Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning 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 Ginkgo Bioworks, the largest designer of synthetic DNA in the world. Back to the last time someone asked you what you did for a living. For a simple question is this, it can be really hard to answer. The reason is, in the back of your mind, you're probably thinking, "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. 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. This is something that Jason Kelly has mastered. Tell me a more complex business to have to explain than synthetic biology. 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 Gink go getting ready for this conversation. And I've got to tell you, you've got one heck of a challenge to simplify for us non-scientific types. What's your business is all about? Tell us about your business in the most simple terms you can. Sure. So inside of every cell out there in nature is digital code in the form of DNA. So it's ATCs and Gs, not zeros and ones like what's inside your computer. But you can actually read this code with DNA sequencing. You might have heard of the human genome project, that whole thing. That was you basically grind a cell up, you put it in a machine and on your computer screen, ATCGGG 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 type on my computer ATCGGG, I hit 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, inject 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 can 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 is the largest writer of that type of DNA code in the world. That's an amazing place to be. And 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? Yes, I'll give you another computing analogy before we go too nerdy on biology. So what makes computers special? They get better all the time as 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, all right? Well, we'll talk about because the analogy 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 don't know it yet. That's why synthetic biology is interesting. Yeah, you got to believe we can get good at programming these cells, which is a conversation we should definitely have. But if you can, those are the types of industries that need to pay attention to it. So how do you go about building a company that really makes this possible in the future? This is an incredible challenge, it seems like. 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 2002. I was pushing 20 years now, actually. First off, you surround yourself with people that are passionate believers in a long-term vision, right? And so I'll give you a little background on my co-founder. So there's four of us that were in grad school. The fifth founder was a professor at MIT. It's fellow Tom Knight. And Tom gets to the heart of your question of 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. So Tom went, he programmed mainframes. He was a computer architect. He had designed that machine. And so what happened was 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 could 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. They're growing bacteria, scaring all his coworkers, who had never seen this stuff, and built a relationship with the biologists. And so you had this meeting of computer scientists who had their lessons, biologists who were like, hey, biology's too complicated to think of it. 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 that same group, we've all been following Tom's vision for the last 20 years now. And we're believers that 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. The company's 15 people. It's running low on money. Or this, you're sort of like, well, it's worth a try, right? Because we have this bigger goal we're going for. That's a big part of it, is having that shared long-term vision. And Tom gave us that. You go from a company having 15 people. How many people do you have now? About 700 people now. You're the CEO. So you've got to tell people the story. You've got to tell Wall Street the story. You've got to bring in new people telling your story. What's the hardest thing to communicate about what you do? The hardest thing is it's sort of a new area for people. If you're the latest SaaS company or social network, you have a lot of things to point to in the past and say, well, listen, snap, right? We have these angles to compete with Facebook. And this is our modes. But you understand how a social network makes money, right? I mean, advertising. So that's just what we're going to 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 in computing, right? You look at the biotech industry that I'm in, everything is vertical. Every pharma company has got its own technology stack. And companies don't-- 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 that new? Are you making a new seed, right? Are you going to go compete with Monsanto? 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? We should have a platform business model. And they're like, what the heck are you talking about? Because it's new in that industry. But we've spent the first 10 years at MIT really thinking through the technology kind of physics of this industry. And I spent the last 13, 14 here at Ginkgo figuring out the business model side of it. And the lesson was the models come from tech. 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. It's 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 tens of new deals every year with all these different customers. So 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, just to give you a sense of some of the difficulties. When you think about disrupting the industry, you talked about the hamburger. Give us an example of a product you guys have developed that is really changing the game. OK, yeah. So I like the burger. That's a good example, actually. And by the way, a reminder, I don't develop these end products. OK, our customers do. So I'll give you an example. So if you ever had-- and by the way, Impossible Food is not one of our customers. I'll give you an example from this industry. So if you ever had an Impossible burger-- Yes, I am. All right. So it's veggie burger. You bite into it. It bleeds. Where are they getting the blood from, David? Right? You know, like 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. OK, this is like the protein in blood, in cows, in humans, or whatever else that makes blood red. And they take yeast, like think like brewer's 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. Instead of beer coming out, hemoglobin comes out. Because you just reprogram the yeast to do that. Well, now you add it back into a burger. And suddenly, it smells right. Tastes 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 Food Works that got founded four years ago. We actually did a project with them to engineer a yeast cell to make a hem oglobin. 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 passionate about this business, Jason, obviously. What's your personal purpose behind the obvious passion that you have? 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 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 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 if 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 as a God." Right? And when 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 apples margins if you just copy, you know, 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'd think of it as like some unbelievable alien advanced technology, right? You know? But, "Oh, hey, it's a house plant." You're so accustomed to it that you ignore it. And so for those of us that kind of were 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 into MIT, like flipping through the course catalog being, like undergrad, looking for the genetic engineering courses, right? Because I was like, "I had read about and known about." So even then, I don't remember what's that. I think it 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 clearly remember that. I thought 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 at 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 and 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 at the end of summer, I was like, "Oh my God, this doesn't work." I thought I could get to program biology and kind of like, at the time I wouldn 't even use that language, but just like, you know, engage with it at the DNA level. And I was just like, "God, hopeless." It wasn't until I met Tom and my advisor at the time drew Andy 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 it's like, "What else could I do?" You know, like I was like, "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 Ginkgo, 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. I get it. You know, you love biology. Like I love marketing and you get started in it and then you get the chance to build a company that you want to make live a long, long time. You know, you go to MIT, you hook up with these other Brady acts. You know, tell us how that happened. Yeah. So I had had that sort of like meltdown, right, where I wasn't 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 cells were code and you could program them. And then we had 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'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, like Pam Silver and Harvard and others who like took pity on us engineers. And we're like, all right, 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 these 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 lost to a flame based on somebody saying that DNA could actually be engineered. 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. 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. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Kendra, episode one here on How Leaders Lead. Tell us though, 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? 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 can be 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, a compute cycle, and then you make it available to people on a fee basis. And they're happy to pay the fee for two reasons. One, it's actually in many cases cheaper at your scale. You don't have the scale to build their big facility. So if you built 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 cheaper than it 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 license 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, buy all these materials and beakers and yada yada , hire a whole team of scientists. And 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 that company, Motif, I mentioned in 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? All right. So that's one half. The other half, this is where we differ from Amazon. And 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, I'm going to do commercial deals and all that stuff. They stop 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 Apple similarly is like, hey, we're going to host your thing and give you all this distribution and blah, blah, blah, but someone's going to 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, that was an App Store business model in the 80s before there was even, you know, and it was fascinating. And so that's very much what we provide. We effectively are outsource developer tools, like you have to use our 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 thought that was interesting that you actually get paid in some cases with equity in the company with these startups that you're dealing with. So one of the other kind of general policies I have with building the business is like, learn from your customers. It's a novel idea. That's a very novel idea. You're supposed to 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 going to 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 going to get anything done in time. 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 they're cash sensitive, okay, right? Which makes sense, you know, and the scope of work in biotech is not small, right? Like you actually need to do a lot of lab work 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 out 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. Unfortunately 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 ginkgo. Great. Okay. So that's a big equity in the company. So those are the two ways we end up holding equity. It has mostly been like us learning from what the smaller companies needed to get on platform. Definitely thinking outside the dots there, 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? Today in biotechnology, it's therapeutics. The therapeutics is really kind of the cash cow of the biotech industry about, you know, depending on what you look at, calling it 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 biotechnology. Their first product was human insulin. Okay. My dad's a type one diabetic. My wife said type one diabetic since seven. Okay. So there you go. All that, you know, and that whole experience and, you know, that technology to be able to make human insulin instead of poor scene, right? Like, that's exactly this. It literally, it's the very first biotechnology 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 a tank. Now, what's changed since 1978, 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, like animal meat as an example. Gates had a quote, you know, maybe six months ago or something where he was like, there's going to 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? And Mark Evans today is volatile. But like, you know, trillion dollar company built from scratch. Why? 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 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, oh, have you seen the size of the auto industry? Like, you know, of course it's going to, you know, and 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, be there trillion dollars, you know, right? These are the energy. You're gigantic, right? 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 kind 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 bootstrap, but the bigger industries will be outside. 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 would say it when, but they believed in him. You know, being a storyteller is a powerful asset for a CEO. How have you really developed that skill? I think you have to be exposed to a lot of people that aren't just like from your little level to be good at storytelling. There is a certain story I can tell to my PhD friends from MIT that has like every little bit and bop exactly right. And you know, has, you know, 18 papers supporting it and all this stuff. And I've got close friends who will like rip my head off if I get one little thing wrong on the 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. You know, I had a range, right? I also got exposed to the MIT crowd too. 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 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 that is 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 a door annual meeting or something like that, like I'm giving like a can talk, practice way more than you think, right? I will repeat a speech, you know, myself, alone, 25 times. 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 and stage and just do it. I am. That's the point, David. I 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 just requires work. But like, you know, don't make me do something I don't want to do that. 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? Yes, I do actually a lot. So it's an interesting balance, right? Like when I talk with like an investor, it's very much sober selling, right? It's sort of like, okay, like let me explain to you how someone can get at us. My view on Gengo has been like, look, 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 say, is someone going to 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 sort 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 stops working. And by which stops 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? So I'm 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 30 last year and we met or beat that, you know, 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? Because the reasons people have 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 the big ones. I think everything else kind of works out. Yeah, as long as you're selling it, you're developing something relevant to sell that your customers want. You can figure out all that other stuff out. Yeah. If there's something wrong, I can fix that. Right? Like, oh, did I get this, this bit 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 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. Speaking of competition, Reed Hastings, another unbelievable founder, the founder of Netflix describes his competition as sleep. How do you view your competition? Yeah. So my competition is you doing this on-prem. So in other words, like think back to that cloud computing analogy when cloud is 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 all these reasons. Right? Because they have owned it in the past. Right? And so that's my main source of competition is the current status quo is, and by the way, thousands of biotech companies, right? We'll walk over to Cambridge and open a door and there's a farm, a 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 you don't really necessarily see like coming from a nontraditional competitor like a Google or a Merck? No, the world of bits is a lot easier than the world of atoms. And so when people from the bit world come over, they're like, oh boy, I'll tell you the story from back we're 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 going to 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 would 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 do the exact same thing twice. And I got a different result. And they're like, yeah, yeah, that happens. And they're like, why? And he's like, oh, well, you're never going to 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 is way messed up in the universe, right? You know? And so they're leaving this world of pure logic over at a 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 cart computing. Why did my computer not? My code not run. Well, it jammed, you know, right? Like just like all these crazy mess. So Tom saw the arc and computers and, traditionally, are more scalably program mable, 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 issues never been like really someone new trying to take it. It's been convincing the market to shift to our way of doing this kind of work. You know, because you listen to this podcast, there's one thing I know about you for sure. You're someone who wants to improve as a leader. And I'll 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 howleaderslead.com/plan to sign up for free. That's howleaderslead.com/plan. We mentioned that powerful word, "win." "Winds is going to happen." "Winds the electric car going to really take hold." And you come out, your company goes public, your market cap goes up to $23, $24 billion. And now with what's happened, I mean, every growth company in the world, every tech company in the world's been under pressure, your market cap goes down to four. You've got all these people that you brought into the company. How do you keep people fired up when they see the stock taking the tank like that? How do you lead in that kind of situation? You brought up Buffet a couple times. He has a really nice little answer to a question on this topic where he talks about buying a farm. He's like, "You buy a farm." Imagine you bought a farm and you understand the topology of the land and how much corn it makes and so on. And you're going to run at your great farmer. And there's a neighbor for this farm. His farm is exactly the same as yours, right? Same topology, same output, blah, blah. This neighbor, he's like, "That is 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. This guy, the other one, he's a normal farmer, but he just does this one thing every day. And Buffet'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. What he is telling you, influence how you run your farm." In other words, his little call there has changed nothing about the topology of your farm or the best way to get the corn to make 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 strategically the share price matters if we have the tap capital markets. And all the good thing I have going for me is I just raised $1.5 billion, David . So I don't need to have capital markets. So from a strategic standpoint, if you're just being a purist about it and how someone like a Bezos or a Buffet, if you want to build a long-term, last company, you focus on the intrinsic value and you just make sure you're not going to run out of money when it's a bad time to need it. Number two, you foster a culture of ownership in the company. And I think this is particularly important. We have a good amount of employee equity ownership at Ginko. 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 that is set over time basically. Like any other Ben Graham quote, near term, the markets of voting machine, long -term, it's a weighing machine. What should everybody do? Build the company and overtime, it'll work out. There's no other magic to it than that. But I don't want to get people in an attitude. The thing to be careful of is to say, oh, equity's not worth anything. You know, like, oh, it's volatile. It's crazy. It's all involved on crazy on a short time scale. 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 Radford survey of companies your size and your position engineer number seven, you know, right? It's your replacement cost, which, oh, that's interesting. It applies, you're basically a cog. But the equity you hold in the company is the product of your work overtime. 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 owned like more than 10% by employees into the future. Imagine Amazon. That'd be like, if you'd be able to a trillion dollar company, it's a hundred billion dollars 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 head 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 Ginkgo's always been clear about that. We're a long term company. You're not going to see me play for a quarter. By the way, 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. 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? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So what happened was Genentech had it because remember Genentech invented bi otechnology, basically, right? Like Herbert Boyer, UCSF got no surprise, right? Moving one gene to another founder of the company. And so of course, you know, they realized the right thing they get is DNA. And so they got bought by Roche. And so when you get bought, the ticker goes back to the stock exchange. And Nizie and Nasuk each get a short list that they're allowed to keep for themselves. Okay. And Nizie had this. And so, you know, they're always trying to eat 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, Genghos always been like a little bit outsiders, right? Like we're the engineers coming to the biologists. They're people that work on hamburgers. And by the way, we do work in pharma. I did a deal with biogen and, you know, a V gene therapy work without devron on vaccinee of capping enzyme, ingredient for mRNA vaccines. Like we do stuff 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 we're sort of 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 work on human insulin as we talked about. Indigo die. Like, you know, they were going like for blue jeans. They're working on plants. They're working in enzymes for laundry detergent. So like there's a company that basically what happened was when insulin hit, they sold everything off. The enzymes business unit got sold to Corning. It became Gen N Core, which then was a good size enzyme company, right? And and ultimately sold to DePont 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 that 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'll either burn to the ground or we'll build the platform that's like the, you know, the first OS type thing for programming DNA. And so we deserve the ticker. You deserve DNA. You deserve that. Well, you have it. So you got to deserve it. Nobody could take it away from you. Yo. So this has been so much fun. Jase, I want to ask you, I do a lightning round of Q and A. What's the one word that best describes you? Passionate. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be and why? I was one of 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 she thought that way. Great. Who's the smartest person you've ever been around and why? Tom Knight. Who the heck has seminal contributions in things ranging from early debuggers for main frames 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. That's something few people would know about you. I was on the junior pro tour playing Magic the Gathering when I was in high school. I was a very good card player. Can you go to Las Vegas? They did actually at one point at the peak of that card game. It was on ESPN. It was like the best thing ever for all of us nerds. Who do you go to for inspiration? My old advisor at MIT, Dr. Randy. He thinks big about biology. You have to be resilient to build a company for scratch, which you're doing with your founders. Do you have any rituals that keep you going? I think I would say about starting a company. Sometimes you'll hear people tell advice like don't do business with your friends. If you're going to start a company, you start a company with your friends. The ritual we've had to have resilience is like being human beings who care about each other. My pandemic happened in 2020. My self and very rich, which my co-founders are married. We all have small kids. We literally moved in together with another family we were friends with and lived together for the summer. We were all losing our minds. It was both work stressful and life stressful. I could lean on them because they're co-founders of my company, but because we care about each other. What would be the single most important advice you'd give aspiring leaders? I'd be a servant leader. Ultimately, the actual work of an organization is the output of the collective actions of the people. You should respect their contribution. They're not cogs. You should respect it in reality as people. Then you should tie their value in the organization and their control over the organization to that. How do you do that, Jason? Everybody says, "Servant leader." It can be a bunch of BS for a lot of guys. I want to be a servant leader. What are you doing within your culture that really reflects that that's your mindset? We've done a thing again, Go where we've given. We have a Class B share, it's a 10x voting share. This is something that, by the way, got pioneered by Sergey and Larry. Zuckerberg has these. It's been a tool for founders to maintain control of the business. You can't acquire Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg's approval because he has the majority voting shares because of his super voting shares. We did that for the Ginkgo founders. We did it also for all the employees now and in the future, actually. We met new B shares and those Go to employees. The employees at Ginkgo have 10x voting. That is how you empower people because the way a corporation works is it works in service of the shareholders. Ginkgo, the largest shareholder block, is the workers. From my standpoint, this is also in the great overwhelming as founder control companies have demonstrated from Facebook to Google and Amazon. It is also how you vest power in the hands of folks and end up with servant leadership because they're serving the shareholders. Jason, you've got an unbelievable company, unbelievable challenge on your hand and a great future. Last question. What's your market cap in 2050? I don't know what I'm allowed to say on stuff like that, David. I'm going to say nothing, but if we manage to make biology easier to program as computers and we are the horizontal platform for it, I think people can work it out on their own. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, David. It 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 got to 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 asked 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, you'll be on your way to be an unstoppable. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders simplify the complex. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball. You have an obligation to go in a room and exchange views and try in good faith to find common ground. 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. 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. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]