NEWS
Recent press, public appearances, and other 50Y news
With the launch of the second edition of our fast grants – Manifest Grants – we were featured in a CNBC article by Lora Kolodny. The nominations for grants are open until August 31. Learn more about the Climate Grants and what incentivized us to continue the initiative here!
We hosted an Impact.Tech seminar on Synthetic Immunology led by Dr. Alex Marson. We explored the fundamental workings of the immune system and learned about engineering new cell behaviors and capabilities to treat diseases and advance our understanding of human health!
Seth was invited to this year’s SynBioBeta conference where, together with Thomas Middleditch, the star of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and a climate investor, he discussed climate tech investing.
Seth moderated a panel about Climate at SALT in NYC. He led the discussion with Nili Gilbert (Carbon Direct), Gaurab Chakrabarti (Solugen), and Afsaneh Beschloss (RockCreek).
Giving founders the support they need requires a different kind of VC – one that runs like the startups in its portfolio. Founders need a partner that builds. We’re excited to bring the tools we’ve been working on to the table for the first time!
Norrsken House Stockholm invited Seth to share about his journey, daily challenges, and plans for the future.
The pace of development in AI has given many the feeling that the ground is shifting under their feet. How can you find defensibility and create enduring value in the age of AI? Seth shared his thoughts in the first blog post he’s written in 8 years.
Our Founding Partner, Ela Madej, was selected the Lead Artist for this year’s Burning Man temple. Her project, Temple of The Heart, will be brought to life in collaboration with Reed Finlay. See links below for amazing renders!
Seth spoke about spinning out deep tech startups from academia at Hello Tomorrow 2023 in Paris.
In episode 9 of the Speed podcast, Peregrine spoke with Keenan Wyrobek of Zipline about building a company that saved tens of thousands of lives by overcoming obstacles insurmountable to others before.
In academic labs right now, researchers are inventing solutions to the climate crisis, disease, malnutrition, connectivity, and a host of other important problems. Commercializing this science is one of the fastest paths to solving the world's biggest problems. Unfortunately, spinning technology out of a university into a startup is a murky process, limiting the number of impactful companies created. The main element of spinning out – tech transfer of IP from academia – has been improving, but it’s far from solved. We’ve seen negotiations with tech transfer offices (TTOs) take so long that founders burned out, teams lost momentum, and investors walked away. We’ve seen TTOs introduce terms that hurt the startup’s ability to raise capital. We’ve seen so many exotic term combinations that we wondered: how are founders supposed to make sense of it all? So we made this Spinout Playbook to help aspiring scientist founders make sense of the process.
Join us for the conversation with Will Bruey, who together with Delian Asparouhov and Dan Marshall co-founded Varda, a company leading in-space manufacturing.
In this episode, we were excited to ask none other than the Founding Father of Genomics and the Father of Synthetic Biology, George Church (the Church Lab at Harvard) about his take on multiplexing in bio, raising grant funding, the right culture for a lab, and more!
We’ve launched Repro Grants, a fast grants-style program awarding ambitious research projects aiming to deepen our understanding of the female reproductive system. Initiated by Sara Kemppainen, the program is open for applications from scientists and researchers in and outside of the US.
Learn more about the program →
Applications closed on December 17th, 2022.
Join us for the 4th episode of SPEED podcast and hear John Gedmark, CEO of Astranis, share his team's journey from the very early days to the stage they are at now, launching satellites into space and providing internet access to people in need.
Seth spoke at a climate-focused panel, Sara shared a lot about repro health, and Ela talked about GP <> LP communications.
Substack is a powerful platform for publishers. Our guest and co-founder of Substack, Chris Best, shared with us what helped the team reach the recognition they have now and how they approach growth, releasing new features almost weekly.
Josie Kishi joined us for episode 4 of Translation podcast to talk about Light-seq, a cheap and accessible method to combine sequencing and imaging in intact biological samples that she developed together with her team. In episode 5 Anastasia Ershova walks us through DNA origami, a powerful tool that may be useful to produce ultrasensitive, next-generation diagnostics or in programmable biofabrication at the multi-micron scale. Dan Goodman was our guest in episode 6. He walked us through using T-cells to target new proteins that are markers of cancer, infectious diseases, and other important disorders.
Episode 2 is with Erik Schluntz of Cobalt Robotics. Erik and his cofounder Travis started in 2016, setting out on a quest to bring useful robots into human spaces, fast. They went from nothing to a first mobile robot prototype in 2 weeks, and a working robot at a paying customer site in 12 months.
Seth was invited to join a climate tech panel at Web Summit in Lisbon. He was joined by Nick de la Forge of Planet A Ventures and Yasir Khan, the Editor-in-chief at Thomson Reuters Foundation.
