I was offered a fellowship from the Department of Energy. So a weird mix, I was the first one ever to get to offered it at a school of medicine. It was called the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and I'm honored to still be involved with that community, but what they strive to do is to train cross-disciplinary experts. So as someone who was coming from a biology background, I was required to also take computer science and applied mathematics classes, but in those graduate departments in those colleges. So I was not allowed to claim bioinformatics as computer science, and the goal was to train me to understand the languages of other disciplines. If you had come in as a computer scientist, you'd have to take some other discipline and applied math, et cetera, et cetera.
(00:08:02):
Because I was coming in as a biology student and biologist are traditionally allowed to ... we have to take some of everything, chemistry, physics, math, but we're allowed to take slightly less rigorous courses in those because we're biologist, and you'll love her ... whatever. They required that I take two years of classes. So I think I took more classes at Johns Hopkins than any graduate student in their history. Probably, I definitely think in my program I had took the most. So I had to take machine learning, applied mathematics, things like statistics, linear algebra, differential equations, databases, algorithms, data structures, all stuff that actually formalized my ability to program made me a much better programmer, but I am not a good programmer. You did not want me in your code.
Cody Simms (00:08:48):
It's like they knew you were going to build a company at the intersection of biology and machine learning someday.
Sarah Richardson (00:08:55):
Well, I think what they were hoping was that I would join the workforce and be able to bridge some of the gaps. We have silos sometimes in technology where someone might start a company that needs to draw on multiple disciplines, but because who they know and who they're comfortable with, they may recruit people who are closer to them, that they understand their skills and try to hire the expertise in later. So the Department of Energy made me take parallel computing classes so that I could elevate to say super computing, so I can understand what it takes to do data processing at scale because that's part of their mission, is to enable super computing in the United States.
(00:09:35):
So yeah, I learned a lot and I still get involved in that community sometimes where I get called in maybe to consult on how you integrate cancer research with machine learning, because finding people who can, at least be conversant. My goal or what I was trained to do is not to be an expert in any of these fields, aside from potentially my home love, molecular biology and even then, people who have focused more on it are going to be better than me at almost everything, but I speak the languages, I'm conversant in the languages of many fields and that allows me to build connections.
Cody Simms (00:10:11):
You are undoubtedly much more of an expert and probably much more of a generalist as well than I am in either of those areas. So it's definitely a lot more training than most of us get.
Sarah Richardson (00:10:22):
I have to know my constraints, I have to know my constraints and what I use these skills for is to ensure that I can hire a good talent, that I can tell what they know, they know more than me and they're good communicators and then, make sure that I help them build the bridge to the other disciplines they need to interface with and ensure that those bridges are equitable, respectful and as peers. So at our company, although we are a microbiology company, the microbiologists, molecular biologists do not run the show. They respect the skills and the contributions of the chemists and we call them codees. Anyone who touches a computer is a codee and anyone who touches bacteria and chemicals are a benchee. Our business development team, they're the busies and I guess that makes me the bossy, but all of us are critical components of the ecosystem and the success of MicroByre. So that's what I was trained to do.
Cody Simms (00:11:16):
So you had this incredible amount of cross-disciplinary introduction at DOE and then, you went and decided to go back to school.
Sarah Richardson (00:11:25):
At Johns Hopkins. This is all at Johns Hopkins. All of that training, and I was working on the graduate project at the same time, which was working on all the computational infrastructure needed to reliably synthesize a yeast genome and that's really where I sort of started to doubt, that I started to think I'm building a tool to help engineer a yeast genome and I don't understand why we're working in that organism.
Cody Simms (00:11:52):
And your PhD is actually in synthetic biology, is that right, your dissertation?
Sarah Richardson (00:11:56):
Human genetics and molecular biology, is what it says on my PhD? The work was yes, it would be what you would call synthetic biology, yeah and I was finding myself ... I didn't dig it, I didn't like it, I didn't dig it.
Cody Simms (00:12:11):
Why not? Unpack that.
Sarah Richardson (00:12:13):
It was yeast. The organism that I was making all the tools for, everyone around me was working in and also, the broader community, whenever I traveled and talked to other people who were enthusiastic about this field, they were using one of two or three organisms, I think we could stress to say five.
Cody Simms (00:12:30):
I've made sourdough bread once and it did involve yeast from the air, which was kind of cool. What's the negative side of yeast?
Sarah Richardson (00:12:38):
Well, it's just one organism in a very wide world of organisms. So, it has its niche. The one we use or the one that is used in synthetic biology is derived from the same strains that make bread not your wild caught yeast and bacteria mix, but the ones that we use to make alcohol and the ones that we use to make bread. So, it is really, really good. It's been selected for converting sugar into ethanol. That's what it's great at, and we learned to genetically engineer it, it was one of the very first organisms we sequenced.
Cody Simms (00:13:14):
Basically yeast, you feed sugar, you get alcohol out. That's the basic equation, right?
Sarah Richardson (00:13:19):
Yeah, or carbon dioxide if you're trying to make bread but yes, this is the basic equation. It is one organism of gazillions on the planet, but one we kind of domesticated. We said, we will feed you sugar, you'll make ethanol, we will make sure that you pass your genes on. We will protect you. That also means you can ditch a lot of traits that you don't need in containment that you might need in the wild. In the wild, you have to protect yourself from predators, from disease. You have to be very robust in case nutrients go away, but when you come into a fermentor, maybe you don't have to do any of that. So the yeast that we're working with, that we got genetic access to, it's kind of scoped very tightly to what it was specialized to do.
(00:14:04):
The challenge for synthetic biologists is to then ask it to do many, many things that evolutionarily, it has no context for. That's what the work I was doing in my PhD was facilitating. Now, I like building tools, I like building bridges, but I was becoming disillusioned that the tools I was building were not really going to move the needle in terms of the number of organisms that we could access or that they were necessary for that. So that is where the pseudo quitting of the PhD came in.
Cody Simms (00:14:34):
From a software perspective, it's like, "Hey, we've ended up creating this JavaScript framework that's really great at doing X, Y or Z, and now, we're asking it to go be a database layer and that's just not what it's meant to do"
Sarah Richardson (00:14:46):
Yeah, and you will find libraries that will do that and you will look through the GitHubs and the PyPI and go, "Oh no, what are you doing with that?" So it might be possible in some cases, but the costs incurred, the efficiency, yeah, that's not a terrible analogy. Although I will caution you many, many analogies for computer science and electrical engineering have been unproductively applied to synthetic biology, which is part of what I'm trying to shift. So that's part of what I was becoming. You can go back and find some of the talks I gave in grad school and I will be using the same analogies, but I was becoming really, really disillusioned with them, which is where you got the impression that I quit my PhD. I did walk into my advisor's office and say, "I'm out. I can't do this anymore."
Cody Simms (00:15:35):
That sounds like you quit your PhD, but then they gave it to you, right?
Sarah Richardson (00:15:39):
He gave me the PhD, yes. So that's one bit of advice to graduate students. I think my husband is the one who articulated it to me. He says, "Your PhD is over. When you look back at all that you had done and said I should have done it differently, don't do it different. Just quit, at that point. Demand the PhD and move on. Move on." Similarly, for postdocs, for a graduate student getting a PhD, it's like, "Oh, I need to wait until they award me the PhD." For a postdoc, you quit when you get a job, start looking for a job. You don't owe them four years, six years, you quit when you can move on, and that's your decision, not your advisor's decision. So a little bit of graduate school advice. Rule one, don't do it. Don't go to grad school but two, if you do, quit on time.
Cody Simms (00:16:21):
They prepared you well obviously, for what you're doing, but you obviously, decided when it was time for you to hang it up, and I think what I'd love to learn about next is I've heard you talk a lot about the real difference between biology and chemistry when it comes to approaching biological organisms and how there are fallacies to bringing a chemistry based approach to trying to understand and manipulate and grow organisms to do things we need them to do. So maybe unpack that a little bit for me, in case I'm not fully articulating that correctly.
Sarah Richardson (00:16:55):
I really started to realize that at the next step, when I did go to the Department of Energy to do about four years of postdoctoral studies and realized that the lab I had just come from was led by someone whose classical training was in biochemistry and they embraced biology very well. Then, I went to two laboratories that were headed by ... one was someone who had a biology degree, but the other was someone who had a chemical degree, and I realized that the vast majority, I'm talking above 90% of people in the entire biosciences division had PhDs in chemistry. So that's caused me to start, I start to look at how I was seeing things versus how they were seeing things.
(00:17:34):
In the field of synthetic biology, some of the biggest proponents and the loudest people pushing analogies, computer scientists, physicists and chemists who are coming to the field with a lot of enthusiasm and taking some of the traditions of biology and then, sort of not approaching them with the biological philosophy, so yes.
Cody Simms (00:17:56):
What you do in chemistry and in physics is you edit things, right? You're editing an atom in physics for example. Is that a poor statement?
Sarah Richardson (00:18:03):
No, what you have is a lot more granular control over your experimental conditions. So every single time you introduce this solvent to that reagent, you're going to get a chemical reaction, very dependently and here's the reason why in biology, the number one rule, the immutable sort of thermodynamic equivalent of, you can't make matter without ... all of the things the physicists say about object and motions tends to stay in motion. The number one rule of biology is you make imperfect copies of yourself. The system is in motion at all times and mutation is part of the game. It's not a bug, it is a feature. There's no way to avoid it, and it means massive complications to any analogy or to a practitioner who is used to things being absolutely perfectly repeatable within very small tolerances.
(00:18:56):
Like not every time you do a chemical reaction, you get 100% yield, but you know you're going to be getting like plus or minus 0.05% yield, right?
Cody Simms (00:19:04):
Is it harder to apply the scientific method to biology, like the notion of control, test, experiments, learn?
Sarah Richardson (00:19:10):
No, I don't believe so. I believe that it's hard to compare it to physics and chemistry and computer science if you are coming from that framework. So something I ran into as someone who is getting a lot of multidisciplinary training, I'd go to multidisciplinary conferences, people would ask me, what are you doing? I'd say biology, and they'd say, "Oh that's cute or biology is just a lot of memorization." I think there was something about how biology is taught to everyone, that can make people who are more inclined towards chemistry and math, unhappy. The same way that the way I was taught math made me unhappy. So it's not like I liked the beginning levels of biology any better, but yes, when they asked me to memorize stuff, I didn't like it. I wasn't like, "Oh, all the monkey genuses." That was not what was happening.
(00:20:01):
I viewed it as the price I had to pay to get into the cellular biology and the molecular biology, but if you don't accept that organisms making imperfect copies of themselves, you will try to control them instead of riding along with them and applying selection. So every time you apply selection to a set of cells, you are going to see a response. If you don't know what you're selecting for, that doesn't mean you're not selecting. So the cells are making imperfect copies and responding to their environment. So it is reproducible in a sense that if you take the same stock of original cells and apply selection, you are going to get something out. The way they get there might be different. If you compare the genetics of the two stocks of cells, you're not going to see exactly the same genetic which kind of might confound some chemists who are taking the DNA as code.
(00:20:55):
There are so many ways for biology to get to the same thing, that doesn't make it not reproducible or not recyclable and iterable, it just means that the ranges of biology need to be allowed for. So that is something that they'll stumble on.
Cody Simms (00:21:09):
And there's a big field today, multi-billion dollar field of biotech. We've seen big advances just in most recently in all of our lives with COVID vaccine, in terms of advances in biotech. How do you see the current industry leaders of biotech and how they're approaching things versus where you see the opportunity ... and we haven't even talked about what MicroByre does yet, but where you see the opportunity with MicroByre.
Sarah Richardson (00:21:33):
Well, I also want to differentiate biotechnology, it's a really broad umbrella. So there's lots of different technologies in there. When you hear biotechnology, you might also think of medical devices, things like pacemakers and insulin pumps, that's biotechnology, that's not what we're talking about and then, there's the spectrum of things you just referenced like pharmaceuticals and vaccines. That's also not what I talk about, mostly, there's a different set of business rules, different business models, different margins, different amounts of money running around in biomedical tech. So my specialty and the things I will complain about or brag about are largely for what I would call industrial biotechnology and that is the leveraging of biology to get at things like chemicals that are not for human ingestion.
(00:22:23):
It is to get at chemicals, to do agriculture, to do mining, to do the kinds of things that are not going to cure somebody but might improve carbon, and the climate challenge to improve carbon sequestration.
Cody Simms (00:22:37):
And very nature of chemical being the desired output would lead me to believe most approaches to these problems today are chemical approaches, not biological approaches. Is that correct?
Sarah Richardson (00:22:47):
This is the one where we felt that we could have the biggest impact because yes, it used to be that almost all of our chemicals came from biomass. So we would make plastics from biomass. We used to make nylon from oats, we used oats to make Furfural and we turned the Furfural into adipic acid, nylon. When we decided that petroleum was a matter of national security, was when we started getting shellac in the Spanish-American war by oil fired ships as opposed to coal fired ships. That's when we first set aside massive petroleum reserves for the Navy. When you start building an infrastructure that lets you tap petroleum, it becomes very inexpensive to tap it for chemicals. So three to 10%, usually around 3%, I think is the number you see of your average barrel of oil, goes to become chemicals. That's 33% of the profit of the barrel.
(00:23:38):
It is a really impactful thing that now, some of our medicines even, all these chemicals, everything that goes into your iPhone that's not metal, all of these plastics and monomers and polymers are coming from petroleum. So, yes, this is the big impact I think biotechnology can have, and when I say biotechnology, I am scoping it to replacing petroleum here, but there's other things, I mentioned mining, there's things like agriculture and helping plants protect themselves from pests, helping them fix nitrogen is a very bacterial thing to do. So these are all things that we can do to help fight the climate emergency with biotechnology that people tend to go for the biomedical, which is great and fine, but I am not qualified to speak on it.
Cody Simms (00:24:24):
So this is awesome because we're 20 minutes in and we've just started talking about climate, which is obviously the focus of our whole world here at MCJ.
Sarah Richardson (00:24:31):
One of us had to bring it up. Yeah.
Cody Simms (00:24:33):
How did you take all this background and then say, "Oh, I want to focus on climate." Where did that come from, for you?
Sarah Richardson (00:24:40):
A lot of my cohort went into ... remember, I was in a human genetics program at a school of medicine. A lot of my cohort studied cancer or human genetic diseases. When I looked at the amount of work in front of them, I was stopped. To study a human disease might be to wait for 30 years to see enough patients come through where you can compare their genomes and locate the lesions. To study cancer is to compete in a very, very crowded and overfunded field where there's a lot of emotional work to do in the fear and the impact cancer has on people. I also have a pretty mean joke about how the NIH will never run out of money because cancer is one of the only dependable scourge of senators. So studying cancer has a lot of money behind it.
(00:25:31):
What I found was there was a lot of noise and I was not sure where I could put my feet on a foundation that I could trust to have an impact. So DOE funding also helped because NIH funds biomedical stuff and some basic research that could go either way, but their mission is biomedical. The Department of Energy's investment in biology is by definition, industrial, for manufacturing and for agriculture. So, there's another space to use my skills that I had not been aware of, were it not for that fellowship.
Cody Simms (00:26:05):
So fascinating. I mean, similar background and not at all to you, but similar experience and that I ... when I was first starting to, I've been working with startups for a long time and started to realized I really enjoyed working with startups that were focused on some kind of larger scale impact to the world and actually, started with health myself as well, and quickly realized for me in the world I do, the things the startups needed help with was introduction to health systems, and that was not the background I had at all, whereas a lot of climate startups, it was more that kind of generalist, interdisciplinary sort of ability to work across lots of disciplines that was helpful and thus caused me to lean in as well.
(00:26:44):
So it's interesting to hear you, you came at that from a different direction, but it seems like kind of reached a similar kind of conclusion on climate being A, more immediately urgent and B, frankly a broader problem to try to solve.
Sarah Richardson (00:26:58):
I think that we can impact many, many, many, many lives simultaneously with some of the solutions. Everyone working in the climate space, not just biologists can have, but I don't want to disrespect the body mechanics and the people working in biomedical technology. They're also working with complex systems. I think that they're working with a tide that is going for them, and when you are fighting climate change, you are fighting a status quo that is a bit resistant to change, unless you can really show them how they can profit from it, and that is not the case in biomedicine. People believe they will always find a market for a cure.
Cody Simms (00:27:40):
So with all that background and history and kind of the rationale for focusing on displacing petrochemicals, which is kind of what I heard you say is your big focus right now, how do you define MicroByre? What is your quick sort of description of encapsulating all the stuff that you just kind of went through into, "Hey, here's what our business is doing."
Sarah Richardson (00:28:00):
Cost competitive, commodity, chemicals from crap,
Cody Simms (00:28:05):
Love it, lots of Cs.
Sarah Richardson (00:28:06):
We domesticate bacteria. So this kind of goes back to the difference of opinion from some of the synthetic biologists to where MicroByre is. Remember, I talked about yeast, so one of the analogies is that yeast is a chassis and DNA is a programming language and therefore you can design DNA, which is a chemical and the computer scientists like it because it's a code and you can put it into the yeast and the yeast will run this program and produce a chemical for you, and MicroByre says, "Where did you steal that DNA?" Yeast does not want to do that and also, yeast runs on sugar, which is a cost that can preclude you from economically competing with the status quo of how much chemicals cost. So the crap part comes in when we say, well, what eats stuff that's not sugar? Bacteria and other fungi, if it rots some microbe is eating it.
(00:29:04):
We tend to elide over the impact of microbes on our greenhouse gas emissions. We say, "I farted." We don't say, "I fed my bacteria fiber and it made gas." So there's a lot of ways to all elide over what microbes are doing for climate change or for emissions or what we could do to leverage them to not emit. So if it rots, it is potentially a feed stock and then you ask, well, what bacteria are on it or what bacteria can leverage it and why aren't we using them industrially? And that's Microbyre's key spot in the ecosystem is don't use yeast. You picked a good target, a good chemical target, you had good motivation for going after that. Let us help you get it into an organism or let's get you into an organism that already fits into the niche that you need it to specialize in.
(00:30:00):
Maybe it already makes that chemical, maybe it makes a precursor that was easily separable and you can drop it into your existing chemical pipelines, but let's not force a yeast. It's like making a goat try to catch mice because you're friendly with a goat and you're scared of cats. They're like, no cat has ever been trained or something. One, it's not true but two, forcing the goat genetically to get smaller, to grow claws instead of hooves, to rewire its metabolism so it eats meat instead of grass, this is a massive challenge you're setting yourself up for and I think it's the challenge that you can see in synthetic biology, has not really been terribly successful. So we want to tell these companies, we set upstream of you, your goals are good, your customer based, ready and willing, let us help you drop the cost and improve the titers by getting you into an organism that will work with you instead of against you.
Cody Simms (00:30:54):
It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is you learn a bunch of different organisms how they may grow, how you may be able to cultivate them, what problems are good at solving, what problems are not good at solving, what their byproducts might be, what their feed stocks might be and then, you can provide those to-
Sarah Richardson (00:31:09):
One missing step. So yes, we know more about, more bacteria than anybody else does in a single place. There will be labs that know more than us about a single bacteria and labs that know more about one thing and many bacteria, but we just have breath. So that is not enough. Other people can find bacteria that are good at something, but they're not necessarily ready for industrial scale up because they're missing something and they're wild and people don't know enough about them. So just finding them or knowing about them was enough, we would not have this problem. The missing stuff is genetic modification. So this has been something that-
Cody Simms (00:31:49):
That was what I was going to ask, there, that's great.
Sarah Richardson (00:31:49):
That is what we do, so we do that assessment. We say, "What are you good at? What do you like to eat? How fast do you grow?" All of these things that you would like to know about a bacteria. Then, we can also assess how long are you going to take to genetically engineer because that's been something people bounce off of. There's a contingent that believed that some bacteria are not growable. There's contingent that believe that a bunch of them will never be or are very hard to transform, that is to put DNA and that changes their behavior or influences their behavior. MicroByre just sort of discarded those assumptions and said, "No, no, no," we can grow anything and we can genetically engineer whatever we need to genetically engineer.
(00:32:24):
So when we find a match, a feed stock, a product, an industry or when our customers come to us and say, what have you got or we have something that is missing genetic modification or we have ... they come at different stages in this pipeline and we say, "Okay, what is the minimum amount of genetic engineering that is needed to make it effective and efficient and worthy of scale up and cost competitive with existing processes?" Also, because we are thinking about domestication, how do we also work to make it domesticated more containable, more specialized and more robust in fermentation? That's the missing part to just know the bacteria, deploy the bacteria, it is all the ones that were able to do this right out of the soil. They came out of the soil in the 60s and it's been very difficult to bring new ones online.
Cody Simms (00:33:15):
So, if you're great at having a library of all these different potential use cases, inputs, feed stocks and you're great at actually building environments to grow and cultivate these bacteria, are you also doing the editing as asked or required by a customer or are you handing them and saying, "Hey, you're the editors, you go do this?"
Sarah Richardson (00:33:35):
No, no, no. No, other shops have struggled to edit arbitrary bacteria. That is why we are here. That is why they have defaulted frequently to yeast or E. Coli or Bacillus subtilis. That is what they have available as infrastructure. That is what they use. That's not really their fault.
Cody Simms (00:33:57):
They don't have the right bio reactors and things set up to actually support the growth of these different organisms. You can't just hand them over to them.
Sarah Richardson (00:34:04):
It's not the bio reactors. So imagine you are, and you have this experience, you are a fresh face, idealistic biologist or chemist. You recognize that there's a chemical need for something and you understand that there's a biological way to get there, that their enzymes exist in the ecosystem, that you could put together and get to this chemical. So then you go, "Okay, where are those enzymes?" And they might be in a bacteria that there is no literature about how to grow it, how to transform it. It's just, "Oh, we observe this bacteria. It has this enzyme." So you as someone trying to start a company or trying to start a research program, you want that enzyme, but you're not really mandated or capitalized to grow it, to understand it or to build a toolkit.
(00:34:49):
These are all skills you might not have, especially as a chemist or as someone who comes out of ... depending on your biology program, but what you do know is that you have E. Coli, you have yeast and these have very public toolkits. High school students have used them to make edits, and you can get in there, you can quickly test an enzyme sequence. So that's really the bottleneck is when you put that enzyme into the E. Coli, it's got a 50% shot of just killing the E. Coli. Most of the genes you transfer around, you're just in the wrong context, and the organism goes, "I'd really rather die than do that."
Cody Simms (00:35:21):
It's back to the software analogy. It's much easier for Amazon to acquire a company that's built on AWS because they don't have to do any integration.
Sarah Richardson (00:35:28):
Sure.
Cody Simms (00:35:28):
Right? They know how it works.
Sarah Richardson (00:35:30):
If we are going to use software analogies, it is like looking at a computer that's running Ubuntu. I know, I just ... I can't. So let me copy that binary over to Apple, that's in my laptop or even worse to Windows because maybe you got a chance since Apple has been on FreeBSD, Mac OS has both. That's not a good success strategy. What you really need to do is go learn Ubuntu and tweak the binary there. Otherwise, what you're looking at is a campaign of refactoring it for Windows.
Cody Simms (00:36:02):
We're going to take a short break right now so our partner Yin can share more about the MCJ membership option.
Yin Lu (00:36:09):
Hey folks, Yin here, a partner at MCJ Collective. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing, that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019, and since then grown to 2000 members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and perspectives, and while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams I've met, nonprofits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done.
(00:36:46):
Many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (00:37:12):
All right, back to the show. So these customers of yours, they will then hire you to actually deliver the end product chemical at that point or are they ... what are they expecting from you and maybe let's move the conversation then, into what does your commercial business look like?
Sarah Richardson (00:37:29):
Part of our hypothesis was that we don't have time as a planet or as a startup company that specializes in what we specialize in, to raise capital, to put steel in the ground, to make chemicals when there are chemical companies that are already there, with the right steel. So we also select for bacteria that'll fit into existing infrastructure, which is many, many, many more than some would guess. Our model is to sit upstream of people who can use biology and provide that liquidity, that flexibility that allows them to leverage biology that has not been leveragable before, but we do not produce the chemicals, we allow them to produce the chemicals cost competitively using biology instead of petrochemicals. So our model is to ... and the people who approach us are people who are genuinely looking for biological techniques or who already have one in place, but it's not yet cost competitive.
(00:38:27):
So if you think of yourself as a petroleum company or a chemical company that uses petroleum, you are feeling pressure to go green, but you cannot justify going green if it's going to cost more money to produce. We have proven as a species, we will not pay for a green premium and until subsidization hits the levels that it got for petroleum, it's very difficult to justify that, so they're looking.
Cody Simms (00:38:54):
The levels that petroleum still enjoys, by the way, that's not in past tense.
Sarah Richardson (00:38:58):
Yeah, and I'm not so much an expert on how all that works. I'm trying to get there, but I have to rely on other experts to explain some of that stuff to me. What I do know from a baby business sense is that it's also not enough to say, "Oh, this green process will cost just as much. The final product will cost just as much. You can sell it for just as much," because now you're facing the inertia of, well, what new equipment or new process, it's not enough to just come in at the same price. You actually have to beat it. You have to motivate that if I change now, I will be able to make it for a bigger margin later. Then, you will really shift your processes, your downstream separation, everything. So the unfair playing field that biotechnology finds itself on is our first products to really start catalyzing a shift in funds, a shift in subsidies, is we have to beat an unfair playing field.
Cody Simms (00:39:48):
So from a business model perspective, I assume these are either, they're licensing tech from you or you're doing some kind of joint development agreement with them. There's heavy, I assume, agreement on who owns the IP that's being developed here one way or the other, that I don't know if you have a firm point of view on that for MicroByre or if that depends on the relationship with the customer you're working with.
Sarah Richardson (00:40:07):
We're biologists, so we're flexible. We're like, "What works for this ecosystem?" So the deal that we strike with our customers looks a lot like something that works for their ecosystem. So there's licensing, there's joint development agreements, there's even a possibility for spinouts or subsidiaries where we can have an impact on biomedicine too. As an example, we want to stay focused on climate, but if someone comes to us and they say, we really need this bacteria for a novel antibiotic or to be able to tweak a bioactive compound that's coming out, but just needs a little bit of enzymatic tweaking to really be the right target, we could conceivably just spin out an IT portfolio of editable bacteria in that space and just have them go really specialize in the regulation.
(00:40:56):
To bring to market what that needs. By not taking individual products to market ourselves, but partnering with people who are motivated, who can, who already have QA, QC, who have customers, who understand the space, we are able to have an impact on multiple fields that can impact climate or impact human health. So our model is come to us with your problem, we'll tell you what it's going to take to cause movement in that area and then, we will jointly figure out how we can both profit from that.
Cody Simms (00:41:26):
So, to some extent then, the ultimate business success of MicroByre is going to depend on which of these chemical outputs and customers who are using them end up hitting mass scale in terms of further downstream adoption, which is a little out of your control. So as a CEO, how do you manage sort of the uncertainty of that?
Sarah Richardson (00:41:45):
Yeah, well, I mean we could boil it down to two ways to do it, right? We could pick one and really focus on the whole thing and do it ourselves or take it to a bigger scale before we hand it off as a licensing agreement to somebody else who could scale it. That's also a risky bet because what if you pick wrong, and also you're small and inexperienced? So what if you don't know what you don't know? Bringing in a partner early who knows a lot more about the volatility, about the things that you literally don't know you don't know, can help you de-risk it. They already have interest, they already have hidden information from us about what they care about, what is feasible.
(00:42:22):
So bringing in partners early, giving them that sense that this is the thing that's very different and MicroByre is very different, that can shift the metrics. Bringing them in, allows us to de-risk what we couldn't do if we set ourselves up as potential competitors to them. Also, I borrowed a trick from the VC playbook, which is to have a portfolio by having multiple conversations going on that leverage a backend, our automation pipeline that works the same regardless of what the target we're looking at is. I can have my foot in multiple places that might work, especially, when you're targeting something as difficult as slow as commodity chemicals. We want to also have things that move a little faster, like some specialty chemicals or people who are further along in the development of their process, whether it's chemicals or not, and we can come in and help accelerate that even.
(00:43:17):
So yeah, the portfolio play, some VCs I talked to like, "No, if you think you have a molecule, you need to build the whole thing." I said, "But you have a portfolio. You didn't go, oh wow, this market is the one market and this targets one target and then you invest in 10 companies that are just doing that." That's too risky, so why would I do that? Some of them didn't like that answer.
Cody Simms (00:43:40):
Well, you're doing okay with it so far. So from a portfolio construction perspective then, what can you share about some of the diversified bets you're making right now? Feel free to go as nerdy and wonky as you like, what are some of the chemical compounds you're trying to solve for right now?
Sarah Richardson (00:43:56):
Well, when we were a baby co, like three of us, we went for and we started curating a list of things that others had failed at, because that's the conceit, right? We have a different technology that changes the cost models of what you can get. So there was some that you know can just read the trade magazines, you can read the press releases, you can read the other startups that rose and fell with certain targets in mind, and the biggest one that I thought we could do with the small team was succinic acid, and the VCs rolled their eyes at me when I went pitching like, "Oh, okay and here's the one we've been demonstrating as succinic acid." succinic acid is not a massive market compared to commodity chemicals. Downstream, it gets a little better, but there had been so much interest in it.
(00:44:43):
Companies that just had to withdraw from the space or actually went bankrupt trying it. Succinic acid can be used for Lycra. So I think that's the non-trade name. There's one that was spandex for Lycra. I think it's Lycra. So it can also be used for ... you find it, the derivatives of it, right? It's upstream of the kinds of plastics you find in automotives and in the bathroom. What else? Alexseal solvent. So when you get down to commodity chemicals, some of the immediate derivatives are not so exciting. Succinic acid was such an attractive target. It can also be used to make biodegradable plastics and to make films that protect our food and things like that.
Cody Simms (00:45:26):
It's petro produced today?
Sarah Richardson (00:45:27):
Yeah, it's petro produced from butane. Butane becomes maleic anhydride and then, maleic anhydride can be tapped to make succinic acid. If I recall correctly, I am not a chemist. So the chemist in the audience may be going, "See, see you need us," and I do. I absolutely do. Yeah, the petro process is still the dominant process in the field because the bioprocesses, they tended to come out using E. Coli or yeast and that wasn't a terrible try because every cell on the planet that uses oxygen, that respires oxygen makes succinic acid. So, you might think, "Okay, well, this is not one where they specialize. So I can get any organism to just bake a lot of it. We actually went and found or resurrected interest in a bacteria that had been discovered.
(00:46:21):
We don't tend to have to discover bacteria. You shouldn't think of us as going out into the wilds, hacking down the jungle and bringing back samples. One, that's not ethical and two, it's not necessary. What had happened was people said, "Oh look at this bacteria. It produces stellar amounts of succinic acid, but oh well, it's too expensive to ferment and we can't genetically engineer it, so E. Coli." So that was our first target where we said, "Look, we can genetically edit that bacteria and we did so we can grow it. We can make it cost effective to ferment," and we did. So, this is an example of something that we're happy to license out because succinic acid is a commodity chemical, you'd have to make kilo tons of it to actually start having it done. That's again, not what we're capitalized, deployed, or specialized in.
Cody Simms (00:47:05):
So that's an example of one where you all kind of came across a problem and now, you're trying to find a buyer for it or find a solution. I assume you also have examples where large companies are kind of starting to come to you and saying like, "Hey, we have this problem. Does that exist as well?"
Sarah Richardson (00:47:22):
Yeah, we have three or four categories of people who come to us, looking for assistance. One is very upstream and they are people who have streams of organic wastes that would otherwise rot, and they looking to valorize them to be able to upcycle them and claim revenue from them, rather than paying to dispose of them.
Cody Simms (00:47:44):
And presumably also avoiding methane emissions from whatever the thing is too.
Sarah Richardson (00:47:49):
If you're doing wastewater processing, if you're doing composting, if you're just throwing it away in a landfill and it's organic, yes, it is rotting to methane or carbon dioxide, and if you're processing facility does not capture that natural gas, the methane, it is just a greenhouse gas emission. So being able to take things like waste water, take things like any byproducts from dairy production, from any kind of food production where you know there's carbon in there, that is something that we seek samples of this. So if any listeners have samples of non-household waste industrial, and I don't always call them waste streams, I call them streams of organics that they do not have another use for. So they come to us and they are not necessarily going to be able to produce something from them, we would match make, but that also adds to our database of what low cost.
(00:48:43):
It's not going to be zero cost, but what low cost feed stocks can we offer to compete with sugar as a feed stock? The next class of people who approach us are people who are working in yeast or E. Coli and they are hitting a metric wall. So they come to us and they may say, what should we have done or what can you offer us instead to achieve our goal? So, the third class is people who are already working in the right organism, they found it. They've scaled it a bit, they have gotten downstream, but there are metrics they would like to improve, maybe byproduct production, maybe robustness. So they have metrics that they want to improve that they can improve without genetic engineering, and they are not kitted for generating novel genetic engineering.
(00:49:25):
Some of the successful companies that labeled themselves synthetic biology in this space, did go through that process. MicroByre, it's easier for us to do it because we leverage automation. We're very skilled at it, but companies that spend a long time specializing in one bacteria, they get there.
Cody Simms (00:49:40):
So it sounds like you're hitting customer needs on both the input and output side where people are bringing-
Sarah Richardson (00:49:46):
There's one more class of customer, and they don't know anything about bacteria potentially, and they don't know anything about feed stock. They have a chemical. They're like, "Can you get this chemical?" When we approach customers or they say, what else can you do? That's a dangerous question for an entrepreneur to answer. Well, what can you do? And you say, "Well, what do you want me to do?" It's when you have broad opportunities. Those people and your audience, I'd like to ask, what have you given up on? What did you think was a really good idea, but you just could ... the tech wasn't there yet. What chemicals did you get excited about? You know they have markets and you know it could have a climate impact, but you haven't been able to do it yet.
(00:50:24):
That's what you bring to MicroByre. We'll be honest, this was not a bacterial problem or yeah, we could do it, but it's going to take two years. Yes, we can do it, it'll take six months. That's what we asked that fourth class of customer, what did you give up on? Because if we have a new tech, we have a new way to do it, let's do this.
Cody Simms (00:50:40):
Let me try to spit back the four classes you said. One, the first was, "Hey, we experiment with stuff where we know there's a market for it and we might have a solution. The succinic acid was your example there.
Sarah Richardson (00:50:51):
Yeah, on spec projects inside where we see things because of our automation. Yes.
Cody Simms (00:50:56):
Two was, on the input side there is a waste stream, someone needs to do something with and they're looking at either finding a profit center for or just reducing the cost of removing it, and you're working with them to figure out, "Hey, can we actually turn this waste that you have into a profit center or just reduce the cost of removing the waste, on your end."
Sarah Richardson (00:51:15):
Provide an incentive to help build an infrastructure to get biomass moved around instead of rotting. This hopefully will extend up to grass clippings and municipal compost. Just where can we leverage this stuff instead of just rotting, yup.
Cody Simms (00:51:29):
Third is on the demand side, which is companies that already have a business demand to build a chemical substance and they don't have a methodology to do it. So they've signed a deal or are working on something to solve a business problem.
Sarah Richardson (00:51:45):
They tend to have a prototype they've gotten so far. They have reason to believe it's doable biologically. Yes and then, we come in to help them realize it.
Cody Simms (00:51:55):
Then, fourth, I've now forgotten. What was the fourth one?
Sarah Richardson (00:51:59):
The fourth one, people who want chemicals may not have leveraged biology before or who have been shopping for biology but have not found the ones that really shift the cost margins, so this would be your big chemical companies or your little chemical companies.
Cody Simms (00:52:12):
Yeah, so my question on four is do you have a sense of what's driving four today? Is it, we think that biology can do this more cheaply than petrochemical or is it, "Oh, we're getting hammered on ESG. Our stock price is getting messed up. We have net zero commitments and we have to find an alternative to petrochemicals."
Sarah Richardson (00:52:29):
I think it's a combination of everything and also, I think a bunch of people, no matter what their day job is, we are faced with a climate emergency and the struggle is we have to work within the constraints of the system. Unfortunately, nobody can wave a dictator wand and get it to fix. So responsible people are trying in every industry to shut them-
Cody Simms (00:52:52):
That's so heartening to hear.
Sarah Richardson (00:52:52):
Stockholders ... they're trying.
Cody Simms (00:52:58):
That's all we wanted to hear. All of us are trying to do what we can in our own little ways and it's just going to take a million little cuts at it, right?
Sarah Richardson (00:53:04):
Yes, and hopefully that million little cuts moves the needle because what's discouraging is some of the ironclad rules of our society and capitalism, which is it has to make someone a profit, either free to come in, flow into the system from somewhere, right? We call those subsidies where nothing moves without some external energy. So free money has to appear from somewhere or we have to work together to find a way to make it economical. We have to change the slope so that we're always rolling downhill towards money. So I think there is ESG pressure, but I think that it is fighting that since it ... but also, you must profit. If the ESG pressure was also, "I am not an expert yet. I'm still a baby co. I am learning a lot."
(00:53:48):
If That ESG pressure also said, "We are willing to not take dividends while you research this, maybe lose money on it, or while you have that period of time where you're switching over, we want you to not just invest in it, but we are willing to take a slow down in profits." Until ESG says that as well and gets the rest of the shareholders who don't care about ESG as much to agree to it. We have to find special solutions that actually thread that needle, and so that's my uneducated take on it.
Cody Simms (00:54:19):
While also still like not letting society fall off a cliff because they're losing valuable products that they need to continue to, whatever, have safety in an automobile for example.
Sarah Richardson (00:54:30):
We need the molecules from chemicals. We need the molecules that we're getting from petroleum right now. Yes, it's life saving. I cannot ask anyone, particularly people who have nowhere near as much privilege as me to go without, to save the planet. That is also a constraint on the system. So I think these companies know all of that, see all of that, are acting within the constraints they have and have tried before. Let me be really clear, they're not just waking up now because the molecule I told you about, succinic acid, these were big companies with investments and joint development agreements and joint ventures from massive chemical companies that use petroleum all day to try this. It's not that they haven't tried, it's that biotechnology has not been able to deliver on some of it at a price point that made it possible, and that's what MicroByre is trying to do. One more try. Let's try it this way.
Cody Simms (00:55:22):
Speaking of incentives, you are building a company, you are building a for-profit company, you're trying to attract talent to your company with the notion that yes, you're doing great things for the world, but you're also going to make a profit and people will be able to feed their families and all of that stuff too. So maybe share a little bit about what are the kinds of people that are coming to work at MicroByre now from a talent perspective and from a mission alignment perspective, what does it look like?
Sarah Richardson (00:55:48):
I am so proud of our team. I told you, I speak a bunch of languages, but I am not good at their jobs. My job with the company was to ... we'll, we're smaller, be the second best at everything, except some stuff, I just had to do and then, to fall through the ranks with every single hire, to get down to four, to five, to six. It's a joke with them now. They'll tell me, "Oh, you're not acting like number four. Remind me to delegate or yeah, no, no, you need to step out of this conversation because you're number six now, your vote doesn't count," which is good. That means I'm doing it right and like you said, inviting the right talent in and then, they're finding their space here. One of the things that made it easy to attract, really stellar, I am so impressed with our codees, is I get to say, "Hey, you can use your machine learning techniques and your data science and your software engineering not for adware."
(00:56:35):
"Come leverage your same skills but also learn about biology. Get really close to our robots and our bacteria and use the same skills but maybe to save the planet." So that's been a really good and compelling pitch for our codees. For our benchees, the chemists and the biologists, I think that they relished the chance to do something different. Some of them ... my co-founder, Maggie, I think one of the reasons she found the pitch come, struggle with me was that in her graduate experience, she saw a lot of chemicals that were accessible in bacteria but she couldn't work in those bacteria. She was in the chemistry lab and they said, we're looking at enzymes or we're looking at the function but it's a distraction to actually be able to study it in the locale that we were there. So she always kind of regretted that.
(00:57:25):
She still has a really soft spot for the stuff she did for her graduate thesis, but just, there was not the tools to do it and now, she can do it. Now, she has worked in so many bacteria and she has seen so much bad bacteria and knowing that when she sees something interesting, we have the chance to actually turn it on. So I think for the benchees, the novelty of working for a place that says, all the cool stuff that you love, you actually might now have a different way to get at it, and I think that's the draw for the benchees.
Cody Simms (00:57:56):
I wonder on the benchees, it's really interesting, I wonder if studies have been done on what percentage of people going into the professional realm from chemistry, physics, geology, biology are petrochemically focused. I have to imagine biology is the lowest, but I don't know for sure.
Sarah Richardson (00:58:19):
I think there's a bunch of environmental microbiology wrapped up in petroleum, in prospecting and some in bioremediation. So in mining companies, the bacteria are really important and for mind closures and cleaning up after themselves, bacteria are really important. So you find biologists or microbiologists, let's not lump in all the jobs that you can get as a ... aren't there bird wranglers at airports, and veterinarians and stuff those are all ... they're all biologists. If you work with animals or plants in any capacity and you care about them, I'm going to call you a biologist, but for environmental microbiologists, it's interesting because we talk about petroleum, it's the dangerous other and it is, but it started as biomass. It is all biomass and it's the kind of petroleum you get, is really influenced by what a what and how far along it got in the eating process. So bacteria are still involved in petroleum.
Cody Simms (00:59:15):
That's fascinating. Yeah, I guess, I asked that question only in that you all are definitely providing, I feel like, a unique new way for people to apply their skill sets.
Sarah Richardson (00:59:25):
Yeah, I think they like it and the biz dev people haven't had to sell strains of bacteria before, really. So they're coming ... our busies are coming from different markets, from chemistry and from other biological pursuits in getting to now try a different pitch and I think they're having fun, I think they're having fun, and my other co-founder, Jeff, he has two law degrees and an MBA. So, he provides another part of our ecosystem which is keeping the company, "Okay, you're doing all this cool stuff, but what stuff do we have to reinvent to get a company like this and what stuff do we not have to reinvent?" You just need a steady shorthand at the tiller and he provides that too. He's a critical part of our ecosystem for that.
Cody Simms (01:00:05):
And I first met Jeff when you all were raising your last round of funding, which MCJ is honored to be part of. Maybe share a little bit about the capitalization kind of history of the business and also, what you see it look like going forward.
Sarah Richardson (01:00:17):
So I was lucky to be admitted to what's now called activate, but was then called Cyclotron Road and their cohort of entrepreneurs, and I used that non-dilutive funding to ensure that Maggie could afford to come co-found with me. That's also how I met Jeff. So, that was roughly half a million dollars, not all in cash and all non-dilutive to provide the space to sort of test out the company and keep making some technical progress for two years without having to engage VC because VC is a runway that you get on, it starts to be a treadmill and you have timelines. So, Cyclotron Road or Activate was very proud of their ability to give technical founders. So you had to be a technical person to be eligible, the runway to try things and then, to be able to gracefully say, "Oh this isn't going to work."
(01:01:07):
Either it doesn't work for me to be an entrepreneur or we tried the idea, we didn't go deeply into debt to do it and it's not going to work. So that was a really cool experience because I thought I was going to be a government scientist and when I couldn't do this inside the government for reasons that aren't worth getting into, this was ... I thought I was over, I thought I was not going to be able to do this or tilt it this one mill anymore and Activate offered me a way to keep going. So I'm really grateful for that. Without Activate, we would not be here. Then, we were able to raise a seed round in 2019 and the leads were Bioeconomy Capital, which is an outfit that invests in platform biotechnology. They say we're not going to do that silo thing, we're going to try and get at a bunch of stuff because we're running out of time.
(01:01:55):
So the partners there are Wehbring and Rob Carlson and they are deep thinkers about Bioeconomy and the climate and also Azolla Ventures, at the time, Prime Impact Fund was the name of the fund they invested. And they are really ... also a really great fund to follow because they have a pretty unique vision and structure that allows them to have long views of climate strong companies where they aim to be catalytic capital. They say we invest in stuff that the regular VCs are not, they're not there yet, but if we come in and be catalytic, they might be willing to take a shot at it.
Cody Simms (01:02:30):
I think all three GPs of Azolla have been on the pod in the past, actually. So anyone who wants to get up to speed on Azolla, go back to our archives for sure.
Sarah Richardson (01:02:38):
Yes, they are amazing and they are strong in their climate commitment and they model it, their investments before they make them. They don't just jump in, so really happy to have them on board. The Bioeconomy Capital and Prime Impact Fund led our seed round and we also attracted a house out of Berkeley and some angels, and we ran on that for ... until COVID hit and when COVID hit, we did not have enough money to move out of the free laboratory space we were in when that space became very restricted for appropriate reasons. So, we had a seed extension fund and a slight evaluation where we attracted new funding from ... through the network from a couple new funders, smaller amounts, but really, really impactful in keeping the company going and getting our own space that we could start to grow into.
(01:03:24):
Just a wild experience for me as a baby CEO to now have to kind of fit up a building. Jeff was really instrumental in that and we got a lot of help, but at that, we were still only seven people. So we were seven people from 2019 to February of this year. February of this year is when we start closing the A round, which was led by Lowercarbon Capital with real strong follows from Safar Investments, Impact Science Ventures, the LOSA group, Airschott Ventures, My Climate Journey is in there. I think we're getting everybody on our website, but all funds that are really, really, really invested in making a difference and who are intrigued by the new possibilities we are bringing and who have all been really, really helpful within their skill sets and strengths and networks of making sure that we are working.
(01:04:17):
Yeah. Now, we are 25 people and yeah, no, I'm really proud of the culture that my staff are maintaining, that they're really proud of the culture and that idea that we are peers in an ecosystem and we need to respect and cross train a little, not to replace each other, but so we really understand the value each other are bringing, the efforts and so, we can foster communication between them. So I'm really, really proud of the staff as we grow. We're picking and getting good people who really want to make an impact and respect each other, like our culture is absolutely mutual respect and I'm proud of it because I think what I've learned and what I'm seeing is that once you get past 15, 20 people, your culture is kind of set. It's a garden that I tried to fertilize, tried to shape and prune a little bit and now, I have to let it grow and so far, so good.
Cody Simms (01:05:09):
That's awesome, and you've kind of given some shoutouts along the way of where you need help from people who are listening, who might have contributions to make this, that and the other. If there's anything else to add there, please do. If not, I want to hear your take on what you think the next 10 years looks like. Not just for MicroByre but for the incumbent biotechnology, for the petrochemical space. Where's this all going?
Sarah Richardson (01:05:33):
I mean be fair to me, I've had my head down doing very specific CEO stuff and now, I am coming up to start ... to take a breather and start to write the op-ed pieces that establish MicroByre as a thought leader in the space. What I've always hoped for is that we start to all get on board with a vision that lets us realize circular bioeconomies within our houses, within our cities and then, within our states, where we start to embrace some of the ... it feels more stochastic but still more biologically integrated, ways of first looking. First, we have to acknowledge where biology is, outside, in our backyard but also, in our lives and start to look and think about some of the choices we are making where we can make those choices like cotton over microfiber, things like that.
(01:06:26):
Then, asking more questions. Asking questions about the choices, our states and are we composting? When we remove things from landfills, we can capture the methane better because nobody is really capturing methane off of landfills. So if you're putting things that rot into landfills, not separating out your recyclables, that is a source of methane emissions that we can ... as just individuals of all sorts, we can separate our compost and our recyclables, our paper recyclables so they don't end up in landfills rotting. There has been a trend of that improving and that's a little thing we can all do to just change our culture a little bit and sort of how to recycle them better. The plastic recycling is that the whole other episode of what's going wrong there, but pull out your paper, pull out your compost.
(01:07:11):
Where I want the world to be in 10 years is whether or not all the technology has come online and we've reversed the curve, that we are all way more aware of how it works biologically, that we are way more aware of the bacteria and we're way more aware of the sources of greenhouse gas in terms of biomass and working to channel them, build different infrastructure to get them not to rot.
Cody Simms (01:07:34):
The big takeaway I have in talking to you is there's a dangerous linear way of thinking, that is to say that technology innovation has gone from the biological to the chemical, to the physics driven, right? Even in energy, you go from biomass to petroleum to nuclear fusion, who knows? It's not that. It's a yes and, to all of them and continuing to innovate heavily on that biological layer is something that can't be ignored.
Sarah Richardson (01:08:01):
We say ecosystem and sometimes we don't reflect deeply on what that means. So an ecosystem is this planet, it's also each of our bodies. When you're working in an ecosystem and you want to succeed or you want to shift it, you can't ignore any part of it. So petroleum can have a place in our society, it can have a use, but we have to come into balance. We have to, because we're kind of trapped on earth. So it's an ecosystem that we can really damage and we have damaged and we have to recognize that ecosystem runs on biology, and when we recognize that, we can start shifting it back. We can sustain the planet. We can still have the lifestyles and the materials we need.
(01:08:47):
We do have to make an investment. We have to make smart investments. We have to pick the right risks because of all the other constraints we discussed, but it is possible. It is possible for us to sustain our entire planet and to build the things that we need to build and to actually have even more equity about where those resources are built. I mean, where do we grow biomass? Where do we discard biomass? It's not just in the cities, it's not in Boston and Berkeley. We can distribute a new biomanufacturing future across the entire globe so that everybody has a motivation and a benefit from it. We can do this because we can. We need to have the motivation, so MicroByre is trying to provide some of that flexibility and help feed some of these motivations and then broaden them.
(01:09:35):
Well, we start to provide that flexibility and more things are possible, some of our bacteria can do more than one thing, so we can amortize some of our investments and get at many, many more things. This is the future. It has to be, we believe strongly in the bioeconomy and we're going to do everything we can, everything we can, to bring it about.
Cody Simms (01:09:55):
Sarah, I knew this was going to be an awesome conversation. You were amazing. I so appreciate you taking the time to join us.
Sarah Richardson (01:10:01):
Thank you very much and thank you to your audience for giving it a listen. I know biology sometimes ... especially, if people are much more battery, chemical focused, that biology can seem like a distraction, but like we said, we're going to bring you around, we're going to bring you around. Remember, if you've given up on something that you think might have a ... let me know. Let Cody know. He'll let me know and we'll take a look.
Cody Simms (01:10:25):
All right, thanks Sarah.
Sarah Richardson (01:10:29):
Thank you.
Jason Jacobs (01:10:29):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (01:10:32):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars, content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (01:10:54):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com and if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter, @mcjpod.
Cody Simms (01:11:09):
Thanks and see you next episode.
