jrkelly

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31.
Soylent Contains GMOs-And Proud of It(skepticink.com)
2 points by jrkelly 11y ago|0 comments
32.
These Synthetic Biology Companies Have Raised Half a Billion Dollars in 2015(synbiobeta.com)
2 points by jrkelly 11y ago|0 comments
33.
by jrkelly 11y ago
Nice recent post on the "mathiness" of Taleb's paper: http://www.inexactchange.org/blog/2015/07/24/the-mathiness-o... Best resource on GMOs remains this Grist series: http://gri
34.
by jrkelly 11y ago
Yeah it is a little ugly in pharma particularly. But I'll take the good luck :) If you come through Boston happy to give you a Ginkgo tour sometime.
35.
by jrkelly 11y ago
You do seem to have it all figured out. I'm glad YC is running the experiment, guess we will need to see how it plays out.
36.
by jrkelly 11y ago
I won't go down the pharma IP rathole, but I don't think this problem is intractable. There are many inventions that aren't CRISPR where TLO is happy to have the student who invented it run with it. Funding is a much bigger
37.
by jrkelly 11y ago
I don't think that is true of the last biotech boom in 80s when recombinant DNA tech was developed. Amgen, Genentech, Biogen, etc, were outsized winners. Just b/c biotech has gone to more of a 'single drug asset, build and
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by jrkelly 11y ago
Who do you think is doing the hands-on work in Bob Langer's lab that leads to that scientific breakthrough (hint - it's not Bob). No reason that recently graduated PhD/postdoc can't start a company built on their work.
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by jrkelly 11y ago
Mmmmm. Flagship (Noubar's shop) mostly incubates it's own companies (same with 3rd Rock) and uses VC partners as founding CEOs -- so if you are a missionary founder it's not really a fit. In general the pharma VC ecosystem
40.
by jrkelly 11y ago
I'll take a pro-Boston comment on hackernews however it comes!! It is true that BOS is basically unrivaled for pharma -biotech. Biotech is moving into other markets now too though. That said, we (Ginkgo Bioworks) are mostly non-pha
41.
by jrkelly 11y ago
We didn't relocate to SF. We are in Boston and kept the lab and the majority of the team there while we did YC. + lots of red-eyes.
42.
by jrkelly 11y ago
I'd recommend an SBIR/STTR (or other govt grants) first for wet-lab biotechs - it's a good source of patient money while you show early technical traction. YC after you've got things rolling can be throwing gas on a fir
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by jrkelly 11y ago
That sounds like an insane thing to do? Have no idea where that is from.
44.
by jrkelly 11y ago
CRISPR makes it easier to edit genomes in a targeted fashion especially in organisms where engineering the genome has traditionally been really hard (plants, mammalian cells). We work in microbes that are a lot easier to engineer out of th
45.
by jrkelly 11y ago
Sure. To the general public GMO has become synonymous with genetically engineered food crops. At Ginkgo we genetically engineer microbes (brewer's yeast mostly) not plants. We also wanted to highlight that designers at Ginkgo spend ti
46.
by jrkelly 11y ago
I'm Jason Kelly, one of the Ginkgo co-founders -- happy to answer questions!
47.
by jrkelly 11y ago
If you would like to get deeply into the weeds on most important facets of the debate on GMO crops, this is the best set of articles: http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/
48.
by jrkelly 12y ago
"Admit" is a pretty loaded word. The results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal by the scientists.
49.
This Startup (YC S14) Is Designing Yeast to Make Brand-New Scents, Flavors(buzzfeed.com)
8 points by jrkelly 12y ago|0 comments
50.
Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) raises $9M to build organism engineering factory(techcrunch.com)
8 points by jrkelly 12y ago|0 comments
51.
by jrkelly 12y ago
Great to see this -- much needed infrastructure for bio research.
52.
Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) Is Hiring Sales Leads(jobs.lever.co)
1 points by jrkelly 12y ago
53.
Soylent Really Green: Meal-Replacement Startup Raising at $100M Valuation(recode.net)
6 points by jrkelly 12y ago|1 comments
54.
by jrkelly 12y ago
And people are working to bring the chestnut back via genetic engineering: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/geneti... The problem with extinction is that you are throwing away a work
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by jrkelly 12y ago
Photo storage /viewing that doesn't try to sync my photos to a computer (making me scared of losing them in a sync mishap) or share them. Electronic equivalent of a shoebox. Snapjoy did this but Dropbox bought them and shut it d
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by jrkelly 12y ago
So lyft for the burbs and uber for the cities, then? Burbs require non-professional drivers (i.e. daily commuters) to become drivers since ride request density isn't high enough to support professional drivers.
57.
by jrkelly 12y ago
Yeah, my email usage at age 12-15 was also almost nil and that was in the 90s. Doubt stats at 12-15 correlate well to whether those kids will use email when they hit college.
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by jrkelly 12y ago
Agree - commercials as "30 or 60 second fully produced dramas" is laughable. Native ads can fall to wide adoption of AdBlock. It's like commercial skipping on DVRs. The only "ads" that make sense long term are thin
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by jrkelly 12y ago
Couple old, enjoyable blog posts from Bunnie Huang on viral genomes from CS standpoint: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1676
60.
by jrkelly 12y ago
We were a biotech in last batch (Ginkgo Bioworks) and got a lot out of YC. Would do it again in a heartbeat. In biotech anyway, cost of doing the work is falling rapidly. It's not software development costs yet but we're getting

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