At Ginkgo Bioworks, we design microbes and organisms to specifications, and we were founded in 2008 with around 75 employees.

I started Ginkgo Bioworks to harness the power of biology for great things, as biology can self-replicate, self-repair, and self-assemble with precision that engineering disciplines can only dream of.

At Ginkgo Bioworks, our mission is to make biology easier to engineer, and we measure our success by the amount of genetic engineering we can achieve per person.

At Ginkgo, we focus on improving the process of designing biology to make it smarter and more efficient.

After much brainstorming, we decided that Ginkgo's mission would be to make biology easier to engineer, which defines us as a company beyond just our business model or products. The only reason to start a company is if there's a problem you're passionate about solving and you have a mission to accomplish.

Biotech companies often use their time in Y Combinator to conduct critical path experiments and work with external companies for proof of concept studies, which can advance their regulatory filing status.

Successful biotech funds often incubate ideas internally before spinning them out as independent companies, which has proven effective in the industry.

Recent approvals of gene therapies and cell-based therapies have opened new avenues for biotech companies to create marketable products.

Biotech companies need a period of exclusivity around their intellectual property to recover their investments before generics enter the market.