Design to Disrupt [Entire Talk]

Who you are defines how you build. Thank you for welcoming me for your last session of the quarter. Just before I start going through the presentation, I would recommend you follow the wonderful team at Bolt Threads. I'm sorry, if you have the misfortune of following me on Twitter, you'll mostly get rage tweets about the Seahawks games and things like that. And so I'm going to tell you about the company I started after graduate school called Bolt Threads. But before I can get into what Bolt is and some of the things I've learned, I kind of have to give you a little view on how I view the world and why there's a problem that's worth solving here. So the planet we live on, Earth, about a little over four and a half billion years old. If we look at fossil records, life has been on this planet for, I say 4 billion years is actually like 3.8 is the current estimate. But I always say, what's 200 million years between friends? And if you think about us Homo sapiens, we've been here for about 200,000 of those years. We've got some ratio, 23,000 to one up there. I actually like an analogy as a way to understand this a bit better. So if you say Earth is about 1 day old, humans are about 3.76 seconds old, and the decimal points really matter on this when you're talking about such a big ratio. And what astounds me is that in that time that we've been here on this planet, in two human lifetimes, 150 years, humans have had a dramatic impact on every aspect of this planet. Climate change is the one that comes to mind. But whether it's changing the hurricane season to be more intense, wildfire season as we experienced here just a week ago, or covering the planet in pollution and waste products, we are having a big impact and we've done it incredibly quickly. And adding to that problem in the next, by the end of this century, we're going to add several billion more of us to the planet. This is baked into the pie. It's pretty much inevitable. And the truth is, a good chunk of those 11ish billion people who are here are going to become middle class consumers. And that's good. No poverty, all sorts of good stuff. On the downside, they're going to eat like middle class consumers, buy stuff like middle class consumers, and throw their crap away like middle class consumers, much like we do here in the United States. And so the question a lot of people have to grapple with going forward Is can this planet support about 3 billion more middle class consumers and about 4 billion more people going forward? And it's an honest question and I think there's an interesting thing we can think about here of some of the limitations of resources. So I'll use the arable land example. So right now, arable land, where we grow our food and we feed all of us. It's great, it works. We've got about 5% more arable land that we can go and add new crops to and grow more food. But if you just take that population growth and number of middle class consumers and look at 2050, you need 70% more arable land. And unfortunately, this is not like adding servers to your code cloud infrastructure. This is like land. We don't make more of it. Maybe someone will come up with a crazy idea, but it seems a little far fetched. So I actually want to ask you guys a question. Knowing this, how many of you show of hands are optimistic that humans will be here thriving 10,000 years from now? Couple of you. Okay, we'll make it a little easier. A thousand years hands. Anyone else? Now the easier question. 100 years we going to be here. All right, so everyone's pretty happy we'll be here in a hundred years, right? I'm actually incredibly optimistic that we are smart enough to be here and thriving 10,000 years from now. And it's not because I have blind faith or I'm just a dreamer. It's that I'm trained as a scientist and I believe in the data. And I think that the example is there in front of us of what we harness to be smart enough to do this. I believe in what we can measure, improve. And here's what I always come back to. For that 3.8 billion years that life's been here, it's done, okay? We just screwed it up in the last 150. Look at all these things that biology has done. It pervades the planet. Huge amount of diversity. I'm showing you what's called a phylogenetic tree here, but the idea that everything comes down to a common ancestor, which yet to be agreed upon. But everything from your fungi and your animals to your filamentous and cyanobacteria, your photosynthesizers, there's a huge amount of diversity. And this all went along just fine for basically 3.8 billion years, minus 150, before we really came along with our modern society. And the thing I find amazing about biology, this is like, it almost reads as a sci fi tech, even something as boring as a flower. Biology covers the planet in every possible range of ecosystems, from snowy and arctic to subtropical or desert. It self reproduces all of our modern products that we've learned to make. Widgets, devices, your iPhone, if you chuck it in some sugar water, your iPhone doesn't reproduce, it just shorts out. You throw a seed in the ground, it grows, it makes more seeds and it makes more stuff. It repairs. If I cut and I'll show an example of this later, if you cut something off of a tree, it grows back. And can you imagine describing to someone? I'm going to show a short video here. This is forest floor, nothing really happening. Oh, now it's moving a little bit. It's time lapse, not in real time. Look, something is growing out of the floor, growing to many times its height. It's then going to sprout some flowers and look pretty and blow in the breeze. And if you describe this as a technology you were going to invent out of a entry level engineering class, people would tell you you're crazy, it can't be done. This CO2, sunlight time, don't freeze, it works. That's absolutely amazing. Biology is powerful. And me as a bioengineer see this as an example of something that can we figure out how it works, not just watch it and say wow, that's pretty, but use it to solve some of the problems we have on this planet. And here's what's really changed a lot in the last 15 years. And to the layperson who's not a biologist, it's been less obvious. This is one of many things ways to convey this, but DNA sequencing is a really good way to show how this technology has changed dramatically. You can talk of this is reading DNA technology. You look at the as Ts, Cs and GS within the genome of every living organism on the planet and understand how it stores information that makes it do everything from eat and digest things to make new versions of itself to self repair. And as this cost has gone down from $100 million a genome to about $1,000 a genome, it's enabled a lot more engineering capabilities, design build, test cycles and I can show you analogous data for writing DNA code for synthesizing those AS T's, C's and G's as well as some of the more esoteric tools and computational functionality that's critical there. And so I actually think modern bioengineering is truly engineering and going there quickly. And it liberates us from the canonical ways we think about materials in particular across our planet and energy, so that we're not going to be reliant on 18th century solutions to 21st century problems. And so. One big problem here is that all of our modern economy is built on an absolutely amazing material that is fundamental to everything we do, and that's oil. And oil's amazing. I'll show you in the next slide when we get there. We kind of need it. But there's no amount of optimizing that current economy to sustainability for 10,000 years. We're either going to burn it all up, we're either going to release enough greenhouse gases that we unleash the full fury of climate change, or we're going to drown ourselves in pollution of things that never degrade. But as I said, it's actually quite useful. It's made some really awesome things. You think about driving your cars and stuff like that, but everything from paving roads to making plastics. And over the last 50 years, plastics, unsurprisingly, have grown dramatically because they're cheap, they last a long time, and they're very good at what they do. In fact, you find them touching every element of your life, including, I'd be willing to bet 95% of you are wearing plastic fibers right now. The challenge with that is that it's designed for a product that you use for a short time, but lasts a long time. And our future looks something like this. When you create something out of a polyester or a nylon or an acrylic plastic, you're putting something out there that you're going to use for anywhere from, I don't know, drinking straw for a couple seconds to minutes, and it's going to last for a few hundred years. There's a big impedance mismatch between the material and the product and how long it lives. And that's actually only the part you see. Take your clothes. Two thirds of the fibers made on this planet every year come from plastics, primarily polyesters. We make and consume about 80 billion, it's about 100 billion now, garments per year across this planet. That is an insane number. And it's only going to get worse. And those plastic fibers, when you look at your yoga pants, your T shirts, your sneakers, they're all there and they take hundreds of years to degrade. What's even worse. And our friends at Patagonia paid for this study and we have a partnership with them and give them a lot of credit for calling out something where they are part of the problem as well, and they know it. When you Wash your garments that have polyester fibers in it. Small microfibers smaller than a millimeter break off and go down the drain. And this data is showing you is like a per 6 kilogram wash load. How many, what the count is of those microfibers, not only do they come off in the water, but they actually go slip through all the way through the waste processing plant out into the ocean where they're eaten by small organisms like plankton or which are eaten by fish, which are eaten by us. And there was actually a great article came out about two months ago, quantifying the amount of plastic microfibers in poop of humans across every continent on this planet. And it's like 95% of us have it. And it's actually such a new problem. We don't even know if it's bad for us or not like I think it is. But we don't know. We just kind of know the problems there now. But if you ask me, this seems kind of unsustainable, right? How do we go, how do we live on a planet where we consume 80 billion garments a year that effectively never go away? Whereas you turn around and look at how nature does things and it makes materials that are designed for 4 billion years to biodegrade in the environment. And I found this one, I throw this up here just to point out the absurdity of some of the things we do. Fruit is great. There's a term goes bad faster than fruit because fruit actually biodegrades. We've actually been so crazy as to make things that look like fruit out of plastic that will never go away. This is absolutely absurd. So I think, you know, nature's incredible. There's a problem here with materials. Nature solved a lot of problems. Four billion years, that's a lot of like what exists today. But everything that came before it that we can find out there. And when they, when nature makes a material, it stores it in the genetic code like I kind of alluded to earlier. And so I'm going to give you an example here, one that I think drives the point home a little bit to show you a few things that nature makes. So this is a barnacle. I'll be surprised if none of you have seen one of these before, but maybe you haven't. These little crustaceans, they stick to the hulls of ships and piers and things like that. And this is a blown up version here. They basically sit there in their filter feeders trying to eat stuff that comes by, have no brain, have effectively no way to move around, except for in the early part of their life cycle. But they've essentially evolved and adapted over time. A glue that they make and secrete that cures within salt water, which is actually a really rare feature. And they stick to the ship. And not even no hurricane, no amount of driving fast takes them off. You come there with a hammer to bust them off. We as scientists, chemists, chemical engineers, we haven't made things as good as that in our hundred years of supposedly being the smartest in the world. This next one I'll show you is another different material where nature evolves something cool. And it'll do this in two phases. One, because I a gratuitous hummingbird video because I like hummingbirds. So this hummingbird is flapping its wings 60 times a second. That is kind of crazy. Has anyone tried to move their arms 60 times a second? Don't do it, you'll hurt yourself. It's, it's absolutely amazing. So how did nature solve this problem? And the better example to show you guys is we'll take this dragonfly. Does the same thing, but it's a better understood system. So this dragonfly, fairly small, has wings that are about the length of its body. Giant lever arms. I don't see big burly muscles to move its wings 60 times a second. And in her short lifespan, she'll flap her wings about 300 million times. What she's done is gone and evolved effectively. Protein based rubber bands that sit in the joints of the wing that are 99% energy efficient. So she's not actually putting a lot of energy in. She's just kind of keeping them bouncing over time. That keeps her aloft. And that's absolutely incredible. We don't make rubber nearly that good anywhere on the planet from petrochemicals. So my personal favorite where Bolt started, the silk that spiders make. So what you're looking at here, it's a video I'm going to show you. This is called the Darwin bark spider. She's about a gram not the smartest critter in the world spins this protein based fiber that we call silk. It's very similar to the silk we use for apparel over the years. And it's fine, it's biodegradable. I'm going to actually back up and play this again. Okay. It's fine. Biodegradable. It's actually stronger or tougher than Kevlar by about sevenfold. It's absolutely incredible material. She's not intelligent about it. She just had a 400 million year head start. And so what she's doing here, actually this is a really cool feature that spiders do. This is called ballooning. She's releasing this silk, it's wafting across a river. It's going to catch on the other side. It's about 30 meters wide. And she's going to build a web over that river to catch bugs that come up and to make more baby spiders. That's the power. That's one of the most powerful things you can imagine on the planet when you look at biology. And it actually gets far better than that because this silk is actually out of one of six or seven kinds, depends on the species that she makes that have different features. One stretchy like spandex, another you think of a spider's web, it's sticky. That silk is not sticky. She actually makes a glue from a different gland that she coats onto those fibers. There's another one that's super soft. There's one that's very, very fine. But all in. She's already provided a roadmap for how you would make a wide array of fiber based polymers. And so I think about the technology that makes these guys tick. They make our modern devices look like rocks that we carry around and talk into. This is amazing with everything that they can do. And spiders are really where the Bolt story started. So we came along and said, you know what, there's a lot of these features out in nature. They're often made from proteins, much like the fiber we have here from the spiders. The glue, the barnacles make, the rubber in the insect wings. All incredible materials, all made from proteins. And proteins are kind of the core competency of biology. When you study biology, there's something called the central dogma. It's about information stored in DNA to functionality largely in proteins. The search space is about basically 20 to the N is the number of amino acids you have in there. So it's effectively quickly becomes basically infinite. So I founded bolt threads in 2009 with two of my buddies out of graduate school with the idea of using proteins to replace the plastics and other materials we find out there in the environment. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we do that before I talk about some of the things we learned along the way. So step one, everything's stored in DNA. Find the information you want and copy it out. And I no longer get to do this because I've been able to find people much smarter than me who work at Bolt, probably many of your colleagues over the years who come and Work with us. So Rena here kind of typifies what happens in a biology lab, ranging from finding the information in an organism, doing a little bit of tweaking and coding to make it work better in a new organism. We use yeast. That's actually what she's looking at here on these plates. Single celled organism, actually. We as humans have a very long and passionate love affair with yeast. For several thousand years we've used it to make cheese, bread, beer, wine, things we love all over the world. And then we have essentially yeast that are tuned to make the spider silk protein without any spiders. Then we need to make a lot of it. Turns out that growing scale up is always a thing for startups. Growing a lot of these plates is a real bad idea. So we turn to another yeast kind of technology called fermentation, where we use large stainless steel tanks. And there was a time when I used to say this was a giant 300 liter stainless steel tank. Now in bolt parlance, this is a baby little fermenter. That's cute. And we run it around our place normally when we're doing scale up now these things are about 20ft in diameter, about six stories tall. And that's where we mass produce metric ton scale quantities of spider silk protein then. And I'm not going to show it here because it's kind of distracting, but we take it, take the protein, make it into a powder, much like a powdered milk or a whey protein, like after a workout, dissolve it into a viscous liquid and extrude it like you'd make rayon or polyester into fibers. And one of the things we've learned over the years is that if you give people a pile of polymer or a pile of fiber, they don't really know how to interpret it. So you make things that people actually interact with. So about a year ago we did this. It was a limited edition drop. This is a wool spider silk blend, 60% wool, 40% spider silk that we did in combination with friends of ours at bestmaid company and it basically makes this beautiful soft yarn that we knit into a product that actually turns out to be about 30% warmer than wool by itself, while being about 10% lighter. And so we made this, we made it into product and we actually took it all the way. This was the idea of getting minimum viable product all the way in the hands of consumers by making something, putting it in a FedEx box and showing up at a doorstep. Turns out the hardest part of the whole thing, getting through customs in Russia. Another example so we work with the designer Stella McCartney. And in early last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned a piece for an exhibit they were doing where Stella designed this dress. And then we came along and made it out of 100% spider silk. And the museum displays it as a piece of art for about six months before. Now, I think it probably going to end up on display in one of Stella's shops at some point, but absolutely incredible. And what it does is it starts to ignite the imagination of what can be and that this can become real product, that it's not just a science experiment, that it's going to turn into things people can interact with and buy. And as we continue going forward, the mantra is scale. You're going to see this in a lot more places starting next year and beyond. So the good news about this, it kind of sounds sci fi, like Tom said in the beginning, it sounds like you're venturing into the unknown and that you're going to try and launch, put a man on the moon for the first time or do something absolutely crazy. And it is a bit crazy, I won't deny that. But we're following a playbook that's been optimized over billions of years. You're copying something that already exists. So I look at this. The beauty of biology and the 4 billion years evolution to use as your crib notes, is that you get two big advantages that other product developers, chemists and others before you never had. And this should never go understated. You have a working prototype in your hands, like I can. Well, not right now. It's too cold. The spiders are all dead. But it's Charlotte's web fall, whole thing. But we can go out there when there's spiders and webs. We can take a piece of the silk, we can put it in a mechanical tester and we can test those properties. Right There is a working, functional 3D composition of matter that works for this stuff. So you know that. And second, you know that biology can manufacture it. So if you can engineer biology, you too can manufacture it. What that small caveat there is, it doesn't tell you how hard and how long it's going to be, how many millions of dollars it's going to take. But it can be done. And I would venture to say that that is a massive cheat when you're going off and starting something new. So we have another product we announced earlier this year that I'll talk about briefly. A problem material on the planet for sustainability. This is one that actually is from nature. Leather. Everybody loves leather. Who doesn't love leather? There's some reasons not to love leather. I'll cut to the chase there. But a wonderful material has evolved effectively with humans over the years. I love a leather jacket as much as the next guy, although it has some problems. I'm not a vegan. But from a sustainable materials point of view, besides just killing a cow, that is a really inefficient way to make that material. You could do far better. So if I have a jacket like this. Raising the cow to make the hide, to make the leather is a three year process. The economics of leather, of the hides is absolutely terrible. It's actually considered a waste product. And during that three years, that cow is taking up pasture space. It's eating a couple tons of grasses that are using water and land and all sorts of stuff. Cows are expelling greenhouse gases in the form of methane from their belches, which is about 20ish, 25 times more potent than CO2 alone. And it's essentially fueling global warming. Let alone once you have the hide of a dead cow, you have to go through a tanning process to do what's called deputrefication. It's the word of the day. And tanning hasn't changed much in the last 600 years. Some of them look a little nicer than this. We used to do a lot of hide tanning in the us. It's terrible. Toxic chemicals, lots of salt, smells awful. And so what we've essentially done in the US is export all of this pollution to other parts of the world that look something like this. And there are fancier versions, but largely that. So when I look at it from a renewable resources point of view, what you have is a 600-year-old solution that just makes no sense. The bolt we actually announced earlier this year where that we're making a leather product. I've got one that you guys can touch up here if you want. And this is a leather. It looks like leather, feels like leather, but it's made from growing mushrooms. So we grow. You take a mushroom and the part you eat is called the fruiting body. Most of the organism grows in a dense network of roots called mycelia. We grow these mycelia on waste products actually from the silk process and create a leather that grows in nine days, not three years, and eliminates all of the harmful chemistries in the tanning process. It's durable, it's functional, no animal involved. Mushrooms are kind of fascinating, right? These are things that grow on waste products like cellulosic biomass, they're some of the biggest organisms on the planet. I find this actually pretty incredible. You can actually take a road trip up to Oregon and see this 2000 acre single organism Pop quiz trivia for pub night is the largest organism on the planet. It's not a blue whale, it's a fungus. And so what we do actually is grow it in a tray. So this is essentially wood chips or manure or something like that. Corn stover is what we use in particular. And then what happens is this mycelium, the fine root structure, we trick it and it grows above the air. We create a foam in about nine days. And then we use that to compress it, cook it, dye it and you get something that looks like this looks like cow leather. But like the silk is a completely circular material, comes from products from nature, can be redigested by natural processes across ecosystems on the planet. And that's pretty incredible. And at Bolt, we have a whole series of new things that will come after this. And so these two are just the beginning of what we're doing. We were really started as three science obsessed nerds who were driven to avoid getting full time jobs when we were going to graduate. And what we've evolved into is a company looking to solve some of the most vexing material science problems on the planet. And the best news of this whole thing, in my opinion is you don't actually have to trust me. You have to look at a working, functioning system that's been here for 4 billion years and trust that track record. And so far we only have nine years of experience. But I'm going to go into a short section where I talk about some of the things we've learned about reinventing a category. So Bolt's a weird company. We blend consumer meets molecular biology and effectively no one else on the planet really does that. So here's a couple of things I've learned. One, and this seems dumb and it feels a little, maybe even overused, but everyone forgets it that when you're starting a startup, I think the most important thing you can decide on as early as possible is, is what I would call what's your North Star? And that's to say, what's the thing you want more than anything that you're willing to sacrifice on other things to get there? A really, really smart person in startup land once told me that the true strategy is the things you decide not to do, not the things you decide to do. Because it's easy to say yes to A lot of things. It's hard to say no and give up the things that come with it. So first and foremost, simple point, but absolutely pivotal. And at Bolt, for us, it's actually about our mission driven nature. Most people join Bolt because of the ability to take amazing new technology in an exciting new commercial space and do some real good in the world if we make it work. And so we actually reduce that down to a little slogan we have, that we're inspired by nature, devoted to science, and driven by an optimism that the best days of the planet remain ahead of us. And that's something that everyone who comes to Bolt really buys into. And it makes it easy to say no to all the other things along the way, because we know what we're saying yes to. The second thing I'll point out, is about recognizing opportunities. I think oftentimes people think that opportunities are either they have to be completely obvious or that people get lucky. I would say that each of you are smart enough, you know, amazing opportunities, and it's all about the execution to get there. And so I'm going to show you. This is a vintage 2011 Bolt threads, then called Refactor Materials Series A pitch slide. We raised $5 million in our series A back then, and it was about the benefits of why you'd want to make silk this way. And we're mostly wrong, but whatever. The idea here is that you can make with an automated process, you make more consistent fibers than when nature makes them. You can control cross section, we thought, and we. And we now know you can make these fibers machine washable. And then I added these two things. I was like, people should care about this sustainability and the fact that they don't come from animals. I got literally laughed out of venture capital pitches because of this. They were like, I might be as green as the next guy, but I've never heard of a vegan material. Today there's like a billion dollars of demand coming to the bolt's door asking for these things, and no one cares about these things. So the point here is not that venture capitalists were dumb, it's that there was an opportunity. It just wasn't clear that the market and the need had all lined up in a way that everyone understood it yet, and that we had the right idea, just the right timing, and that by being flexible and knowing that there was an opportunity there, we were able to harness that later on. The second part of this was, where do you use silk? And so my slides are a little backwards here, but the way I'll explain. This is when I tell people we're making spider silk, the first thing they say is make bulletproof vests. And it's probably because I seeded it in your mind by comparing it to Kevlar and being tougher earlier. Turns out that's probably a terrible idea. You're taking a business risk on a market space application that literally no one's ever done with that material before. And so you're compounding risk upon risk. That's serial. Whereas if you look back for about five centuries. Sorry, five millennia. Sorry. Silk's been used as a beloved material in consumer products and apparel. It doesn't have the long timeline and technical and regulatory risks that come with some of the other spaces. And it simply required us as a bunch of engineers to kind of check our egos at the door and say this isn't what feels like the most technical application out of the gate. But turns out Silk's about a $5 billion a year market, which is not really what we go after right now. Silk fiber itself, we go after other stuff within the fibers market, but as you dig into it, there were really interesting technical problems to solve and really interesting sustainability problems to solve. And then after we solve that, we can always come back and do these other crazy things people asked us to do, like make semiconductor dielectrics, sailboat sails, medical devices, beauty, and automotive. Nothing stops us from doing that in the future if we get the business right in the beginning. The other part I'll point out is Milo. So a year ago, this was not really a big part of Bolt at all. And it was a recognition that there was a massive opportunity in the market here, that the right technology at the right time with our team could be huge. And today the demand is. I actually have stopped taking calls on Milo because the demand is just through the roof and people will pay anything for it. This one is a little self serving because I'm a scientist, but I would argue that treat entrepreneurship like science. Make sure you're learning from everything you do, everything you do can be designed to learn something even in failure. And so I would give a couple basic examples I think of. I've got a four year old son and little past blocks and holes, but trying things actually ask the question, gather the data, analyze it, and use that to inform your decisions. Running off of other people's wisdom and instinct is rarely the right option. And usually you can design good experiments that allow you to make data driven decisions on how to build your company and how to go forward. I'll skip over this one competition. So when you kind of lay Bolt out there in the world of startups, you could think about what exists with similar materials. You've got your natural materials, your synthetic, and as we think about it, the bioengineered. And we're not the only ones who thought of this idea of using biology to engineer materials. In fact, if you go start Googling around, you'll kick up companies like these ones and you'll say, oh, they're your competition. You could, like, fight them and block them with IP and like, all these other things. And they've got, like, pretty pictures kind of like ours. And like, maybe this is a. This is. This is all our stuff over here, but maybe this is a problem, right? The reality is most startups don't die because you have competitors. Like, we're all a bunch of startups who are burning cash and trying to, like, figure it out. The biggest competitor is ourselves. The most likely chance a startup fails, in my opinion, is the team makes bad decisions and runs out of money and can't make payroll. And so that's like the most obvious thing, but everyone forgets it. So, like, I often advise everyone at Bolt look internal, not external, for where the worst competition is, and make sure that we're testing the right things and being prudent with our path forward so that we can make our product and our technology real. Turning a technology into a business, this is a tricky one, especially for scientists and engineers. You know, we're all good with technology. At some point, you have to find a way to make money doing it. The Dan, just go raise more money answer only works for so long. Even though I've heard people say that at Bolt, Dan will just raise more money. And so, you know, the question here is, like, I would argue that Netflix did this brilliantly of finding a way to take a technology and marry it with a business model in a way to devastating effect to the rest of the market place. And so when we look at this at Bolt, we have a business model that in the traditional sense, what many people told us to do was Bolt makes stuff and then we give it to someone who's like a middleman, who makes things like fabrics and materials, and then they'll sell it to brands and you'll monetize by basically feeding the pipeline, and these people will eventually pull. That turns out to be terrible. And there are a million reasons that doesn't work. And there's no incentive. Great technologies die all the time here. So what we did at Bolt was kind of hybridize the business model where not only do we make things, we take it all the way to the consumer. Like that hat I showed you. We made a series of neckties, this bag actually we had on Kickstarter a little while ago. A few examples here of stuff we've done. And like I said earlier about being a scientist, these are all experiments. We design these to learn a lot in everything we do from how do you design packaging, how do you ship something to what archetype of customer is interested in following us, how does it map across, across social media space and e commerce? And it's all about getting out there and doing lots of tests really, really quickly. I often tell people within the company that humans are worse than random at predicting the future, but we are far better at seeing it and recognizing it. And so let's just make a lot of things and let's recognize where it's working. What you should care about this is a little nebulous, but if you start a startup, this is what the headlines are going to tell you you should care about. These are some things that were written about bull threats. It's all about dollars, right? Everyone cares about money. No one cares about the rest of it in public perception. But much like that North Star argument I made in the beginning, you need to know what you're going for and learn to ignore this. And it's harder than you think. It's really difficult. Everyone gets caught up in this. Raising money, financing, since we all understand money and the fungibility and being able to do things with that. But in reality it all comes back to this. We care about this internally and if we do this right, all of the capital, all of the money will be there. And the last thing, and this is just small. As an entrepreneur, no one is going to tell you how to do your job better than yourself. And the great entrepreneurs, in my opinion, find a way to self motivate for myself. It's how you cause enough anxiety, enough motivation to channel all of your energy into making the business go forward. So the example here is if you put yourself in a boring office situation every day, it's pretty hard to motivate yourself to do extreme things to make risk based decisions. Because bolt no amount or day one at your startup, no amount of cutting costs will get you to profitability. You're going to have to make risky decisions and take chances to get there. Which I imagine if I was hanging upside down on a rock like this, you're pretty motivated to make some risky decisions if you have to. So those are a handful of things I've learned. I'd actually like to take some of your questions now about what we've done at Bolt, how we've gotten here and where we're going next. Right here in the middle, the leather suitcase, the not real leather suitcase you're making that's comparable. What is the cost analysis on that comparable leather product and how is the market reacting to it on that basis? Because I've never heard of it before today. You say you're getting a lot of calls. Yep. So for the people who are watching the video, how does the cost compare on the leather product today and how does that drive market reaction? So our biggest problem by far today, Bolt's been around for eight years is how much stuff we make. We've made 500 square feet total of that stuff, probably so it's not ubiquitous. We've made maybe 100 kg of fiber total now. Next year we're going to go up 100x in leather and 10x in fiber or more. What happens by taking stuff to market? What I have learned, the people who would buy from some of your customers and partners are the most attuned to the new stuff coming out. So if I launch 100 hats through Best Made or 200 briefcases or tote bags through Kickstarter, the people who are designing and making purchasing decisions at the large partner companies are the most attuned to the news that comes out around that. And modern, you know, modern advertising can be used for good or ill. And if you have something that's new, exciting and has a great story behind it, you can broadcast your message further than you ever could two decades ago. And so that to answer your cost question, its cost compare will be less than leather at scale. You're feeding it dead plant matter, ground up trees or horse manure or stuff like that. You're feeding it free stuff. Why does leather even exist anymore? Because we're not at scale yet. Because we're not at scale yet before we displace it. About $100 billion market and it just needs time. So what's your main obstacle to scale? What's my main obstacle to scale? No one's ever scaled advanced biotech processes in this way before. So if you take about. I'll give you a quick example of the silk problem. In silk, we have to develop a brand new process to do fermentation of this modified yeast and purify out the polymer. And all that does is buy you table stakes to to then use your pure polymer to figure out a New fiber spinning process that takes some tweaks as well. And it just takes time to work through. People ask this in investment all the time. And when you break it down, it's very mundane things. It's like, oh, you're waiting for that widget to show up from Argentina where they're making it, or whatever it is. But with time, we're growing at about 10x per year right now in volume. And we will for several years to come right here. How are your products durable while still being biodegradable? So how are the products durable while still being biodegradable? Oftentimes in the beginning they're biodegradable but not durable. But biodegradability is not about. It goes away instantly, but that it does go away in less than hundreds of years. So often with our silks, you're looking at something that if you were doing a bunch of biodegrading tests right now, it's proportional to the density of the material and how enzymes and things like that and microorganisms can infiltrate if you bury it in nature. But your closet is not the optimal biodegradable environment compared to a compost heap. And so you can tune in that way. And we shoot for something that lasts for roughly impedance match with how long you'd keep the piece of apparel. So most humans, you buy a piece of clothing, you wear it for, I think industry would say 50 washes. So 50 wears. Almost no one goes that long anymore. But we basically have this idea like, if it lasts for five to 10 years, that's way better than hundreds and, and long enough to last for the product lifespan. Who else back there? So the fashion industry is kind of known for its, let's call it, ethical issues. Do you see in the future replacing that or ensuring that the materials that go into it are more healthy for the planet? So fashion's ethically challenged in a number of fronts. Do we envision replacing the fashion industry or changing the inputs to make it more sustainable with the planet? My thesis right now, you need to change, if you want to change the output with plastic, change the inputs of the material. Because recycling, I'm not a chemist, I'm biased on this. Recycling is a terrible technology. It's just super lossy and you end up with this distributed pollution all over the planet. So I think step one is that step two is one of the things. We don't talk about this a whole lot externally, but we actively look for materials that could change the way you manufacture the product, because then maybe you could dramatically change some of the other impacts in the industry. And it's still early in that we're mostly focused on the longevity of the product and the waste product. But we've got some ideas kicking through. So it's a little bit of both right here. Do they smell? Do they smell? Actually the leather smells like almost nothing. You guys can come smell it if you want. We actually may end up adding a scent in the end. If you don't do it right, it smells awful. So if you don't, the same way that if you use a hide and you didn't properly preserve it, it rots. The same thing happens with all natural materials. You actually have to go through this process of preserving it so that it does last for a long time. But odor is oftentimes a byproduct of degradation by microorganism in the back here.

So you mentioned as part of your inspiration that you want to disrupt middle class consumers and their consumption like polyester, but you're partnering with still the partner like hats and your first products who aren't exactly affordable to the middle class industry. So how do you plan on like getting into that group and would you consider like selling your threads to bigger companies that are already part of that middle class textile industry?

Yep. So the question is, there's a vast mismatch between the scale we've done today and if you actually want to make a difference at a global scale. And yes, part of this is the healthy tension that comes up in startups between the perfect solution and where you start. And my philosophy is always just start, just start doing things and improving. And so my metric internal for Bolt is it's somewhat arbitrary scale. Everything we do do it 2x better than the last time we did it because if we do that, we'll get there. The long term goal is exactly that. We would love for the fiber we make right now to to be a ubiquitous. Every brand on the planet's using it, has replaced it. As the cost comes down and the scale goes up. But it comes back down to the slowness of scale of making actual physical things. I'm putting plant in place here. I would label Bot thread as a deep tech startup because venture capitalists are taking technical risks in investing you. But now they say that it's really time for bringing up a new 100 billion deep tech company. Will you be the next 100 billion deep tech company? So deep tech is popular. It's been a popular buzzword recently. And will Bolt be the next one that is $100 billion plus company. I don't know if we will be. Certainly if you look at the basic ingredients, you can put together a functional model. When you look at the market sizes in the TAM and all the important stuff you care about, where margin can be, there's no reason Bolt couldn't be a trillion dollar market cap company one day for the volume of stuff that's done. But you are taking real technical, like not even just technical risk, you're taking science risk. This is actually not even engineering risk in startup parlance. This is like, does the world work like we think it does so that we can actually bring this to market? I'm hugely optimistic. I'm hugely biased. What? Yes, I think this should. Well, okay. I hope that happens. I actually hope our competitors do stunningly well also. Because when you look at the need to make a change on the sustainability of this planet, it has to happen on a time scale that no one company can do itself. I mean, you'd have to mobilize in some insane way for both. If Bolt's the only answer. I'm terrified for the future. So I hope a lot of people do this really well. And actually I put my money where my mouth is there. I actually actively help anyone who's working in this space, whether I'm advising, opening up resources we have at Bolt to teach people how to do things. There's a lot of things we've learned that we should be sharing. Why do you just produce these products? Knee ties and hubs. Why specifically? So how do we. So the question is, how did we choose these products and specifically to make them? Again, it was the. We put ourselves in this uncomfortable position of saying we're going to want something. So we did neckties for the time. First, first product we ever did, it was a knit tie. We did it at south by Southwest in. It was 2017, it was March 2017. And in December I went to the team and said, okay, my south by Southwest panel got approved. Two thumbs up. Aren't you excited? Yay. Clap, clap, clap. Guess what? We're going to launch our first product there. Silence. Like there was literally nothing done at that point. And so I left it. What I did is I put the challenge out there and I left it to the team and they did effectively something similar to an agile process where there was a three month sprint to figure out what it was, what we could make, what we could scale, what we could produce and put it out there. Because the point was nothing infuriates me more about tech companies than vaporware. Where it's like, oh, it's coming. It's going to be perfect, it's going to be great. And then the perfect becomes the enemy of good enough and ever making progress for us. It's like, pick stuff, put it out there, learn from it, move on. I had a picture here. We made some composite knife handles. It was kind of cool. We learned a lot about getting bubbles out and wetting the polymer with epoxies and different resins. Made about 25 of them, probably never. We may or may not do that again, but we learned a lot doing it. About how you'd make a different type of product with the material and find out where the killer application is. And you do that by repetition. One more question. All right, last question. Who's got the last question here? Takers. Takers. Right here. Again, why did you buy in 2017 best made? So this company, best made company that we worked with, we acquired in 2017. Part of that was, again, is a learning. And it's. I believe that when you make new materials with wild new material properties, we've learned that no one knows what to do with them. And so we wanted to have the agency to take it all the way to the consumer and see what happens. And we've done one product last year with the hats. We've done about three or four this year, and we'll continue to ramp that up. And it's made us really smart about not only how our products work in the world, but also how the current standard in the market is for direct to consumer. Because these are two things that normally don't exist together. Molecular biology, direct to consumer, retail, and everything in between. And at least now, if we fail at it, we can say it was our fault the whole way through.