Ginkgo 0 -> 1

For Ginkgo Bioworks, becoming the world’s largest synbio company (~$4.6B mkt cap) was no small feat. What many don’t know is that they bootstrapped for 6 years before receiving venture funding. 

So what can technical founders learn from their founding story?

🦠Learn how to tell a story around the science. 

Co-founder Tom Knight was an early synbio pioneer and even hosted the field’s first major conference in 2004. He approached biology using an engineer’s problem-solving approach, and envisioned making DNA building blocks programmable for any company in any industry. However, even he had a difficult time selling this idea in such a nascent market. 

What was key to a successful narrative was comparing their company to tech startups. An initial investor described Ginkgo’s platform as making “designing biology as easy as writing software.” Using similar positioning, Ginkgo changed perceptions of them from an ordinary biology company to an enterprise tech business. 

🦠Take advantage of as much non-dilutive funding as you can get. 

Despite countless no’s from investors and rejections from pitch competitions, they secured federal funding (DARPA, NSF) that still allowed them to focus on exploratory R&D and invest in their core IP. 

Without the added pressure of fundraising, this interim funding allowed them to fine-tune the scalable platform they use today to design and engineer genetic microorganisms. They also fleshed out their core value proposition: automation using software.

🦠Make every dollar count. 

The market was down in 2009, but they launched anyway. They set up their first lab for only $150K, and thus avoided burning operational costs early on. They bought equipment from eBay and Craigslist and repurposed materials from other biotech companies that had tanked during the financial crisis. 

This disproved two notions: (1) that biotech companies were only expected to develop drugs and (2) that millions of R&D dollars and fancy equipment is necessary to scale. 

🦠Iterate knowing your predecessor’s mistakes. 

Other synbio companies were choosing a vertically integrated business model (developing specific products for specific industries). This turned out poorly. Many burned through cash from attempting in-house manufacturing and failed to launch viable products. 

Ginkgo recognized that their strength was actually on the discovery/engineering end. They instead leaned on a licensing model where they would give strategic partners (later Roche, Bayer, etc.) rights to certain organisms. This allowed them to outsource the burden of commercialization to these partners. 

⭐In 2014, Ginkgo caught the attention of Y Combinator, became their first biotech investment, and the rest is history.