it’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically as you bludgeon it into existence. It’s hard to raise the money and to find the right people. So if you’re going to dedicate your life to a business, which is the only way it will ever work, you should choose one... See more
You sometimes hear that a team built something great despite being small - we think that teams most often build great things because they’re small (with strong talent, passion, and chemistry, of course). So our hiring approach thus far is hiring only people that are so talented they could have been co-founders in another sequence of events. We’re... See more
scalability ignores the negotiations between individual elements and is predicated on hierarchy, isolation, and the commodification of nature. Instead, synthetic biology should model itself on the living world, which takes a collaborative approach to survival and allows for fruitful cross-contamination of ideas.
If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?