David Novak 0:03 

Welcome to How leaders lead where every week you get to listen. And while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world, I break down the key learnings so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Jason Kelly, the co founder and CEO of gingko, Bioworks, the largest designer of synthetic DNA in the world. Think back to the last time someone asked you what you did for a living? A simple question is this. It could be really hard the answer. The reason is, in the back of your mind, you're probably think, Where do I even start, you can imagine if you are running a synthetic biology company, I mean, holy cow, but running any business is complex. And until you learn to simplify all the complexity, and learn to talk about what you do in a simple way, you'll be throttling the kind of impact that you could be making as a leader. And this is something that Jason Kelly has mastered, I mean, tell me a more complex business to have to explain than synthetic biology. And yet, Jason has learned to simplify the complex. I'm no bioengineering buff. But when I hear Jason talk about ginkgo, and what's possible with the technology, they're pioneering, and scaling, he has me leaning in. So whether you're leading a billion dollar brand, or a small business, how you communicate as a leader matters, the great leaders I know have learned to simplify the complex. So let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with my friend, and soon to be yours, Jason Kelly.

I have to tell you, I have really had a lot of fun learning about you, and gingko getting ready for this conversation. And I've got to tell you, you got one heck of a challenge to simplify for us non scientific types, what your business is all about. Tell us about your business in the most simple terms you can.

Jason Kelly 2:14 

Sure. So inside of every cell out there in nature is digital code in the form of DNA, right. So there's a T C's and G's, not zeros and ones like what's inside your computer. But you can actually read this code with DNA sequencing, like you might have heard of like the Human Genome Project, right, that whole thing that was you basically grind the cell up, you put it in a machine and on your computer screen, a TCG GG starts coming up, that's the code inside. That's the reading of the code. Well, the other side of that coin is we have technology to write DNA code. So I opposite I type on my computer ATCG GG, I have print. And here in the labs, we have about 200,000 square feet of automated labs here in Boston, that piece of DNA gets printed, almost like HP inkjet kind of printing, you make the DNA molecule, and then you insert that DNA into a cell. It reads the code, just kind of like if you installed a new app on your phone, and it does something new. And this allows us to have applications and things like animal free meat and new ways to do agriculture and new medicines. We could talk about all those but the core idea is inside of cells is digital code in the form of DNA that you can read and write. And ginkgo today, as the largest writer of that type of DNA code in the world,

David Novak 3:28 

that's an amazing place to be. And it's, you know, it's synthetic bioengineering. It's basically a new category for most people. Why do you see it as essential for the present and the future?

Jason Kelly 3:38 

Yeah, so I'll give you another computing analogy before we go too nerdy on biology. So what makes computers special, you know, they get better all the time. It's a sort of exponentially improving technology. They have digital code, like I said, which means you install a new program. And suddenly your phone can do something today that it couldn't do yesterday, right? It can order you a car or something. There is a limitation on what computers can do, though. It's only things in the world of bits in the world of information. So if you look at what computers have been disruptive to media, telecom, finance, all your information based industries. Let me tell you what hasn't been disrupted by computers, hamburgers, right? hamburgers were left out of the computer revolution? Well, we'll talk about because synthetic biology is disrupting hamburgers, because a cell runs on code, you install a new code, I swear it does new things when you put that new DNA code in, but it doesn't move information around. It moves atoms, it builds things. And so it's going to be disruptive, not to the information based industries to the physical goods industries, things like food, things like medicine, things like building materials and chemicals and fuels. These are all biotech industries. They just they don't know it yet. That's why synthetic biology is interesting. You gotta believe we can get good at programming these cells which which is a conversation we should definitely have, but if you can, those are the types of industries that you need to pay attention to it?

David Novak 5:01 

So how do you go about building a company that really makes this possible in the future? I mean, this is an incredible challenge, it seems like,

Jason Kelly 5:08 

well, first off, you have a long view. Okay. So I met my co founders, we started our PhDs together at MIT, I think in like 2002. And I also put the push in 20 years now, actually, first off, you surround yourself with people that are, you know, passionate believers, and in a long term vision, right. And so you know, I'll give you a little background on my co founders. So there's four of us that were in grad school, the fifth founder was a professor at MIT. That's fellow Tom Knight. And Tom gets to like the heart of your question of like, how do you do a big disruptive thing? So Tom, started at MIT on the faculty in the early 1970s. In Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, I have this great old black and white photo of Tom with his master's thesis, which is this refrigerator sized mini computer. Tom, when he program mainframes, he was a computer architect, he had designed that machine. And so what happened was, you know, computer architecture, moved into semiconductors, Tom taught the semiconductor design course for many years at MIT. And then mid 90s Has this insight I mentioned earlier, hey, DNA is code. And I've been programming computer code for 25 years, maybe I can go out and help those biologists out, right. And so begins this journey of what's now called synthetic biology, where Tom basically started like a biology lab in the MIT Computer Science Building, started growing bacteria, scaring all his co workers, you know, who had never seen this stuff, and built a relationship with the biologists. And so you had this meeting of sort of computer scientists who had their lessons biologists who were like, hey, biology is too complicated to think of it like and we kind of banged on each other for five or 10 years at MIT, and kind of got to a point where, hey, some of this could work. And then we started the company in 2008. But you know, that same group, we've all been following Tom's vision for the last 20 years now. And we're believers that, you know, someday it will be as easy to program a cell as it is to program a computer. And that's a 50 year vision. But by having that unified goal, it helps you through all the crappy stuff, that companies 15 people that's running low on money, or this that, you know, like, you're sort of like, well, it's worth a try, right? Because we have this bigger goal we're going forward. That was that's a big part of it is having that shared long term vision. And Tom gave us that you go from

David Novak 7:17 

a company, I've been 15 people, how many people do you have now?

Jason Kelly 7:20 

I'm about 700. People now.

David Novak 7:22 

Yeah, you're the CEO. So you've got to tell people the story, you got to tell Wall Street, their story, you got to bring in new people telling your story. What's the hardest thing to communicate about what you do?

Jason Kelly 7:34 

The hardest thing is, it's sort of a new area for people. If you're the latest SAS company, or social network, you have a lot of things to point to in the past and say like, well listen, like snap, right? Like, we have these angles to compete with Facebook, and this is our modes, but you understand how social network makes money, right? I mean, advertising. So that's just what we're gonna do. So there's a proven business model, and you just have to really understand, do these guys have an edge? For ginkgo? We're saying, look, there should be a new industry that doesn't exist. Like if you look at how the computer industry is organized, market specific applications, horizontal infrastructure, operating systems, programming languages, cloud computing, those apply to every application and computing. Right, right? You look at the biotech industry that I'm in, everything is vertical, every pharma company has got its own technology stack and ad companies going big data. So all those investors people are used to seeing is, Hey, Jason, what's your drug that you're making? Tell me about that therapeutic you're making? What's What's that new? Are you making a new seed, you know, right? Are you gonna go compete with Monsanto? Like, like, what product? And I'm like, no, no, no. DNA is code. It's common across all organisms. There should be operating systems. There should be Amazon Web Services, there should be app stores, right? Like, we should have a platform business model. And they're like, What the heck are you talking about? Right, because it's new in that industry. But we've spent the first, you know, 10 years at MIT really thinking through the technology, kind of physics of this industry. And I spent the last 1314 year again, go figuring out the business model side of it. And the lesson was, the models come from tack, it's the right thing, it's just a new thing. And so that far and away is the hardest thing to explain to people is sort of like bringing in those types of App Store. Like we get royalties and economics on the products developed on our platform, you know, we signed up, you know, 10s of new deals every year with all these different customers. It's not like we have one product to explain to you, you know, we just passed 100 In terms of programs on the platform. So anyway, that just to give you a sense of some of the difficulties,

David Novak 9:37 

when you think about disrupting the industry. You talked about the hamburger. Give us an example of a product you guys have developed it is really changing the game.

Jason Kelly 9:46 

Okay. Yeah. So I like the burger. I think it's a good example actually. And by the reminder, I don't develop these end products. Okay, our customers do so I'll give you an example. So have you ever had and by the way, Impossible Foods, not one of our customers. I'll give you an example from this industry, have you ever had an Impossible Burger? Yes, I am. Alright, so as veggie burger you bite into it, it bleeds. Where are they getting the blood from David? Right. You know, like there's not, there's not a lot of blood in plants, right? And so like, how's this working? And so what impossible did was they found the gene for hemoglobin. Okay, this is like the protein in blood and cows and humans or whatever else that makes blood red. And they take yeasts like think like brewers yeast, like you would use to make beer. They install that DNA code in for hemoglobin, and then you grow it up in a tank and something that looks like a brewery, except instead of beer coming out, haemoglobin comes out, because you just reprogram they used to do that? Well, now you add it back into a burger, and suddenly, it smells right taste, right, it's the impossible Whopper at Burger King, right? That is a disruptive consumer product where the back end is actually synthetic biology. And so we have a company, there's a company on our platform called motif FoodWorks that got founded four years ago, we actually did a project with them to engineer a yeast cell to make a hemoglobin and their business model is supply those types of biotech flavor ingredients to all the big food companies so that you get better plant based products in the future. And similar things for egg proteins, milk proteins, and so on. Can we get these veggie products to actually not taste like cardboard? That's an example of a product I'm excited about in synthetic biology. You're so

David Novak 11:22 

passionate about this business, Jason, obviously, what's your personal purpose behind the obvious passion that you have?

Jason Kelly 11:29 

Biology is this thing that we all take for granted? Okay, like I give all these talks in Silicon Valley, where I would show this like slide and had all these things on the table, like an apple PC and an iPhone and a camera. And there was this little like, potted plant and on the corner of the desk, and I would be like, hey, what's the most complicated sophisticated device on the table? Right? And the answer is the house plant. And like, if you look at it like an engineer, it's obviously the house plant. You break that leaf, it repairs itself, right? Imagine you cracked your iPhone screen, and the thing just fixed itself over the next two weeks. Like we'd be like, you know, celebrating Tim Cook is a god Right? Like, you plant the seed, you add air, water and sunlight. It manufactures itself. No manufacturing facility, it literally builds itself out of thin air, right? You know, think about that. Okay, and then this will blow your mind. It makes seeds that you plant and it just makes copies of itself. It's self replicating, right. Imagine what that would do to Apple's margins if you just copy Yeah, copying iPhones for free. This is intrinsic to the substrate like basically all biology does that. If we just walked up on that and hadn't existed, we think of it as like some unbelievable alien advanced technology. Right, you know, but Well, he's a houseplant. You're so accustomed to it, that you ignore it. And so for those of us that kind of, we're passionate about biology, we're like, crazy people. We're looking around, like, Why does anyone else notice this? Right? And so when I got I remember when I got into MIT, like flipping through the course catalog, being in my undergrad, looking for the genetic engineering courses, right, because I was like I had read about unknown about. And so even though I don't remember, like, what's I think was probably like Jurassic Park, when I was like, 12, or 13 came out. It's like, I wanted to do it, right. And I had this experience when I was an undergrad at MIT, taking lab classes, I suppose I clearly remember that a whole summer in the lab. And by the way, if you've ever done lab work, David, it is a frustrating experience, okay, like you are like standing on a lab bench, moving clear liquids around mixing things together. It's kind of like an advanced chef sort of thing, except any little mistake in the whole thing falls apart. And so I spent a whole summer trying to move one gene into a bacteria. And I failed, okay, and I remember this, and I was like, Oh, my God, this doesn't work. I thought I could get the program biology and kind of like getting out at the time. I didn't even use that language, but just like engage with it at the DNA level. And I was like, got hopeless. I wasn't until I met Tom and my advisor at the time drew, nd who were like, Hey, listen, we're going to be able to do this. It's just going to take time. And I was like, fine, because like, what else could I do? You know, like, I was like, once we at least these people are trying and they seem smarter than me. So that was a big part of it. And then as we built gingko I've gotten sort of a second purpose around how do you build a lasting company? And what are the ways we should structure it particularly around thinking about how the people who work here kind of own and gain meaning from the place we're building and so that's become a second but that was later Right. Like really the driver out of the gate was Jurassic Park.

David Novak 14:32 

I get it you know, you love biology, like I love Barkat, eat and you get started in it. And then you get the chance to build a company that you want to make live long, long time. You know, you go to MIT hook up with these other Brainiacs. You know,

Jason Kelly 14:45 

tell us how it had happened. Yeah. So I'd had that sort of like meltdown, right, where I was able to sort of engineer these cells and then I met Drew, my boss, Drew Andy, who's now a professor at Stanford. He and Tom were kind of pitching this concept that At cells were code and you could program them. And so they hosted this meeting called the synthetic biology working group. And it attracted this like, crazy carnival of people. Okay, right. And the reason was serious biologists at the time were like, cells are not computers, guys, like, let's just be clear about this. They are not predictable. They, they're squishy, they're wet, they move around. And yes, you're right, they run on code, I'll give you that. But I won't give you anything else. We were like, not that welcome with that community at the time, because they were like, You guys are oversimplifying it. But we had certain folks, you know, like Pam silver at Harvard, and others who like took pity on us engineers. And we're like, Alright, I'm going to explain to you some of the things here that you're getting wrong. And you're going and you appear to be people who can learn. And so we're going to, like, get there. And please teach me some of the lessons you have from computer science. And so we kind of had this interesting hodgepodge. And everyone was like, good spirited about it. And I met, you know, the other founders, like all we were kind of drawn to that. And we were just a little students sitting there while the professors were kind of fighting it out. And eventually, because we were the kind of first crop of students, we became, you know, kind of leaders in the early days there. That was basically how it happened. It was like moths to a flame based on somebody saying that DNA could actually be engineered.

David Novak 16:21 

We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Jason Kelly in just a moment, have you gotten stuck because you felt so overwhelmed by how complicated Something seemed? When I sat down with Kendra Scott, we talked about her process of striving for simplicity, in these kinds of moments.

Kendra Scott 16:38 

So many companies, you'll get a customer service packet, that's like 200 pages, and you give them to a new employee. And you say, Here, here's our customer service and policies read this. Mine is simple. It's a sister rule, you treat every customer like they were your sister or your brother,

David Novak 16:55 

go back and listen to my entire conversation with Kendra episode one here on how leaders lead.

Tell us the origin of your business model, you've got a very unique business model, and how did it start out? And what is your business model today?

Jason Kelly 17:15 

Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that we take a lot of cues from tech industry and platforms, right. And so if you look at how horizontal platforms get commercialized, I'll give you two good examples that have influenced our business. One is cloud computing. So cloud computing, big capital investment in infrastructure that reduces the marginal cost of a service, in this case, that compute cycle. And then you make it available to people on like a fee basis. And they're happy to pay the fee for two reasons. One, it's actually in many cases, like cheaper at your scale, like you don't have the scale to build their big facilities. So if you built like a small server, it would actually be more expensive than their big servers on a per compute basis. So that's number one. It's like cheaper than you running it yourself. Number two, no capital investment for you. Right? You don't have to spend the big upfront money to buy all those servers, you can just go and deploy in the cloud, okay. And there was this big transition, right? If you might remember, you know, in the kind of 2000s, where companies started shifting their it from on prem servers into the cloud. And then you had startup companies that got born cloud native, okay, and I'm like, This is what we got to do in biotech. David, you have no idea what it takes to launch a biotech company. It is crazy town, you go licensed some expensive lab infrastructure in Cambridge, you go buy millions of dollars of equipment, from equipment providers in the life sciences, industry, all these reagents by all these materials, and beakers and yada, yada, hire a whole team of scientists, and that now it's taken a year and you can start working crazy, okay? Whereas with me, I can say, Hey, listen, why don't you just have a variable cost r&d budget and spend on my, what we call our foundry, our robotic lab infrastructure, and we'll do the lab work. And you can just have a line item budget to spend without all that upfront investment, which is particularly good for startups, which are some of our best customers like I that company motif I mentioned, the food industry never had to build a lab. So the way I charge for that part of the business just fees. Yeah, how much do we move the robots? How much do you pay? How much compute cycles does Amazon use? How much do you pay? Alright, so that's one half. The other half, this is where we differ from Amazon. When I work with you to do a project, like let's take that hemoglobin, that was about a two year project for motif. So we engineered that cell to produce that hemoglobin at a cheaper price. They used our facility paid us fees to do the work. It ends when I'm done with the yeast. Now they've got a strain. They're putting it into bigger tanks. They're doing, you know, going to commercial deals and stuff. They stopped needing me because I'm not a server providing their website. I'm a programming tools, environment. And so the business model there is actually different. The most direct analogy comes from Microsoft in the 80s, which I will explain, but the one people are most familiar with is the App Store. Okay, so So Apple similarly is like, Hey, we're gonna host your thing and give you all this distribution and blah, blah, blah, but someone's gonna download the app just once. And so as a result, I need to take a piece of all your business, right, I need that 30% rev share in the App Store, because they're not doing an ongoing thing for you. They're basically a place someone comes to kind of pop off this thing, and then off, they run with it on their phone. So they got to take a piece. So Microsoft, in the 80s, had a programming tools business, you know, they would basically provide tools to people who are writing software. And then if you embedded your software in their app, they charge you like a seat licensing cost. I was like, it was appstore business model in the 80s. Before there was even, you know, it was fascinating. And so that's very much what we provide, we effectively are outsourced developer tools, like you have to use our little robotic labs. But as a result, you got your app written, and we get a percent. And so that's the second half of the business model is once the app is done, I need a royalty milestones or maybe even equity in your company, if you're a smaller company, so that I participate in the long tail of value that you get from that app. Yeah, I

David Novak 21:06 

thought that was interesting that you actually get paid, in some cases with equity in the company with the startups that you're dealing with.

Jason Kelly 21:13 

So one of the kind of general policies I have with building the business is like, learn from your customers.

David Novak 21:19 

That's a novel idea. That's a very novel, I'd

Jason Kelly 21:22 

be amazed how many people don't want to do that. So I would talk to these startup companies. And I'm like, Guys, this platform is really useful to you. Like I said earlier, you don't need to build that lab. Okay, you could just use me, I'm like, you actually get more value out of it than like my customers like Roche, or Bayer or Biogen who are like big companies and already have labs, you just can skip the lab. Isn't that great? And they're like, Yeah, Jason, but I've raised $5 million, and like working with you is going to cost me 3 million. So that's not going to happen. And I'm like, Yeah, but you're gonna go spend two on the lab, and then another two, kind of doing some, like half assed work in the lab, and you're not gonna get anything done in time, like, like, you're better off spending that free with me. And they're like, No, it's too bad. I can't, the normal thing to do is hire a bunch of scientists. And so I'm like, Oh, my God, this is killing me. And so what I realized was their cash sensitive. Okay, right, which makes sense, you know, and the scope of work in biotech is not small, right? Like, like, you actually need to do a lot of lab work now, now. And so what we can do is say like, well, you are off selling equity in your company to people, you know, in exchange for their cash, right? Can I work on some structures where I can actually get equity in your company in lieu of cash. And that can really help kind of us be able to engage those companies. And fortunately, with the money we've raised, we have the balance sheet to do this sort of thing. And so it makes it a lot easier to get kind of startups on the platform. So that's an example of kind of how that happens, David, also, if you launch a company on our platform, like we've been doing that we can end up instead of a royalty, we could actually just take a piece of the company up front and waive the royalty and certain startups prefer that they think it's a little bit better for future investors to not see a royalty tale to Ginko. Great. Okay, no problem, you know, we can just take equity in the company. So those are the two ways we ended up holding equity. It has mostly been like us learning from what the smaller companies needed to get on platform.

David Novak 23:12 

Definitely thinking outside the dots here, though, there's no question about that. And the power of having this horizontal platform that you're talking about, really allows you to address, every category infinite categories, Which category do you think will ultimately be the biggest

Jason Kelly 23:28 

today in biotechnology? It's therapeutics. So Therapeutics is really a kind of a cash cow of the biotech industry about you depends on what you look at Colin about a third or more of therapeutic drugs on the market every year are biotech made drugs, which means that they're coming from an engineered cell. human insulin was the very first one of these so Genentech, which is the company that we actually DNA, our ticker came from Genentech, Genentech was like the originator of all all biotechnology their first product was human insulin. Okay, my dad's a type one diabetic,

David Novak 23:56 

my wife's had type one diabetics and seven. Okay, so

Jason Kelly 23:59 

there you go. So then you know all about you Mulan, and that whole experience and you know, that technology to be able to make human insulin instead of porcine. Right? Like, that's exactly this, it literally, it's the very first biotech product of taking, cutting and pasting, in that case, the DNA from a human gene for insulin into a bacterial cell, and then growing it in the tank. Now, what's changed since 1978? Well, you know, and when that first got going, we don't need to cut and paste anymore. Again, we just type in the computer, we print whatever gene we want from any gene that's known in the world. Okay, and so that's very enabling. And also things are sort of getting cheaper to do it. Like I said earlier, you know, take the food industry, like animal meat as an example. Gates had a quote, you know, maybe six months ago or something where he was like, there's gonna be eight to 10 Tesla scale companies in climate and Tesla represents this watershed event where you have you know, a trillion dollar at various times right? Mark as today it's volatile, but but like, you know, trillion dollar company, built from scratch why I, well, they have a vision for in a carbon neutral economy, what has to be true? Oh, well, the cars need to be electric. I think that's right. Okay, when that that was the question like, when would the technology come together to make that possible at scale? But you know, it's gone to happen. And when it does, have you seen the size of the auto industry? Like, you know, of course, it's good. So then you can repeat this process, right? Like, let me tell you in a carbon neutral world, we're not growing cows at scale. zero chance, David, it is way too much of global emissions. It's way too inefficient. It's not happening, it's over. And so you just have to bet when, and then that industry beat 100 trillion dollars, you know, right. Like, these are these industries are gigantic. Right, you know, and so who's gonna win it? You know, that's one, building materials. Concrete is a ton of carbon emission. They all have biotech interfaces to them. I see all like, all these kinds of physical goods areas are big ones. So yeah, I think it'll be something like that. I think ultimately, Pharma is a great way to get the technology bootstrapped. But the bigger industries will be outside.

David Novak 26:09 

It's interesting, you bring up Elon Musk, because you've been compared to founders like him, because, as you mentioned, you're a salesman, innately, you know, you obviously are smart as hell, okay? You're able to tell compelling stories that can drive your market cap up, before you really have the revenue. Elon Musk did that, you know, people were saying when, but they believe in him. You know, being a storyteller is a powerful asset for a CEO, how have you really developed that skill?

Jason Kelly 26:39 

I think you have to be exposed to a lot of people that aren't just like from your little bubble. To be good at storytelling, there is a certain story I can tell to my, you know, PhD friends from MIT that has like every little bit min bop exactly right. And you know, as you know, 18 papers supporting it and all this stuff. And I've got close friends who like rip my head off, if I get one little thing wrong on the on technology, x or y, if I only hang out with those people, I don't actually know how to tell a story that like a wider set of people can understand, right, and I had the benefit that I grew up just around a wide set of people. You know, in Florida, my parents were pharmacists, you know, a lot of close friends or craftspeople. And, you know, I had a range, right, I also got exposed to the MIT crowd to but like, through my life, I've had exposure to a wider set of people, which lets me talk to a wider set of people. That's the thing, I think you have to spend the time and you see what works when you talk to people. And that is how you ultimately get good at storytelling, other than as practice. And the only other thing is, if it's a story, you know, you're going to tell, like, I'm giving a present, like we do our annual meeting or something like that, like I'm giving like, I can talk, practice way more than you think. Right? I will repeat a speech, you know, myself alone. 25 times,

David Novak 27:57 

that really surprises me, Jason, because you're so good off the top, you know, you seem like a guy who could just get up on stage and just do it.

Jason Kelly 28:05 

I am. That's the point David actually am. But if you want to make a can talk like truly amazing, like, practice the hell out of it. It's sad advice, because it requires work. But like, yeah, don't make me

David Novak 28:17 

do stuff that I don't want to do it. You know, Warren Buffett told me once he said that one of the best ways to really build credibility was to talk about things that could go wrong. And the reason why he told me that is that I love my company. And I, you know, these were my babies, and I talked about the brands, and we could do this and this and he said, You'll gain more credibility, if you talk about what could go wrong in your business. You know, it's the concept of sober selling. So what could go wrong in your business? And do you ever talk about it?

Jason Kelly 28:46 

Yes, I do, actually a lot. So the interesting balance, right, like, when I talk with like an investor, it's very much so over selling, right? It's sort of like, okay, like, let me explain you how someone can get at us. My view on Django has been like, what plan for success that is going to create a big pool of value? How will you defend it? How is someone going to try to someone will be able to copy you easily. So those are some of the best ways like that's what investors want to hear. They want to know, you've given some thought, you know, to those sorts of things. Okay. So in terms of like, what can go wrong? Well, number one, we got to keep that technology curve going. Right. So this is why the number one priority, like when I'm talking internally at the company, I'm like, let me tell you what breaks this place is if the platform stopped working. And by we stopped working, I mean, stops improving exponentially, like getting better, because hey, it's like it's like semiconductors. If the thing doubles in efficiency every couple of years, like how do you not make money right? Like, I make sure that people understand that is I don't think it's like the biggest weakness like we have a good plan for the next five years. But it is like the most important thing. And then it's keep the thing fed. So if I'm going to be tripling my output, boy, I need a lot more projects every year. And so we have very aggressive targets on the number of new programs. We're going to add. We said we're going to hit three already last year, we met meta beat that, you know, like, like adding new customers on the platform that was always also a flank I was worried about, are we able to do that? can I convince there's all these reasons people excuses not to want to move on the platform? Can I get them on? Right? And so I have my strategies to solve that problem. And this is one of the reasons I tell investors like, Hey, watch these things. Right? Like, how are we doing on the foundry? How are we doing on adding new programs? Right, those are the things I think about, those are the things you should think about. Right? And so so those are, those are the big ones. I think everything else kind of works out.

David Novak 30:30 

Yes. As long as you're selling it, yeah, you're developing something relevant to sell that your customers want. You can figure out all that other stuff out. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Kelly 30:37 

And even if I get something wrong, I can fix that. Right? Like, you know, like, oh, did I get this this bed? Or how we do this term, or blah, blah, blah, those are all fixable, right? What's not fixable is if that breaks down on, you know, on my scaling, and so like we're very, and I don't mind being public about that, because I want the team here not to lose the thread. Those are the things we got to focus on, you know, keep the platform improving and fill demand and everything else will work out.

David Novak 31:00 

Speaking of competition, Reed Hastings, another unbelievable founder, the founder of Netflix describes his competition as sleep. How do you view your competition?

Jason Kelly 31:11 

Yeah, so my competition? Is you doing this on prem? So in other words, like, think back to that cloud computing analogy, when clarity was just first getting going, who was their competition, not the other cloud computing providers, you keeping your servers, your IT department, right, that didn't want to move into the cloud? Oh, and why oh, well, security, and oh, uptime, and audit all these reasons, right? Because they have owned it in the past, right. And so that that's my main source of competition is the current status quo is and by the way, 1000s of biotech companies, right, will walk over into Cambridge and open a door, and there's a form of biotech company. And inside that door is a lab with somebody like me, in a white lab coat, PhD train, slaving away, you know, moving clear liquids around, it's brutal. And like, those people need to be on a computer and thinking and you know, and using infrastructure like ours, to get their work done. That's my main source of competition, you know, so

David Novak 32:08 

you don't really necessarily see like coming from a non traditional competitor, like a Google or a merc,

Jason Kelly 32:14 

know, the world of bits is a lot easier than the world of atoms. And so when people from the bid world come over, they're like, oh, boy, I'll tell you the story from back here at MIT, because this is a funny experience. So Tom Knight, you know, again, MIT professor starting computer science since the 70s. It's the 90s now, and he's like, Hey, I'm gonna do this biology thing. So all these like computer scientists who by the way, it's very obvious to them that DNA is code. They're like, Wow, I love to program that, Tom. Let's do it. And so they get in the lab, and Tom gives them a pipette, which is a little device you use to move liquids around on the bench, and they get to work doing these experiments, they do an experiment, and they get one result. They do the same experiment the next day, and they get a different result. And they're like, Tom, Tom, I just did the exact same thing twice. And I got a different result. And then he's like, yeah, yeah, that happens. No, like, why? He's like, Oh, well, you're never gonna know. And it's like, right, you know, like, if you're a computer scientist, and you run your code twice, and you get a different result. You know, like, something something is way messed up in the universe, right, you know, and so they're leaving this world of pure logic, you know, over at Google to enter the squishy word of biology and every single time, it just breaks people. And so you know, the funny thing about Tom why he was able to do it, he came from the era of computing back in the 60s and 70s, where computers were like that, right? Like Tom did punch card computing. Why does my computer not why did that my code not run well get jammed, you know, right. Like, like, just like, all these crazy mess that Tom saw the arc. And computers intrinsically are more scalable, programmable, but like, boy, they were messy back when he was there. And so he had a little more like, ability to tolerate it. But yeah, that's the reason I'm not worried about tech companies coming in. Our industry has never been like really, someone new trying to take it, it's been convincing the market to shift our way of doing this kind of work.

David Novak 34:01 

You know, because she listened to this podcast, there's one thing I know about you, for sure. Here's someone who wants to improve as a leader. And I tell you, if you want to take what you're doing to the next level, sign up for my weekly leadership plan, where each and every week, I'll send you an email that will help you build confidence as a leader. Just head over to how leaders lead.com/plan to sign up for free. That's how leaders lead.com/plan You mentioned that powerful word when when's this gonna happen when z electric car gonna really take hold, you know, and you come out your company goes public, your market cap goes up the you know, 23 $24 billion. And you know, now, you know, with what's happened, you know, I mean, every growth company in the world, every tech companies in the world has been under pressure. You know, your market cap goes down to four, you know, you've got all these people that you brought into the company. How do you keep people fired up when they see, you know, the stock taken in the tank like that? How do you lead in that kind of situation? You brought

Jason Kelly 35:07 

up Buffett a couple of times, he has a really nice little answer to question on this topic where he talks about buying a farm. He's like, you buy a farm, right? Imagine about a farm and you, you know, you understand the topology of the land and how much corn it makes, and so on. And you know, you're gonna run it, you're a great farmer, and there's a neighbor for this farm, and his farm is exactly the same as yours, right? Same topology, same output, blah, blah, this neighbor, he's like, there's one crazy quirk, where every morning he calls you up, and he's like, he offers to buy your farm. And he gives you a price. And he offers to sell you his farm. And he gives you a price for that. He this guy, the otherwise normal farmer, but he just does this one thing every day, okay? And Buffett's like, this is a great neighbor. If you ever needed to sell your farm, you could do it. If you wanted to expand, you could buy his you would love to have this neighbor, there's one thing you cannot do. Let what he is telling you influence how you run your farm. In other words, it his little call there has changed nothing about the topology of your farm, or the best way to get the corn MA and all that stuff, right. Like that is not easy. So I think that's number one is for people to understand the intrinsic value of the company, in our case, comes from the compounding technology improvement and getting more customers. And the only reason that like, strategically, the share price matters if we have to tap capital markets. Well, the good thing I have going for me as I just raised $1.5 billion. David, right. So like, I don't need to have capital markets. So you know, from a strategic standpoint, like if you're just being a purist about it, and how something like a Bezos or Buffett, you want to build a long term lasting company, you focus on the intrinsic value, and you just make sure you're not gonna run out of money, when it's a bad time to need it. Number two, you foster a culture of ownership in the company. Okay. And I think this is critically important, right? Like, we have a good amount of employee equity ownership at ginkgo, I want to grow that number, I want people to feel that they capture the value of the work they put out. And to understand that they need to understand also that like, that is set over time, basically, right, like any get you know that another Ben Graham, quote, like near term, the market is a voting machine long term, it's a weighing machine. What should everybody do? Build a company and whole and over time, it'll work out. There's no other magic to it than that, you know, right. But I don't want to get people in an attitude, the thing to be careful of is to say, oh, equities not worth anything. You know, like, oh, it's volatile. It's crazy. It's not, it's only volatile on crazy on a short timescale. On a long time scale, it reflects the actual work you do. Which, by the way, salary does not. Okay, your salary at a company is like the market clearing price for your services as set by the RAD for survey of companies your size and your position engineer number seven, you know, right? Like it's your replacement cost, which Oh, that's interesting implies you're basically a cog, but the equity you hold in the company, is the product of your work over time. Well, that's how you want people who work at your company thinking what you want people to focus on is that they are getting the value of the work they put in, like, I would like ginkgo to be on, like more than 10% by employees into the future. Imagine Amazon that'd be like, if you build a trillion dollar companies $100 billion of value for people, they deserve it. Right? Like they built the company, right? And so you want to have like a worker culture that ultimately does that and gets people there. And that's a big, in my view, how you kind of get people over, like, their heads spinning on stock price volatility in the short term, and you get a more valuable company for investors who are holding it for the right reasons for the long term. And giggles always been clear about that. We're a long term company, you're not gonna see me play for a quarter. By the

David Novak 38:33 

way, you know, you and I have something in common. I think we both were CEOs of companies with two of the best ticker symbols in the history of the world. Okay, mine was Yum, you know, which was great. And I think another great one was Southwest Airlines when they had love Luv when they were spreading love all over Texas. This was years ago and yours is DNA. You know? How did you get the DNA ticker symbol?

Jason Kelly 38:57 

Yeah. Okay. So what happened was Genentech addict because remember Genentech invented biotechnology, basically right? Like Herbert Boyer, UCSF got Nobel Prize, right, like moving one gene to another founder of the company. And so, of course, the you know, they realized that you know, the right thing, they get his DNA and so they got bought by Roche. And so when you get bought, the ticker goes back to the stock exchange, and Niazi and and NASDAQ each get a shortlist that they're allowed to keep for themselves. Okay, and Nike had this and so, you know, they're always trying to get you to list with them and we were like, Oh, we want DNA. That's a hallowed ticker in biotech world. Right and remember King has always been like a little bit outsiders Right? Like we're the engineers coming to the biologists were people that work on hamburgers and by the way, we do work in pharma to deal with Biogen and you know a V gene therapy work without Deb Ron Beck Sinitta capping enzyme ingredient for mRNA vaccines like we do self in pharma, but we're not like your usual drug discovery company. And so like I want to do right by the ticker, you know, right like, like we're so They're like, yeah, we know but like we are like Genentech like those guys were like when you look at the beginning of Genentech, just a nerd for one minute, you know they're working on human insulin as we talked about indigo dye light, like, you know, they're working on like, like for blue jeans, they're working on plants. They're working in enzymes for laundry detergent. So like there's a company that base what happened was when insulin hit, they sold everything off. The enzymes business unit got sold to Corning, it became GNN core, which then was a good size enzyme company, right and ultimately sold to DuPont and then to IFF. Like Genentech tried to do it all they realized what we realized DNA is code and it should apply to everything. What happened was they were not platform business model, they were product, and their big product I hit first was insulin. And so they became a pharma company, and they gave up on the platform dream of genetic engineering. We're not going to do that. We're gonna burn to the ground. And we'll build the platform that's like the, you know, the first class type thing for programming DNA. And so we deserve the ticker.

David Novak 40:56 

You deserve DNA. You deserve that. Well, you have it, so you gotta deserve it. Nobody can take it away from me yet. Yo. So a This has been so much fun. Jase, I want to ask you, I do a lightning round of q&a. What's the one word that best describes you? Passionate? If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be and why?

Jason Kelly 41:16 

This woman called Barbara McClintock, who discovered transposons and she got the Nobel Prize and she got it. She learned about transposons because she could talk to corn. She was like a true biology mystic. And I don't know how her brain worked. And I would love to learn how he thought that way.

David Novak 41:32 

Who's the smartest person you've ever been around? And why?

Jason Kelly 41:36 

Tom night? Because who the heck has seminal contributions in things ranging from early debuggers, from mainframes to semiconductors to bitmap displays, and then invents the academic discipline of synthetic biology? Like the range is insane. What's your biggest pet peeve? People thinking too much about themselves. I think it's even better for yourself to pursue a higher meaning or some bigger cause. And so if you just overly focus on yourself, it bothers me.

David Novak 42:04 

What's something few people would know about you?

Jason Kelly 42:08 

I was on the junior Pro Tour playing Magic the Gathering when I was in high school, I was very good card player.

David Novak 42:17 

Alright, can you go to Las Vegas?

Jason Kelly 42:20 

Yeah, they did. Actually, at one point at the peak of that card game. It was on ESPN. And it was like the best thing ever for all of us nerds.

David Novak 42:28 

Who do you go to for inspiration?

Jason Kelly 42:30 

My old advisor at MIT? Randy, he thinks big about biology. Yeah, you have to be

David Novak 42:37 

resilient to build a company from scratch what you're doing with your founders? Do you have any rituals that keep you going?

Jason Kelly 42:43 

I think I would say about certain companies. And you'll hear people tell advice. Like don't do business with your friends. Like if you're going to start a company, start a company with your friends, that you know, the ritual we've had to have. Resilience is like being human beings who are care about each other. When the pandemic happened. 2020 like, you know, myself and Baron Reshma are two of my co founders are married. We all have small kids, we literally moved in together with another family we were friends with and like live together for the summer, because we were all losing our minds. And it was like both work stressful and life stressful. And I could lean on them. Because not because they're the co founders, my company, but because we care about each other.

David Novak 43:15 

What would be the single most important advice you'd give aspiring leaders,

Jason Kelly 43:20 

that'd be a servant leader. Ultimately, the actual work of a organization is the output of all the collective actions of the people. And so you should like respect their contribution, like they're not cogs, you should respect it in reality as people and then you should tie their value in the organization and their control over the organization to that, how do

David Novak 43:41 

you do that? Jason? I mean, it you know, everybody says servant leader, and it's, you know, it can be a bunch of BS, and for a lot of guys, you know, I mean, I want to be a servant leader. And what are you doing within your culture that really reflects that that's your mindset.

Jason Kelly 43:55 

We've done a thing again, where we've given we have a class B share, to 10x voting share. And this is something that, by the way, like got pioneered by, you know, Sergey, and Larry and Zuckerberg has these, it's been a tool for like founders to maintain control of the business. You bet you can't acquire Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg approval, because he has the majority voting shares because of his super voting shares. We did that for the good co founders. We did also for all the employees now and in the future, actually. So we met new B shares, and those go to employees, so the employees that can go have 10x voting. And so that is how you empower people, because the way a corporation works is it works in service of the shareholders. And it can go the largest shareholding bloc is the workers. And so from my standpoint, this is also in the great overwhelming as founder controlled companies have demonstrated from Facebook to Google and Amazon. But it is also how you vast power in the hands of folks and end up with servant leadership because they're serving the shareholders and Jason

David Novak 44:54 

you you've got a unbelievable company, unbelievable challenge on your hand and grateful Future last question, what's your market cap and 2050?

Jason Kelly 45:03 

Da. I don't know what I'm allowed to say on stuff like that, David. So I'm gonna say, I wouldn't say nothing but Italy. But if we managed to make biologies easy to program as computers, and we are the horizontal platform for it, I think people can work it out on their own.

David Novak 45:17 

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks.

Wasn't that a fascinating conversation? Jason spoke with such passion and conviction and clarity, you can tell that he's done a lot of work to be able to communicate what he does in a simple way. And I gotta tell you, I'm impressed. All right. So this week, here's something you can do to apply what you've learned in this episode. The next time you're at a party and someone asks you what you do, I want you to watch the person's eyes that you're talking to, and see if they glaze over. I'm serious. That's what I want you to focus on. And here's why. If you can tell they're not tracking with you. You need to go back to the drawing board and work to simplify how you talk about your business, how you explain your job. Because if you talk about what you do in a simple way, I guarantee you'll be on your way to be an unstoppable. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders simplify the complex. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball,

Rob Manfred 46:36 

you have an obligation to go in a room and exchange views and try in good faith to find common ground. And I really do believe that that exchange of views in the room is crucial to moving people towards the center towards an agreement in a robust way.

David Novak 46:56 

So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be