The $100 Trillion Opportunity

We make the case that the twin catastrophes of climate change and a crippled health care system shouldn’t be viewed as a threat to the economy, as an economic suppressor — but rather a historic opportunity for reinvention and economic gain.

Roughly, $35 billion is raised by venture capital funds annually, around the globe. Another $55 billion of private equity gets invested into growth opportunities. The promise of that annual $90 billion is to triple their money within ten years.

To most people, that ten year, $270 billion prize sounds like an enormous amount. But I’d argue it’s vastly underestimating the opportunity in front of us.

I think of R&D as an industry’s “mutation rate.” The same way any organism uses epigenetic (environmental) signaling to increase its mutation rate under survival stress, industries and economies invest in R&D to make sure they’re still going to be operating when the world changes rapidly around them. Some firms buy their innovation through acquisitions of startups that have opened a new market. While not native to the DNA of a company, this acquisition or in-house innovation can be transformative, like a virus that takes a host in a new direction.

If you look at the global R&D spend, across both industry and investment markets, you don’t necessarily see the recognition and awareness of just how much the world is changing. Only the healthcare sector and the software/internet sector show rapid increases of their mutation rate in the last five years. The auto industry’s R&D is slowly climbing, but not at the pace you’d imagine for an industry that’s about to suffer the disruptive shock of autonomous and electric vehicles. The mutation rate in computing/electronics is actually going down; it’s also going down in chemicals, energy, telecom and aerospace. In consumer products, the mutation rate is flat. This suggests that only in two sectors is there enough awareness of both how quickly the world is changing, and the size of the opportunity created by those changes.

At IndieBio, we work with people and companies in most of these industries, and we know they are preaching the importance of investment into innovation. Some companies are investing much more heavily than others. Nevertheless, the statistics don’t lie; low overall mutation rates across so many industries hints that these pioneers aren’t necessarily being heard.

Maybe this article will help.

I’d like to show you our worldview at IndieBio — the really big picture — and then focus on the role of just one technological diaspora, biotech.

At IndieBio, we often talk about the “$100 Trillion Opportunity.” It’s a tautology, both obvious and not-obvious at once. Considering that the entire GNP of China today is $24 trillion, a hundred trillion can sound preposterously abstract. An exaggeration. Perhaps something an evil villain in a movie demands as a ransom for the planet itself.

But consider for a moment. The world’s economy doubles around every 25 years. It doubled between 1971 and 1994, in constant dollars, and then it doubled again between 1994 and 2018. Today, the global economy is about $100 trillion. That means in front of us lies another $100 trillion in growth, to be captured over just the next quarter century. The growth opportunity, in the next 25 years, is double what it was in the last 25 years.

We modeled what this $200 trillion global economy will look like in 2043, by industry.

It’s pretty interesting just to stare at. First, most of the numbers are in the thousands of billions — in trillions. That alone kind of opens the mind.

Then this is where biotech comes in. You’ll notice that “biotech” is not a bar on the chart. (We’re saving that.) Along with the industry sector sizes, we also projected what this growth would mean for the annual demand of natural resources.

If we keep scaling up the current technologies we use, the impact on planetary resources would be devastating.

• As we add another 2 billion people to the population, coal extraction and burning would spike from 7.4 billion tons a year to 12.3 billion tons by 2043.

• The meat we rear and slaughter would at least double, from from 325 million tons to 650 million.

• We pull a trillion fish out of the oceans every year — and have hit the upper limit — so aquaculture is going to have to at least double, from 106 million tons to more like 250 million tons by 2043.

• Plastics production, at current growth rates, would skyrocket from 7.8 billion tons to 18.6 billion tons.

• The number of cars and light vehicles manufactured every year would surge from 98 million a year to 130 million.

• Sawn wood, at 500 million cubic meters a year today, would increase to 650 million cubic meters — while wood paneling is on track to increase 150%.

• Oil extraction would jump from 5 billion tons of oil to 7 billion.

We’re either headed down the path of ruinous consumption, or we’ll learn to reinvent production.

Human health is at a similar crossroads. The number of people who have cancer is growing twice as fast as population growth. Over the next 25 years, that means the cancer population will increase by at least 43 million. Obesity is climbing 1% a year and is the number one cause of poor human health. Globally, 31% of the people who die every year are victims of cardiovascular disease. Imagine that rising to 50%.

Despite stunning (and truly incredible) new advancements in disease treatment, we’re not making much dent in the underlying root causes of poor health. And the cost of these treatments (driven ever upward by the price and pace of regulatory approval) only makes the total healthcare expenditure a greater and greater economic burden.

But where most see crisis, I see opportunity. With that next $100 trillion in economic growth to gain, we have the opportunity, now, to invest in solutions that sustainably feed, clothe, house and keep healthy the growing world population.

At IndieBio, we believe that biology is the technology that unlocks this $100 trillion opportunity, solving both planetary health and human health. IndieBio, based in San Francisco, is the world’s leading synthetic biology accelerator. We graduate 30 startup companies a year, all with massive potential to disrupt industries. To co-create those 30 companies, we evaluate many hundreds of applicants, all working on diverse applications of synthetic biology around the world. We literally see the future coming.



Capital markets have long underestimated biotech because of the inaccurate belief that biotech is a mere subset of the pharmaceutical industry. But pharma alone, and it’s 6% growth rate, does not explain why synthetic biology is growing at 28% year on year. Synthetic biology is not a subset of pharma; rather, pharma is just one of many industries that synthetic biology is reinventing.

Virtually everywhere that chemicals and minerals have been used, biology can do it better.

That started in pharma, where large molecule, biologic proteins displaced small molecule, chemically-derived therapies. Riding this revolution, the pharma industry will grow from $2 trillion today to $8.5 trillion by 2043.

Now this same displacement has started in other industries, and whoever has the best biology will win. Proteins are machines, on a molecular scale, that can be designed to serve almost any specific function. They also can be patented, like any machine. Because of this, and because they are the most critical ingredient, this gives biotech innovations enormous leverage to disrupt a market.

Market by market, we can envision the potential of biotech to reinvent so many industries, especially as the environmental externalities collide with current production economics.

We are the carbon planet. All life forms are made from carbon because carbon is an extremely versatile element; it bonds to every other element, and the bonds are stable and store energy really well. Of the 70 million compounds known to chemists, 80% are carbon-based. It’s the King of the Elements. Humans are 18% carbon; soil is 4 to 8% carbon; sugar is 36% carbon; trees are 50% carbon by dry weight. But coal is 87% carbon, and oil is 85% carbon. That’s why, when we wanted energy or we wanted to make things, it was easiest to pull coal and oil out of the earth. We learned to make almost everything from this extracted carbon — bridges, clothes, floor coverings, paint, toys, motors. You name it. That progress started 4,000 years ago, when humans mixed a little carbon into iron and created steel. Over the last hundred years, we got a lot better at making things from extracted carbon. Now we need to do all that over again, almost starting from scratch and doing it more sustainably — replicating the work of the last 100 years in the next 25.

In his book The 5th Beginning, University of Wyoming archeologist Bob Kelly divides the history of humankind into eras. The first beginning was when humans invented tools, three million years ago; the second beginning was the creation of language and culture; the third at the dawn of agriculture and sedentary communities; the fourth resulted from the creation of the state, or governments. Kelly dates the 5th beginning as around year 1500, but his description rings ominously of today: from that time period on, humankind has had the ability that no forebears did — to change the world itself, to destroy it or possibly recreate it. From 1500 to the last century, our impact on the world wasn’t something we were conscious of. But today it’s unmissable.

Since the early 1990s, when we first invented protein engineering and the mechanisms to edit the genome, we’ve been increasingly capable of altering life’s instruction code — not just in our own bodies, but truly, in all life forms on the planet. The biomass of the planet is estimated at 550 billion cubic tons. Annual production is 100 billion tons. Humans make up only 1/10,000th of the world’s biomass. Plants make up 80%. All the animals in the world, together, are only 1/40th the biomass of bacteria. And there are 8.7 million species of animal on earth, with 10,000 new species discovered every year. There are 950,000 species of insects. 400,000 species of plants. And 5 million species of fungi, which is a lot, but nothing compared to the estimated one trillion species of bacteria. Every single species, of every class, represents a slightly unique solution to surviving in its habitat. A solution to learn from, put to work, or improve upon.

Quite literally, all of this biomass, in its awe-inspiring variety, is now subject to human design. We can study its instruction code, mimic it, transplant it elsewhere, or edit it directly. Our planetary impact is so great that we humans decide, intentionally or blindly, which species thrive and which go extinct.

And the ways to approach this engineering are nearly limitless. DNA may be the master instruction code, but organisms also have hundreds of thousands of signaling systems that activate or suppress a pathway. Every step of a pathway — every signaling system — is a potential target.

Scientists today can go online and order any one of 250,000 antibodies from a biological products distributor. There’s a protein on the shelf for every known receptor — choose among 350,000 proteins, ready to ship. If a scientist is interested in a particular gene, they can look up any one of 20,000 genes and select products that act on its pathways. Science today is less about conducting the experiment and more about designing biology, purposely. One of our IndieBio companies, SyntheX, created a system to test 10 billion protein variants, simultaneously, in a single petri dish to hunt cures for cancer. Or if a scientist wants to use machine learning to find hidden patterns in biological data, they don’t have to write that code; they can just download any one of thousands of programs on Github that’s already been employed.

To those who haven’t been near a science bench since ninth grade biology class, a lot has changed. What took many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to do, 20 years ago, now takes a few hours and hundreds of dollars.

Everything from apparel to packaging to plastics — $6 trillion in markets between them — are gradually shifting from chemically-based processes to more sustainable, biological processes. A titanic race is underway, to remake every molecular form of plastic, rubber, vinyl, and compound. Fossil-fuel oil is being replaced as the source material with other sources of carbon: sugar, corn, biomass, burned municipal waste, methane, or direct CO2 exhaust. Biotech is then used to synthesize the biomaterial, and in some cases, enhance it — such as how enzymes treat fibers to keep apparel from fraying or to soften leathers. Then biotech also determines the post-use sustainability, whether the goal is to make the plastic recyclable more than just a few times, or whether the goal is to make the plastic degrade faster, and more completely — be that in a recovery center or in a compost pile. At every step, engineered bacteria are involved, and every year, companies one-up each other with their method, making the materials cheaper and better. Some materials are still awaiting a cost-competitive, new solution — but the prize is huge.

We don’t know who will win, but we know the winners will be those with the best biology.

The $140 billion laundry detergent industry has already been disrupted by biotech, which engineered enzymes to more sustainably clean clothes than chemical detergents. The $600 billion cosmetics industry, the $100 billion hair care industry, and the $40 billion fragrance industry are all on a similar path, reinventing body products to actually live up to the claims those industries long made. And the oil & gas industry already uses gas fermentation bioreactors and bacteria to synthesize both jet fuel and ethanol. Virtually all jet planes and cars today are running on a hybrid fuel made possible by biotech.

Zymergen and Gingko Bioworks have both raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists to systematically enable biology to make these products more efficiently. The engineering of biochemical pathways is becoming a field attracting top young talent eager to solve these planetary problems with biology.

So how else does biotech change the world?

The materials used by the construction industry are not escaping this transformation. New concrete manufacturing biochemistry methods can reduce CO2 emissions by 70%. “Smart concrete” isn’t wired with electronic sensors; rather, tiny pockets of spores are embedded. They remain dormant until a crack emerges. Oxygen activates the spores, which patch the concrete with calcite. We don’t know if the buildings of the future will be made with concrete, or with wood, or with steel — but we know they’ll all be made better with biotech. The exhaust from steel mills is increasingly captured for the bioplastics industry, potentially making steel drastically more sustainable. Cross-laminated timber beams glued with new bioresins are lighter and stronger than steel, and going into more buildings. Society could decide that the best way to preserve the boreal forests is to turn them into a sustainable bioeconomy that’s as taken care of any factory. Meanwhile, exterior building surfaces with embedded hydrogels help buildings stay cool the same way plants and animals do, absorbing heat then evaporating it with water.

The $8 trillion food and agriculture industry is already looking at a projected 6% decline in crop yields, over the next dozen years, due to more arid conditions caused by global warming. Non-GMO biotech solutions improve the bacteria around a plant seed, giving crops the ability to self-fertilize and survive with far less water. Pollination, despite declining bee populations, is solved by companies like Beeflow, which make bees smarter and stronger. Fertilizer runoff — currently causing hypoxic dead zones at river mouths around the world — has a number of solutions, both on the farm and is solved by large scale facilities that use special bacteria that convert nitrogen to unreactive and harmless dinitrogen gas. Bacteriophages are now used to clean food processing factories, reducing chemicals and water washdowns. PivotBio is a company that has raised over $100 million dollars to improve nitrogen fixation in soil through the microbiome of plant roots. This not only improves crop yields but helps keep the soil from becoming fallow.

Lingrove’s EKOA, moldable to any shape, replaces hardwoods.

Meanwhile, as consumers turned away from packaged foods with additives and preservatives in them, food scientists reinvented food safety with enzymes that controlled gas reactions inside the packaging. Sugar is a huge factory in obesity — all the new artificial sweeteners are derived by synthetic biology, mimicking a natural compound. Probiotics will also continue to drive growth in the food industry, and expect that every few years, the ability to tune our microbiome to improve our health will make meaningful leaps forward.

New Age Meats’ pork sausage, made without the pig.

Global demand for meat and fish can’t be met with current technology. Cell-based meat, from companies like Memphis Meats, Finless Foods, and New Age Meats, grow protein in bioreactors, without the animal. Meat analogues are also growing at 16% annually. Then, the entire poultry and fish food chain is about to be disrupted by new feed ingredients. Rather than grinding up little ocean fish to make feed from, biotech is unleashing a variety of approaches that create full amino-acid proteins and Omega-3s for the feed. These ingenious techniques use the workhorses at the bottom of the food chain — bacteria and cyanobacteria (algae), which feed on everything from food waste to gasses like methane and CO2 waste, piped right from factory smokestacks. Once these new feed ingredients hit the commodity markets, they’ll take enormous pressure off our ocean ecosystems.

The carbon cycle is the Earth’s thermostat. Over geological time, rain etches carbon from rocks and soil; when it hits the oceans, the carbon momentarily becomes the skeletons and shells of marine life, before sinking to the ocean floor and becoming limestone. Volcanoes that form at the collision of tectonic plates return carbon to the atmosphere. That’s how it worked for tens of millions of years, until we came along and spread over the planet.

Now, every year, human utilization of fossil fuels put 200 times more carbon into the atmosphere than volcanoes do.
Thus we’re unlikely to meet global atmosphere goals just by reducing global greenhouse gas production and adopting solar. We also have to invent a whole new class of atmospheric engineering technologies to scrub CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide from the atmosphere, and to stop plastics from poisoning ocean life. Atmospheric engineering is essentially an outgrowth of the $1.5 trillion waste management industry.

So, when we look at that $100 trillion opportunity ahead, biotech is pervasive. It’s not a bar on the 2043 chart because it’s everywhere and growing.

Few industry sectors are not going become dependent on biotech’s creations. In the last ten years, every corporation needed to hire data scientists. In the next ten years, way more corporations will find themselves hiring life scientists, and you’ll see Chief Science Officers in far more companies’ C-suites. Deal flow will hinge on scientific judgement. No merger or acquisition will be sealed unless the CSO signs off on it. Banks are going to have to hire way more scientists, just to do due diligence on target companies. Consulting firms will need as many post-docs as they do MBAs, because they won’t be able to offer strategic counsel to industry unless they can understand the R&D portfolio of a firm.

At IndieBio, we have a handful of companies in every one of these sectors discussed here. We even have a few companies that use biology to create a future for the $3 trillion computing industry. One looming problem for IT is data storage. Every day the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data to store. Every minute, there are 156 million emails sent. Interestingly, computers are one of the few things we don’t make with carbon. But if you think about it, nature created a way to store data, perfectly, uncorrupted, in a form that will last thousands of years: DNA. DNA is many orders of magnitude better at storing data than current computers. One of our graduates, Catalog, can replace an entire server room with a device that fits in the palm of your hand — using millionths of less space. Remember when we thought DVDs stored a lot of data?

In 25 years, we’ll look back and laugh at a lot of technologies, much the way we think quaintly of DVDs today. But it’s not just certain products that will go extinct. It’s entire companies, and entire industries.

Biotech as a whole — forced into a radical acceleration by the twin catastrophes of human and planetary health — represents nothing less than a potential “economic extinction” event. Companies that adapt will be selected for their fitness, and will take a bigger share of the next $100 trillion. Industries which do not mutate will be wiped out. It won’t be slow from here on; that phase has already passed. It will be sudden.

In the next article in this series, I’ll talk about the role of design in bringing this $100 trillion opportunity into reality. Design is a sort of taboo word in life science; it’s controversial. As a society, we commonly think of “discovering” science rather than purposefully designing it. But good design — at every level, from the molecular level at the smallest, to the international economic system at the largest — is exactly what’s needed.

Biology is the technology that unlocks the $100 trillion opportunity. But we need to do more, systematically, to harness the power of biology. The design of that system is our next topic.

Written by Arvind Gupta

Letter to Our Founders; Speed Wins Fights, Patience Wins Wars.

Dear Founders & CEOs,

We are in the middle of an unprecedented shock in modern history. Nobody knows how long this will last. Nobody knows how this will end. I do know this. Nothing is ever as good as it looks or as bad as it feels. We will be fine. We may even be better from it. As they say, never waste a crisis. But first, we must survive it.

You are all IndieBio companies. Which means you are already survivors. Born and bred in the basement on Jessie Street in the Tenderloin. Walking into the office meant stepping over the hardships of life just to face it again in the lab. But this shock is different. Covid-19 will test us all. Our businesses, our commitment to community and our commitment to family. It will hurt and frustrate us. A lesson learned from 2001 and 2008 is that good companies will die because the world has changed around them and they do not wish to recognize it. Do not make that mistake. Public equities have been cut 25% in a couple weeks. Where are the private markets?

But we find opportunity in this crisis.

To do so we must defend our business while being prepared to strike offensively at new opportunities afforded by a dynamic market environment. More simply, go into survival mode.

Do not take this as a disruption but as an opportunity to learn and adapt. Remote work, collaboration and sharing is not easy. But with an open mind we may find ways of doing business and science that open up our ideas of what is possible. Second, recessions cull the brittle. Survivors live to inherit a new landscape with fewer competitors and more customers. Live to see the day. Third there is an opportunity for talent. Many companies will not make the right decisions or are positioned in a place they cannot survive. Great talent will become available. Keep an eye out over the next 18 months for the perfect candidates for your team. Fourth is the opportunity to leverage the force multiplier of the IndieBio network. All IndieBio founders have a common experience and we all help each other. Best practices for dealing with labs, protocols for sick leave and other difficult decisions can be made easier by reaching out to each other. In isolation we wither. In solidarity we thrive.

To make the Covid-19 crisis work for you, play great defense. Defense is about preserving the value you have created. Start by creating a worst case scenario that you can build a plan around. The worst case we see is the twin shocks of falling demand from Covid-19 across airline and all other industries along with oil prices putting shale producers out of business cause a chain reaction in the economy, triggering a liquidity crisis that spirals into a major recession that lasts 24 months, perhaps longer. Create a plan for surviving 24 months. Create a plan that ensures not only fiscal but morale survival. You don’t have to implement it right away but knowing you can go there to survive is helpful for strategic decision making. If there is no way to stretch the bank account that long, raise an extension today from investors that missed your last round or were unable to get in at your last round valuations. Great VCs see the opportunity in bargain hunting in these times. Give them a bargain. Find useful milestones to make decisions with spending. For example a second lockdown after our current one indicates the economy will repeatedly suffer. Freeze everything. If a fast, cheap diagnostic is developed and available to everyone, things will return to normal very quickly. Aggressively look for talent.

Every startup on the planet is trying to raise right now. VCs can’t even meet for in person partner meetings. They are trying to figure out their business as much as you are yours. Don’t expect much from VCs right now. Rely on your wits and instinct to slow the burn and focus on high value activities. Win the market while others are scrambling. Stay active. Stay lean.

Now that we have battened down the hatches and defended our value, let’s focus on offense. Winning the market.

Every IndieBio company is a biotech company focused on solving the world’s biggest problems. This pandemic will amplify the need for your existence. It becomes tangible to those that control capital and are sequestered in their homes wondering what they can do. It becomes clear we have underinvested in our healthcare system. The coming shocks from climate change will make it clear we have underinvested in cures for atmospheric carbon dioxide. The entire world suddenly realizes how disruptive biology can be — for good and for bad. Be ready for the market to look to your products as a solution. Don’t sleep on this. Don’t stop business. Have your product ready. Of course this means following government and city guidelines for shelter in place as well as social distancing. But working from home means working from home. Lab work may be halted but experimental design isn’t.

To build product while reducing burn, focus on key customer facing milestones. Slow new product development. Win the market you are in now. Each action you take must have a direct derisking event tied to it. Most VCs in Silicon Valley recently raised new funds. They must deploy them in the next few years. They will come up for air soon. Communicate with newsletters. Show progress. Show traction. Build your customer base. Sales solves everything. Send an update to current investors with your plans. Not just financial plans but what happens if someone in your company contracts Covid-19. The protocol to handle it. Become as prepared as possible. This sets your investors at ease.

Use the IndieBio network for help. You are not as isolated as the virus makes us feel. If you need a reagent, advice, or a protocol reach out to each other. Reach out to the team. Reach out to me. You all have my number. Text me anytime.

IndieBio is reacting to the Covid Pandemic in a number of ways.

First, the next batch, combining SF and NY will start virtually on May 4th. We are creating a core set of talks and looking at online platforms to deliver the content. I am excited to try a new way of delivering our knowledge and panels. As the situation normalizes we will bring everyone into the physical locations to finish the lab work. Demo day will be in the summer and in person. If not possible we will do it virtually with a new web interface facilitating investor interaction with the companies. Second, we will be holding office hours every other day for general questions and a town hall every week to share best practices and the latest in the fight on Covid. Third we have been finding Discord a great way to bring a feeling of hanging out to our social distancing. I encourage you all to find that camaraderie remotely as soon as you can.

We are looking for up to 8 startups that are fighting Covid across all modalities for the next classes. From disinfectants to diagnostics to therapeutics to vaccines. Already we have several portfolio companies working on solutions.

• Caspr is building a rapid point of care diagnostic for Covid-19 using Crispr RNA detection.

• Amaryllis is using universal viral RNA detection for Covid-19

• Diadem is building a pan-coronavirus vaccine program with their exosomal decoration platform.

• Craig Rouskey of Pando Nutrition is spinning up a rapid RT-PCR diagnostic for the population in SF. Get tested at Renegadex.bio

• Girihlet is working on identifying T cell populations to predict severe vs mild disease.

• Dalton is using their mass spectroscopy technology to predict mild vs severe cases and develop adjuvants to therapies.

• We are working with NY State to help with grants to new Covid-19 diagnostic startups.

If you have anyone you know spinning something up, let them know we are here to help. If you know of any investors interested in funding the above approaches, make an introduction. The world needs as many people working on this as possible.

The greatest opportunities come at times of upheaval. Keep a sharp eye and a clear mind. And remember. Speed wins fights but patience wins wars.

Written by Arvind Gupta

I Love You, Indiebio

Dear IndieBio founders, family and friends,

I am excited to share with you that today I am joining Mayfield, a top-tier venture capital firm with a fifty year history of people-first investing, as a Partner to co-lead the Engineering Biology practice alongside Ursheet Parikh. I am also transitioning to the new role of Venture Advisor at IndieBio. I will keep my IndieBio board appointments for the foreseeable future. And I will continue helping with pitch decks, milestone setting, business model construction and introductions for all the IndieBio companies because you are all still, and always will be, my portfolio.

There is more to this transition than Mayfield and IndieBio.

This is a moment not for two firms, but for the entire class of venture capital. Biology is a maturing technology that can change our world for the better. The fact remains we are running out of time to invest in the changes required. For some perspective, across all venture capital, only 3.3% of the money is deployed into planetary health companies. We need to deploy ten times that amount, yearly, to meaningfully impact climate change, pandemics, food security, fertility and sustainability before it is too late.

Human and planetary health investments lag the rest of venture capital

In the beginning, IndieBio was a simple idea for independence. Freedom for a new breed of entrepreneurs — scientists around the world. IndieBio began as an experiment. But in order to succeed, IndieBio would need to become an institution, enabling scientists to consistently build world changing companies. In the process, it also became something unexpected. A movement.

For this budding movement to reach its true potential, it would have to exist at every stage of capital, at every venture capital firm and into the public markets. And I always knew, that might mean I’d need to move to the later stages to help make that vision a reality.

Five and a half years ago, Sean O’ Sullivan and I founded IndieBio as a way of using biology as technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. We would fund overlooked scientists with ideas others thought too crazy to work. We’d give them cash, give them a lab, business mentorship and a venue to showcase their progress.

I believed in these outsiders because I was one as well. I had left a great career as a designer at IDEO to start from scratch to build IndieBio — with no prior experience in biotech, much less venture capital. It all seems so obvious all these years later, but back then I figured the chance of me destroying my career was the flip of a coin.

Since then IndieBio has produced many stars. Most you know. They are the founders reinventing our world. They’ve been written about in so many industry publications and featured in the mainstream news.

But the IndieBio staff in the basement are not as well known. They work as hard as the startups to get every company as far as they can possibly go in four and a half months. And in doing so they also became stars to the founders.

At IndieBio, it truly feels like time goes faster. We learn so much, and grow so fast. The same way our startups grow in just a few months, the IndieBio team — to a person — has matured remarkably in just a few years. Ryan Bethencourt and Ron Shigeta grew in the entrepreneurial direction, taking what they had learned and founding their own, Wild Earth. Alex Kopelyan, who I met as a young PharmD, has wisened into a great operator and leader of our planetary health initiatives. Jun Axup brought her eminent expertise in genetics, but has grown into a community leader and connector. Maya Lockwood came on to do Communications at first, but she did far more, creating our Female Founders series and, with Alex, our leadership track for entrepreneurs; now she’s recruiting new investors and doing investor relations. Parikshit Sharma was still in school when I first met him; now he’s analyzing industries as they emerge, helping us understand what creates successful startups and how to invest in them. In the process of accelerated growth, we became more than a team, we became a family with a common purpose.

Our evening salons and events became hot tickets for which we always found more chairs. Next, I set to work to create an adjunct partner board that could help advise us and our companies. George Church, Jim Collins, David Eagleman, and four others, all legends of their fields, agreed to join the movement and lend us their experience and networks. We were on fire. Then I met Po.

Po Bronson might seem an unlikely person to become a central figure at IndieBio. But he has seen so much, and has such a deep understanding of so many facets of our world, that he is a fountain of unique insight — into industries, into consumer behavior, and into science. Further, his experience on boards, in corporate innovation, and angel investing would serve him well as a venture capitalist. I could see that the very traits that made him so good at IndieBio also fueled his success as a writer and hitmaker, penning seven national bestsellers. His deep and personal commitment to the mission of human and planetary health is what made everyone turn to him as a leader at IndieBio.

In the meantime, our returns were accelerating. We were getting better every batch. Two academic institutions did a study on our process. In 2018 we got our first exit, a 20x return. Our companies were getting funded faster and with more money.

Our alumni needed help with scaling up business models, hiring and raising series A’s and B’s. I joined many boards. The team became stretched. So we added Pae Wu from DARPA and Telofonica as our CTO and Westley Dang as our analyst to help. Pae is a PhD in electrical engineering and expands our scope of investing into biological and electromechanical systems while Westley is a PhD in neuroscience and helps us invest in the future of neurotechnology.

Engineering Biology is reinventing many industries

The diversity of synthetic biology was astounding. The whole world was getting rebuilt, one molecule at a time. IndieBio was at the forefront.

The movement needed expansion. There were still more founders with great ideas than we had slots for. We were speaking to a choir that already believed. We needed a way to scale beyond the valley.

Total portfolio enterprise value just passed $3 billion

The answer came with a call from NY. They wanted IndieBio to spark the movement we helped start in Silicon Valley — in the Big Apple. Partnering with the Partnership Fund New York City and Empire State Development Corp made a lot of sense. With big pharma across the river in New Jersey, it represented a chance for us to expand but also to learn new skills in therapeutic drug development. Adding seven amazing people to the New York team, being led by Stephen Chambers, we were ready to go. We also structured a $2 million dollar seed program for therapeutics companies, knowing they just need more capital to get the data they need for good partnerships and series A financing. IndieBio launched the NY inaugural cohort mid COVID-19 on June 1st 2020.

Today, with over 15 employees, 6 investment partners and a portfolio of $3.2 billion dollars, IndieBio is now finally an institution.

The IndieBio team has grown to 16 people with 6 investment partners

Yet something gnawed at me. With IndieBio doing better than I can ever have imagined, I was waking up at night.

There was a growing suspicion in my mind that these scientists needed more, and I needed to be there to help them.

On the boards of many later-stage companies, I began to see how consistent and strong support in the growth phases of human and planetary health companies can help create success. There is no playbook everyone can follow. We are charting a new course and drawing the map as we go. It began to dawn on me that I needed to be on more boards, with the focus and time to see them through. But the basement always called me away. I was so torn.

I first met Tim Chang over a decade ago and was blown away by his thoughtfulness and knowledge. He and Ursheet Parikh visited the first IndieBio lab in the Dogpatch over five years ago. Since then, Tim, Ursheet and Navin Chaddha who leads Mayfield, have come to IndieBio batches as mentors and participants in panels. The founders were consistently impressed with their feedback and approach to leadership. Mayfield consistently had a culture that placed the founders first. Meanwhile, Ursheet had built the Engineering Biology practice for the past five years at Mayfield, paralleling my own efforts at IndieBio. In the past eighteen months they invested in two IndieBio companies. I had gotten to experience working with their partners and their commitment to conscious capitalism. They are also a top five returning fund in the world — with over $2.5 billion under management and a track record of guiding over 117 IPOs and over 200 acquisitions. They know what they are doing and they are great at building global scale companies.

I wanted something that’s very unusual in venture. Which was a bridge between the firms, where I could still help at IndieBio but also invest Series A at Mayfield. Working this out took a huge amount of trust, from Sean, Navin and Ursheet. Before Covid hit, I asked them all to meet and see if there was a way to work together. We sat down to talk. By the end of dinner, an alliance was forged.

Not only would I join Mayfield as a partner and continue at IndieBio as Venture Advisor, we felt the need to put momentum behind growing the movement of human and planetary evolution. To do so, Mayfield and SOSV are the inaugural members of the Genesis Consortium that will invest in IndieBio companies and promote engineering biology. I am excited to see the Genesis Consortium grow with multiple VCs and corporate members in time. More details on this to come.

I have converted a lot of luck into skill over the past years which gives me confidence that I can handle what comes next. But I cannot say I have no butterflies.

It is at once surreal and empowering to hand over the day to day operations and control of IndieBio to Po Bronson and the team. IndieBio is more than an accelerator to me, it is the most meaningful thing I have ever created. It also has become a beacon of hope that any scientist can forge their own path to create change.

My mission, our mission, has not changed. It is simply growing.

Thank you all for your continued hard work in the basement. I am honored to roll up my sleeves with you.

I love you all,

Arvind Gupta

>>>>> FAQ BELOW <<<<<

What is a Venture Advisor?

A role that is defined by the IndieBio team and what it needs to succeed. The advising will be for batch intake, current batch companies and existing IndieBio portfolio

Can I still ask you for an introduction to someone?

Yes of course. Any IndieBio company remains my portfolio of investments. I want you to do well!

Will you remain on my board?

Yes. I will work with the company and boards as a SOSV representative to transition off over the next couple years as my board roles increase at Mayfield.

I’m an IndieBio company, can you join my board in the future?

Unfortunately no. Without a direct investment from Mayfield, joining a board without significant financial interest is a conflict of interest for LPs.

I am a future IndieBio company, will you advise us?

Yes. As Venture Advisor to IndieBio, my duties include all current and future portfolio companies as directed by the IndieBio management team.

What is the best way to contact you?

Email and text. My email at SOSV, arvind@sosv.com, will remain active alongside my Mayfield email address (primary), arvind@mayfield.com

What kind of deals are you doing at Mayfield?

Series A. This means check sizes from $3m up to $10m (in some cases).

Can I ask you to lead our next round?

Yes! I believe IndieBio companies are the best in the world :)

Is there a specific focus for you at Mayfield?

The mission is the same. Companies using biology to solve the world’s biggest human and planetary health problems.

Is there a right of first refusal with Mayfield and IndieBio?

No. Mayfield is supporting SOSV and IndieBio as an investor but there is no preferential treatment of Mayfield by IndieBio or SOSV’s management teams. For the mission to succeed we need all of venture capital investing in the engineering biology asset class.