In this episode of What if Instead?, Edward Shenderovich, CEO of Synonym, reveals how his approach to entrepreneurship centers on one key factor: execution.
Guest: Edward Shenderovich,
Hosts:
Alejandro Juárez Crawford
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford
Miriam Plavin-Masterman
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
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Episode Introduction
In this episode of What if Instead?, Edward Shenderovich, CEO of Synonym, reveals how his approach to entrepreneurship centers on one key factor: execution. Edward shares many transformative ideas, from the fascinating potential of AI-designed organisms to creating a bio-manufacturing ecosystem.
Tune in to discover how his innovative approach sets the stage for a sustainable future.
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Resources
Synonym: http://www.synonym.bio
Scaler: http://www.scaler.bio
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For more podcast stories from What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford and https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
Bio-manufacturing: How It Can Reshape Industries and Our Planet | A Conversation with Edward Shenderovich | What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:00)
What I would less like to happen when I think I'm saying something funny than is for someone to look at me and say, that's so funny. That's hilarious. And this comes from an experience I had really deep in my youth where I interacted with two people.
who at a time when I didn't really want to hear anyone's voice, because it was a morning class, one would tell the other a story and the other would always respond, that's hilarious. So I'm thinking today about when we're playing for a laugh, when we're making a joke, when we're being witty, what are the reactions that you want?
Ed and Mim, and which are the ones that make you nuts?
Edward Shenderovich (00:50)
Well,
When you say something funny, of course you want someone to But it also depends on the You may want someone to laugh and then say, that's so
Or you may want someone analyze your I think interesting and maybe pertinent to our discussion why does that really Why does someone at certain times and can say that's so funny at other times? what happens in our brain? What types
neurotransmitters are being released at that moment? What types are being is it really you who is saying that's so funny or laughing? Or is it microbiome that's the release of your hormones and actually laughing or not laughing?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:33)
he has a theory, which I've talked about on this podcast before, because it's a favorite of mine, that comic is based on waiting just long enough for the thought to have processed all the way. And you're making me think, as you talk about, you may want someone to analyze your joke, reaction we want when we are being playful.
we want it to be an almost unconscious reaction where we're interacting with the unconscious mind because when you said that's so funny in response to what I said I laughed but I didn't stop and think that's pretty funny I almost did the opposite of stopping and thinking that's
Edward Shenderovich (02:13)
I thought maybe analyzing if you were in a comedy
and your tutor in the comedy says, hmm, funny one.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:20)
I mean, I just wonder if that's so funny. To me, there's like, there's three things that it could be. One, you really feel bad for the person because it's not funny and you think the silence is terrible. So you want to fill it. Two, you actually think it is funny and you have flat affect, which I've seen, which is very weird in person because you're like, the person's clearly amused, but there's nothing happening. the third is like, you don't know what to say, but you think you need to say something.
Edward Shenderovich (02:46)
you can be professionally evaluating the joke.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:49)
true. I mean, I just wonder if that's so funny is the version of that Pan Am smile, right? The fake smile that doesn't quite get to your eyes you're trying to throw them a bone, but not really, all the way. I don't know.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (03:01)
Yeah, flat affect may be the exception that proves the rule, In I we have this in common, you're a distinguished It's not the literary criticism of my poem that is the response I'm really going for. If I play a song, it is not
the analytical response to the song I'm most interested in. That doesn't mean that I don't later take that as a way what I've done. It's very useful in a workshopping sense, but in terms of the response I'd hoped for from that poem, I actually want to get people out of that part of their heads, the prose part of their heads.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (03:36)
Right.
Edward Shenderovich (03:43)
Yeah, what I I realized is response that warms my heart is when people keep rereading and rereading and rereading they just becomes a part of their almost everyday lives.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (03:58)
Mmm, this brings out something really powerful, right? Think of who comes up with a line that you go back to every time a certain topic comes up and you actually have a smile on your face.
Edward Shenderovich (04:09)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. And you keep laughing?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (04:14)
yeah. Does that happen to you?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (04:16)
Definitely.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (04:17)
I could give you many examples right now, but I think instead of going there, we should dive into your work, not just in poetry, but also in the climate transition in a way that we don't always talk about enough.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (04:38)
I mean, we're very fortunate today because we have someone who is, I mean, the definition of a multi-hyphenate, if I could say it that way. He's a poet, he's an educator, he's an entrepreneur, he's an investor, he's a publisher. He's a builder of things and a builder of words and spaces, literally and metaphorically. I mean, it's really kind of special. And specifically, he currently works at a company called Synonym where he helped co-founded, he's the CEO, and it's a company that creates
Edward Shenderovich (04:44)
Okay.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (05:07)
bioeconomy infrastructure. So I'm going to say this in the way that they say it, and then hopefully I will get some feedback if I get it close. bioeconomy infrastructure, basically to help bioproducts that are futuristic or next generation bioproducts get to market at the scale that's right for them. so that's just a really interesting space to talk about this sort of materials transition piece of dealing with climate Ed.
you so much for joining us today.
Edward Shenderovich (05:33)
Thank you for having me.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (05:34)
I'm Alejandro Juarez-Crawford. My co-host is Mim Plavin-Masterman. And we're on a mission to make creating experiments of your own as normal as watching videos on your phone. Welcome to What If Instead, the podcast. Now, Ed, let's pick up on what you're doing at Synonym first. There is a tendency...
that I often deal with when coaching entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs to look at where all the investment capital is going right now and try to go there, right? Which to me is equivalent in the old Wayne Gretzky formulation to skating where the puck just was. And I see you doing something very different where...
On the one hand, you're into applications that relate to some very hot topics, but you're thinking about it in a way that one doesn't hear every day. So let's begin with, how did you see the opportunity as a non-biologist that became synonym? What presented itself to you and what made you want to seize this with both your
Edward Shenderovich (06:50)
I think that in order to you need to understand what your competitive advantages that requires you to think not what the opportunity could be, but what is the opportunity executable by you better than by anyone else?
You may look at the whole playing field and you know where the puck is going, are you the one to catch that Should you be in a rush to get Or should you conserve your energy and seize the puck when the puck is at the place where you can I think that what I realized my
if you can call it a business model is. Only in retrospect, I realized that that's what it is. I'm about it as a template. always been approaching starting companies and as an I look at it as an investor from
really from an investor perspective. Is this something executable? Is this an interesting market? Who are the people going after this It was very similar a company I started previously called Nottel, which became one of the leading flexible office operators. I was walking around Manhattan and thought that every one of these
40 story a unicorn, like literally unicorn sticking out of the it's interesting, like the economics of these buildings on some level are not that different from the economics of a software company. If you want to build a billion dollar software company, you still need to invest a hundred plus million. You still take a lot of risk.
And with buildings, you also take a lot of risk. It takes time. There's a lot of this unpredictability. You're really building a business. And thought, well, maybe in this interesting world of real estate, I could apply some things that I know about technology. And I started thinking about real estate tech, which we now call prop tech. That was about 10 years ago. And then I started digging in and I found out
there's WeWork was already There were other co-working spaces which WeWork really just industrialized in the same way that there were lots of coffee shops and then Starbucks really industrialized that And I thought that there could be an interesting that opportunity is not just about individuals working, but about companies working.
not how individuals need space, but how companies need space. And there was something that was broken in the leasing market. Leases were getting shorter and shorter, and at some there's a disconnect between what real estate owners can do and what companies need. And this ranges from smaller companies to some of largest multinationals.
formulating a bit of time and took a bit working through the maze of the market, speaking with entrepreneurs that are thinking about the real estate market, understanding what the opportunity could be, and also understanding what is the opportunity which I could execute on, or I could execute together with someone.
In the case of Synonym, did think that it would be impossible for us to solve our climate challenges without actually thinking about materials. So energy is something that everyone talks about when they talk about climate. We're using lots of energy, that energy is primarily carbon-based. Let's use less carbon-based energy and
replace it with renewable options.
with materials, not many people in the world, percentage-wise, that actually understand how stuff is made and where the stuff that we use in everyday lives comes from, how much plastic there is around, how large the specialty chemicals industry is
my co-founder Joshua Lector and I formulated this thought will be a massive move from fossil carbon to biological carbon. Because we will, as the economies grow, we will still need to have as much material as we use, if not more. And we need to have physical matter from which that material is fossil carbon,
was biological carbon at some point, but it took 20 million years to make it into fossil carbon, or 60 million years. with biological carbon, something that's renewable on an annual basis. And that biological carbon is something that comes from corn, it could be biological biomass, could come from sugar beets. It's some form of
there's all this feedstock and will come to the market, there are technologies that are being used for processing that feedstock into valuable products or valuable ingredients. And there are companies that are interested in adopting these new ingredients. We will need to have infrastructure for production in the same way that we have this
massive data center infrastructure that powers the we need to have massive bio manufacturing infrastructure to power the materials transition from fossil carbon to biological carbon.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (11:52)
can I ask a question about this and the infrastructure piece? So you're talking about the feedstock, farmers that are producing the corn, the biomass, the sugar beets. When you're thinking about the infrastructure, is it collaborating with the farmers to help them think about getting the stuff to your production facility? Is it collaborating with the materials scientists and designing it that way? Like which side comes first when you think about this infrastructure?
Edward Shenderovich (12:18)
Yeah, so I use the term infrastructure infrastructure, you can also call it an Synonym is building the ecosystem for 21st century manufacturing. We're accelerating the production and market adoption of byproducts, meaning that we touch every aspect of the supply chain.
We understand what needs to happen in the fields and what the farmers are dealing with and what the waste products are, what the core products are that the farmers are delivering, what the waste products are, what could be optimized there. We may not be an active participant in that, but we need to understand what's happening there in order to run proper technical economic analysis for products that could come to the market. Then the infrastructure, physical infrastructure that's needed.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (12:38)
Okay.
Edward Shenderovich (13:04)
is fermentation capacity. Fermentation is this unique process that has been around for thousands of years and something that we use in our everyday lives. We have yogurt in the which is a fermented product. We may consume beer or wine or kimchi. All of these are fermented products and that process of fermentation is basically microorganisms
consuming the feedstock product and converting it into something converting into something new, which arguably lasts longer.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (13:37)
And are those microorganisms designed by companies that you invest in or are they naturally occurring? Like where is that part of the process
Edward Shenderovich (13:48)
bringing up a very interesting point. Some are naturally occurring. The ones in yogurt and beer and wine are naturally occurring know that we also use baker's baking. Yeah, we need to have these pockets of air in the, we like these pockets of air in the bread that we eat.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (13:51)
Okay.
Edward Shenderovich (14:08)
in those pockets of air come from the co2 that's being released by by So Sometimes use natural organisms and Naturally and this is this is something that has been powering the ethanol These are naturally occurring microbes which consume corner corn stover
the waste of corn production and fermented into ethanol. And they naturally release alcohol. Alcohol is a naturally released product of fermentation, functions as an antiseptic. I'm a sugar, release this alcohol. I will grow and at the same time I will kill
any of the other microorganisms that are trying to impede on my territory.
there are other types of fermentation that we use. some of the organisms that are being designed are powering massive industries. for example, insulin, it was a animal product up until early eighties.
and then Genentech pioneered the process of precision fermentation where they genetically modified certain microorganisms and were able to produce human insulate, which was actually better for humans, better fitting humans, through this process of precision fermentation, they saved countless lives, millions of lives.
affected hundreds of millions of people, certainly billions of people over last 40 years of companies like Nova Nordisk and Eli Lilly and Sanofi making insulin through presidium The current products, there's an Azempic Wegovi Manjaro craze. This is a presidium fermented product made in a very similar very similar way to insulin.
you can make these products, what else can you Can you make collagen in the same way? Because all of the collagen that we currently consume is animal derived. There are certain technology innovators that are making collagen through precision fermentation. Some of it is in the market, but very, very little compared to the total amount of collagen that we consume, both topically and...
through ingesting. and then the future is extremely interesting where you can actually use AI to help design these organisms.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (16:22)
Wait, let's hold off on AI designing organisms, because that will be interesting and we're going to get there. I want to just back up a step to sort of how you think about these things. And you began by saying when you were looking at buildings that you thought any one of these buildings is a unicorn sticking out of the ground. You then did something similar when it came to
the transition for materials. you said, biomanufacturing will need to power the transition from fossil to biological. We're going to need to make that possible en masse. And now we're about to talk in a moment about different ways of using the language capabilities of AI than we read about in your average business press
You've made me think, Ed, that you're actually looking at business opportunities the way a poet does. Now bear with me for a second. Vitaslav Nesval, and you'll correct my pronunciation, had this idea that logically, and I'm quoting, the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase. That is why they go unnoticed. It was necessary to set the star near the table.
the glass hard by the piano and the angels and the door beside the ocean. The idea was to unveil reality. Now, what I see you doing is unveiling possibilities by putting the glass not next to the table, but the door beside the ocean. Because when you say a phrase like, the building is a unicorn sticking out of the ground, it's as if
You looked up at the building and everyone else walking by was saying, there is a high rise, there's a building. And you said, no, wait a minute, that's a unicorn sticking out of the ground. And again, everyone, as you said, looks at, all right, we need to make the energy transition. That's carbon. But you look and you say, wait a minute, there's all this carbon in our plastics and in our industrial chemicals. What if we could manufacture that biologically? So.
Bear with me if I've taken us in a place that isn't true, but I'm trying to get inside your mindset for our listeners. And it does occur to me that you are doing what Nezval did for the ocean and the door to the opportunities you're pursuing.
Edward Shenderovich (18:50)
I think what he's referring to, correct me if I'm wrong, is Therestatelian metaphysics. It's like trying to pull together and understand the quality of the table.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (19:02)
Aristotle in the end wants to give us logic. He said that he wanted to give reality back its shining image as on the first day of existence. And if I did this at the expense of logic, it was an attempt at realism at a higher power. So,
without getting into the debate, and you may be able to come back and say this really is Aristotelian, I think that it's this idea that if we see things in a juxtaposition we're not used to, then it can unveil a possibility. That's at least what I heard you doing, both with notel and with synonym. Am I missing it?
Edward Shenderovich (19:41)
Also sometimes makes for a good joke.
hope this is not a psychoanalysis session. I'd rather talk about synonym than psychoanalyze myself and as to how I make the decisions that I make are do know that in many cases,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (19:49)
the
Yeah.
mean to take it there at all.
Edward Shenderovich (20:07)
I have the right vision. But ultimately, I think it was Thomas Edison who said that vision without execution is hallucination. building companies is all about execution. as I said before, it's important to focus on opportunities which you find executable, where you actually have an unfair competitive advantage or a fair competitive advantage.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (20:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Edward Shenderovich (20:33)
But there needs to be an edge for you to be lean in.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (20:38)
let's talk about both vision and execution for a second. Right. And the reason I was asking you that question was for our listeners who are asking the big question, what if instead, and I wanted to look at how they might look at something around them and find a vision for, for how it could work differently or a possibility there. But as we move to your point about execution,
So let's focus on Synonym, What was it that enabled you, as someone who wasn't a biologist, didn't know how to create biomaterials, what led you to say, hey, actually, I can bring something to this in your terms that others can't?
Edward Shenderovich (21:16)
I think it was a combination of my previous experiences I was talking to the CEOs of synthetic biology companies and I was clearly hearing that they are frustrated with the current state of the market from the capacity perspective. They need to get to scale and they either need partners that can help them produce and it's very difficult for them to find these partners, especially
ones that they would trust and that would produce at the right volume and the right price with the right quality. Or they would need to build their own capacity, basically factories, which means that they will need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and do something that they have never done before. There are very few companies that have actually done that successfully.
In many cases, these companies are trying to do this with products that are not super high margin, where they're near commodity. So they don't have a lot of brand recognition or will not have brand value. And they are primarily scientists. There are lots of scientists coming out of labs. They have an amazing idea.
for making, let's use the example of collagen, making collagen through precision fermentation. If we're able to make insulin, then we could make collagen.
And then what? So you succeeded in your small experiment, then you need to go to larger experiment and larger and larger and larger. And at every point, you need to rework the biology. at some point, these scientists are faced with the problem of understanding how to actually
build, like how to build facilities. And this is not what they were trained to do. And they can surround themselves with people that have done this before, but they're still thinking about it from the perspective of that single product. And from that perspective, it's extremely difficult to fundraise for a facility. So you have, you need to
engineer something, is possible. Obviously, you start with techno-economic analysis, the numbers need to pan out. And then you run through your engineering exercises, and you go through different stages of engineering. And then ultimately, you get to a point where you have a project ready, and then you need to raise funds for it, that $300 million that would go into building that facility.
That's not what venture investors would do. The yield of that facility would be lower. So you need to talk to a completely different kind of investors, private equity or infrastructure investors or real estate investors that are not approaching this from the perspective of venture returns. And they really care about downside and you're coming to them with a single product. And really that that single product is a single point of failure. So.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (23:53)
Mm-hmm.
Edward Shenderovich (24:09)
We started thinking about the capacity that's needed for production of biomaterials from the perspective of developing new acid These materials will be produced. This material's transition is inevitable. We will move from fossil carbon to biological carbon. It will take time. will take several decades to make any significant dent.
But it will happen. And that infrastructure needs to be built. How do we unlock the capital for building that infrastructure?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (24:38)
Ed, would you break down for our listeners how you saw the need for a new asset class in that and exactly what you mean by that? I think I know, but I want to tease it out.
Edward Shenderovich (24:50)
An asset class is something that's typically uncorrelated to other asset classes. gold is a certain asset class and it's not correlated, typically not correlated to the performance of stock market. So you invest in gold, you can invest in stocks, in real estate. These are different asset classes. Investment in data centers became a type of, like a
real estate asset class or subclass it provides certain yield. It's predictable. It's not a venture investment. Your yield may fluctuate year to year. Right now data centers are hot. Five years ago, they were not. but it's more or less stable yield that's coming from investment into that
specific asset. And ultimately an asset class is something that consumers should be able to invest in through different intermediaries or directly.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (25:39)
And this is a key point I just want to make sure is clear here is that there can be something that's worth doing. Folks would want it. There'd be a big market for it. But if there isn't a way a combination of time horizons for returns and the other asset attributes that you're talking about that makes it possible, practical to invest in that opportunity won't get the capital.
it needs. I just want to make sure we say this in very clear terms. And if I'm hearing you right, the materials transition needed new way of bringing capital to it. If we're going to realize the opportunity. Am I hearing you right, Ed?
Edward Shenderovich (26:26)
Yeah, so if you look at any of the reports out there, the market for bio-manufactured materials is projected to be anywhere between $4 and $30 trillion in the next 25, 30 years.
which tells me that you will need to invest trillions of dollars into infrastructure to support the development of the factories that would actually produce these materials. venture capitalists will not invest that. It's impossible to invest that much from the balance sheets of companies.
the investment, think it's McKinsey that's projecting the four investment in bio-manufacturing facilities to be on par with data center investments in the next 10 years or in the next 15 years. We're talking about massive amounts of money and those pockets of capital are generally earmarked for large capital projects.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (27:09)
Mm-hmm.
Edward Shenderovich (27:22)
These large capital projects, those are infrastructure investors. They have pockets, like new pockets for experimentation. Generally, they finance roads and bridges and power stations and sometimes hospitals. And then they have new pockets where some of that capital went into controlled environment agriculture.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (27:23)
and tradition.
Edward Shenderovich (27:48)
Some of that at some point someone said well, we'll let's finance data centers and was able to underwrite Facebook's credit Sometimes you are able to get these funds to lean into renewable energy and they have over last 10 years And there was was impossible to finance something Through infrared capital 15 years ago. Now, this is this is the main way to finance it so there are these Trends and there are templates of how it was done
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (28:08)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Edward Shenderovich (28:17)
It's just very difficult to do at the beginning.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (28:19)
Right. And this is the reason it's often been observed that without the Cold War investments in ARPANET, it would have been very hard for the Internet to have developed. Jeff Bezos has said that folks like him and Zuckerberg were able to very quickly create large companies because of the massive investments in the postal service, in Amazon's case, and in the digital infrastructure as well.
So this is related to that point. Now, do you see this being this kind of asset class appealing to certain kinds of private investors? Or do you see there being a need for large social investments to support this in the way that Bezos has acknowledged was important for those companies?
Edward Shenderovich (29:09)
So it's a very interesting point that you bring. 22, I think it was in September of 22, the Biden administration issued an executive order for supporting the bioeconomy and bio manufacturing. they earmarked or asked agencies to earmark $2 billion to spur this
new industry. it was actually, interestingly, this, the development of bio manufacturing was first envisioned by the Trump administration. Biden executed it. Now Trump is back and the funds that the agencies have earmarked will actually be spent under Trump. The largest program right now, that's the largest government supported program.
is actually coming from the DOD, the Department of Defense. This is interesting, you brought up the internet, it's an interesting similarity to DARPAnet and how the internet was originally built. The Department of Defense sees biominufacturing as one of the critical technologies and wants to make sure there's adequate capacity
for production of critical materials for DOD supply chains and for DOD usage. And they created this program called Defense Industrial Base Consortium or DIPSE. And under that program, they will allocate hundreds of millions and then billions into supporting bio-manufacturing infrastructure. And earlier this year, they awarded 34 contracts to
various companies in the space, ranging from production of new food ingredients to specialty chemicals to certain infrastructure. we are a part of that program, or CINEM is a part of that program. And we were all working towards building this capacity, working together with the federal government to enable the build out of the infrastructure that will benefit
both the government or us as citizens or as beneficiaries of what the government does and private companies. So there needs to be commercial usage of that capacity as well as usage for government purposes.
government is actually leaning in. And the Department of Defense is one, and they are the biggest backer and the biggest proponent of biominiacturing. At the same time, you're seeing certain rumblings from the Department of Energy. Some things happening at the Department of Agriculture. Sydenham has also received a grant from the Department of Commerce.
from the Economic Development Administration for building a demo scale facility in Illinois, which we're doing in partnership with Premiant, which is one of those feedstock suppliers. They're one of the leading corn wet millers in the US.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (32:38)
have sort of a two part question. So you've got government as your primary investor, sort of the first investor in the door that's spurring all this other potential investment from other government agencies. Is this only happening in the US because of the contracts with the DOD or Department of Energy? Are there European comparables that you're also working on? Sort of how do we think about where this transition is taking place?
Edward Shenderovich (33:04)
Yeah, so China has made bio manufacturing one of its strategic priorities and 14th five-year plan and they are allocating a lot of capital to building capacity and they want to flood the world with Chinese byproducts. This is something that neither US nor Europe wants. India has made, has published a strategy, a bio economy strategy.
Saudi Arabia has allocated billions to its bi-economy strategy. Europe is doing this as well, and the capital that the EU has allocated or the member states have allocated has primarily been earmarked for research. But I'm certain that there will be pockets that will be applicable to building infrastructure as well.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (34:00)
So I wanted to follow up on one thing before I know Alejandro has a question, but so you mentioned Saudi Arabia. So forgive me for being a little skeptical. Saudi Arabia as a fossil fuel producer, why would they be investing in something that could eventually destroy part of their business?
Edward Shenderovich (34:11)
Mm-hmm.
Well, wouldn't, that wouldn't destroy part of their business. But if they're not a part of that, they may be, they may be on the short end of the stick. So if you take it for granted that we are ultimately moving away from fossil fuels, it'll take a long time. And we're continuing to invest maybe less, maybe some countries are investing more, some countries are
not investing but the investment in in development of fossil fuels in extraction and processing in refineries in Transportation continues and it will continue because it's a very large market And there will be a lot of inertia in that space At the same time we know that ultimately we're moving away toward we're moving towards more renewable energy sources just like we're moving towards
biological carbon in materials. It will also take a long time. It's definitely not a sprint. It's a marathon for everyone who's involved in these I think it's important for countries, especially for countries that will be most affected by the materials transition to
invest in development of infrastructure for new materials. If you are, if you're producing certain chemicals, say, a dipic acid, and you and your user, you have a certain supply chain, you have capacity to produce, you also have your customers that are buying it from you. Your customers will continue buying it. And what can change are your production methods. And
We are going through this massive process shift in everything. It starts with digital and AI is driving this massive process shift. In the way that we work, in the way we think about information, in the way we create content, in the way we augment content creation. So these processes are changing. These processes will be changing across a number of industries, both augmented by AI and not.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (36:32)
So if I'm a petrostate and I believe in the idea of multiple S-curves where there's one innovation.
it flattens out at some point and so I better have another one ready to ready to go up the steep part of the slope in terms of its potential. Then of course I want to, cynically speaking, I want to maintain the fossil economy just long enough, as long as I can, while also investing in what will replace it, either as ecological pressures force us off of fossils or as the wells run out. Now,
Can we move ultimately you talked about closer? For you as an entrepreneur, I hear you that it's gonna take time. But now let's say we don't have time as a planet. And are there things we could do to advance this not on the Petra Estates schedule?
but on the schedule that would work well for the rest of us.
Edward Shenderovich (37:37)
I think we need to ask as consumers. We are already consuming byproducts in our everyday lives. We just don't know how these products are made. I mentioned insulin and Azempik and Wegovi, but also citric acid and vitamin A and some other vitamins and
Xanthan gum and Jellon gum that are in lots of products that we use in everyday lives are all by manufactured products. They're all products of fermentation, specifically microbial fermentation. And we just don't think about this. And as consumers, we don't think about the way things are made. But
There are certain industries where consumers are asking for things to change. Fashion and health and beauty are some of them. So in fashion, you see lots of fashion houses moving away from nylon or polyester or trying to replace nylon polyester or trying to replace leather with an animal-free material.
Those are the consumer pressures they're feeling. At the same time, the food industry, you're seeing certain chemicals that are ingredients in our food products being regulated out, like certain toxic dyes or colorants, things that go into Doritos or Frito-Lay or Cheetos or other things that we eat out of plastic bags.
are the they're the consumer and certain government pressures on business to change, which are driving adoption of byproducts. And as I said, it will take time. we're talking about very large parts of the industry. Those are very large assets.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (39:35)
So I want to get to the point about AI and buyer manufacturing that you started to get into earlier. And I said, let's hold that for a few minutes. I, Mim and I, if I can speak for both of us, have an impatience with AI solutions that attempt to replace a service or a creative function with something that is
cheaper to generate, but in the end is canned and in our terms unresponsive. So I have skepticism about some of the applications of large language models delivering on their hype. On the other hand, I've heard you talk about
an approach that uses AI's capacity to synthesize and to deal with language in a way that I found very exciting for bio manufacturing. Can you lay that out and this will be the last topic for this conversation at least.
Edward Shenderovich (40:46)
Yeah, so.
AI will permeate every aspect of our lives in different ways. And AI is very loose experienced chat GPT. And that was that we will now talk about this chat GPT moment. But AI had been around before in various ways. Tesla has been talking about self-driving cars.
And we've used similar technology in running our call centers. And we've had some frustrating experiences, some experiences, some less frustrating experiences. This was all pre-Chat GPT.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (41:11)
Hmm.
Edward Shenderovich (41:24)
Ched GPT just opened people's eyes to what is possible. And the large language models is just one of the paths. It's one of the pathways for AI to show us what it can do. There are and there will be others and we will move to better technologies.
speaking of large language models, I think this is a, this is an easy example. think of, of what chat GPT has shown. So you can write text and,
and produce videos, short videos,
Humans can do all of that and we have done that for quite some time, at least over last hundred years. I'm referring to creation of videos. What we are not able to do is write DNA and large language models will be able to do that. There was already a model released over the last few weeks by a group of Stanford scientists called EVO, which...
which is using AI to generate genomic sequences. And what this means is that we will be able to create novel non-model organisms. We write DNA of an organism and DNA in this case is like executable machine code. Just instead of ones and zeros, you have the letters of DNA. It's a little more complicated, many more orders of magnitudes of complexity, but
It is code. And we've been trying to decipher what that code means for decades. We've sequenced DNA. We know what the letters are. We know what that sequence looks like in every place. We just don't completely know what it means. So we don't fully know the cellular function. But this is something with which AI will be able to help. Decipher that cellular function.
and be able to pull together the letters of DNA into executable machine code, which will create new organisms. And then maybe we'll be able write that code of life in the same way that we're writing computer code. We'll have some low-level languages and then we'll have higher-level languages
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (43:39)
Mm-hmm.
Edward Shenderovich (43:47)
in which we will just, or maybe it will be our human language that will allow us to request for certain organisms to be designed. And those organisms will have certain purpose and certain traits. Like, I want an organism that will eat plastic and will do it at a temperature of
72 Fahrenheit and and it will secrete something useful like collagen and There will be the byproduct of it will be something else. That's equally useful
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (44:27)
Ed from real estate to food and chemicals all the way through to plastic eating organisms. I appreciate the way in which you're not just asking the question, what if instead?
But as you've said, you're going deep, you're executing, you're living that question. It's been such a pleasure having you here and can't thank you enough for the conversation. Keep us posted as this goes further with your work at Synonym and beyond.
Edward Shenderovich (44:58)
Thank you both. It's been a pleasure.