Reshma Shetty Speaks at Y Combinator's Female Founders Conference 2016

[Music] Hello everyone. Um, so first off, I'd like to, uh, thank both Jessica and Susan for inviting me to be here today. It's a real privilege and honor to speak to such a talented, amazing group of women here.

Um, so, so as Cat said, my name is RMA. I'm a co-founder of Geno Bioworks, a biotech company based in Boston, uh, so not from Silicon Valley. Um, uh, I wanted to first start by asking you a question. Um, does anybody know what the most complicated piece of technology on this desk is? You're right, it's the plant, right?

Uh, so if you think about it, right, this plant is capable of self-replicating. It's capable of self-repairing. It can self-assemble, right? It makes its own shape itself, um, and it can assemble structures with about a nanometer degree of precision, right? These are all traits, uh, that other engineering disciplines can only dream of, but biology has it all inherently. This is what makes me so in love with biology, right?

Is that it's capable of all these things. Um, so in my mind, biology is the most powerful manufacturing platform on the planet, um, and it's what I want to be able to use to build stuff, right? Um, and so for us at Geno, what we're excited about is that this next century is going to be, uh, the place where we learn how to design biology, right? Where we learn how to program DNA, program biological systems.

And so we think the next generation of designers are going to be designing biology, and that's what we're all about. Um, just a few quick facts on GKO. Uh, we were founded in 2008, so we're about 8 years old now. We're based in Boston, we're around 75 people or so, and basically what we do is design microbes, design organisms to spec.

Um, and I basically, what I do today is just give you a little bit of our backstory: how do we come to be where we are today, in case you might find it interesting? Okay, so, uh, Geno started, um, officially 8 years ago, but I think it really has its roots quite a little bit longer ago.

Um, uh, I grew up in Utah. Um, my house is, like, just actually off to the side of this picture. Uh, I went to the University of Utah, and I studied computer science there. Um, but at the same time, I also, um, worked in a biology lab. Um, and it was a really interesting experience because I, on one hand, would study, um, uh, programming, computer science, you know, operating systems and so on in class at the same time I was working in a research lab, um, learning biology on the fly.

Um, and the reason I did this was quite frankly, I found biology classes boring, right? They were filled with premed students who just wanted to memorize stuff, and I was much more interested in sort of engineering and hacking. And so, working in a biology research lab and studying computer science was a nice mix for me.

Um, and so then I decided to try to actually merge the two, uh, halves of my life, uh, when I went to grad school. Um, and I went to grad school at MIT, and that's where I met this, uh, person here on the slide. This is Tom Knight. Um, Tom is a very interesting guy.

Um, Tom basically, um, has a legit claim to inventing the internet, right? Um, he was involved in the early days of the ARPANET. Um, this, uh, this is him on the left there standing next to a Lisp machine. Um, you can see from the pants that it kind of dates back to the 70s or so.

And then, but about 20 years ago or so, Tom said, you know what? This computer stuff's getting a little boring. You know, there's a lot of people involved in it now. I don't need to really think about it, um, so much anymore. I'm going to start studying something else.

And he decided to basically go back to school for all intents and purposes. He would take biology undergrad classes and, and, and pair up with the freshmen in, in, in freshman biology labs and learn how to pipet and do biological research, right?

Um, but Tom brought a very interesting perspective when he, uh, went to biology. He brought an engineer's perspective, a hacker's perspective. He thought about, well, how can I take biology and simplify it? How can I design it? How can I program it? How can I can introduce ideas like standardization and abstraction? All sorts of co...