How to Grow Your Own Story with Erum Azeez Khan and Karl Schmieder

What happens when brilliant scientific innovation meets masterful storytelling? 

Marketing rarely tops the priority list for scientists and biotech founders who are deep in the technical challenges of making their innovations work. Yet without effective communication, even groundbreaking discoveries risk languishing in obscurity, unable to attract the talent, funding, and partnerships necessary to scale their impact.

In this illuminating conversation, Dan Goodwin welcomes marketing experts Erum Azeez Khan and Karl Schmieder — from Messaginglab and the Grow Everything Biotech Podcast — who work with science-driven companies to elevate their stories and impact. With their unique backgrounds spanning biochemistry, creative writing, and entrepreneurship, they share insights on transforming complex scientific concepts into compelling narratives that resonate with investors, partners, and the public.

Through revealing case studies like K18 Hair (which sold to Unilever for nearly $1 billion after just three years) and Cultivarium, we explore how effective scientific storytelling creates tangible business results and exame how scientific innovators must adapt their messaging to emphasize performance advantages.

Whether you're a scientist, entrepreneur, investor, or simply curious about how ideas spread, this episode offers practical wisdom on making people care about innovations that could shape our collective future.

(00:00) Introduction to Climate Biotech Podcast
(00:35) Meet the Hosts: Dan Goodwin
(00:51) Special Guests: Erum Azeez and Karl Schmeider
(01:37) The Importance of Storytelling in Science
(02:26) Marketing Strategies for Scientists
(03:41) Getting to Know Karl and Erum
(05:03) Erum's Journey from Pharma to Marketing
(07:34) Karl's Path to Biotech Marketing
(09:58) The Role of a Fractional CMO
(14:26) Effective Storytelling Techniques
(21:09) The Value of Blogging and Content Creation
(24:20) The Attention Economy and Google's 7-11-4 Rule
(25:11) Maximizing Content Reach Across Platforms
(26:23) Case Study: K18 Hair's Science Storytelling Success
(29:08) Leveraging Experts for Market Differentiation
(29:57) Case Study: Verium's Strategic Growth
(31:39) Shifts in Climate Biotech Narratives
(37:25) The Importance of Language and Buzzwords
(40:18) Rapid Fire Questions and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

[00:00:00] Karl Schmeider: There are trillions of dollars. On the sidelines waiting to be invested and deployed. There is so much money and the businesses that are being created in biotechnology are really the businesses of this century. 

[00:00:17] Erum Azeez: people think that, marketing is when they're ready to sell something. No, sales happens soon as you have an idea and you wanna share it with the next person 

[00:00:25] Daniel Goodwin: Welcome to the climate biotech podcast, where we explore the most important problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how we can solve them. I'm Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and neuroscience to a career in climate biotechnology.

As your host, I will interview our sector's most creative voices from scientists and entrepreneurs to policymakers and investors. 

Today we're thrilled to share a conversation with Erum Azeez and Karl Schmeider from Messaging Lab.

Messaging Lab has on their website. Consider us your fractional chief marketing officer. This is a great articulation and they're very good at what they do. But what does it mean? This stuff is important for scientists and innovators, and so we're really happy to share this conversation now. First, we need to know that Carl and Iam run the Grow Everything Podcast, which has over a hundred episodes and absolutely one of our favorite podcasts here at Home World.

And just by looking at their guests, you can see that they're substantial members of the synthetic biology community. But if you're listening now, the question is why would a professor or postdoc, or startup hustler. Possibly want to think about marketing. What does that even have to do with getting your experiments to work?

It all comes down to storytelling. If you do great work, but nobody cares, you will struggle to recruit talent and capital. 

We at Home World see storytelling and marketing as an essential skill of empowerment and understanding the basic mental models that Carl and e Room do for their clients can be unlock for the innovator. From my personal experience, getting people to care about your story is an essential yet subtly difficult art.

In this conversation, I hope we can succeed at laying out some big ideas in your head to get you in the enough to be dangerous direction, but then also explore some of the more advanced case studies. The last thing I'll say before we jump into this is we're gonna say a lot of things that sound obvious, make people care about your project, speak in people's language, get major leaders in your target market to care.

But it's one thing to say them and one to do them. So the thought I would want to put in your mind as you listen is what can you do today? Take this advice, work with your team and just practice telling your story, and you'll be amazed how overly iterations it's gonna become tighter and tighter and more understandable by people that you're trying to sell on your idea.

Without any further ado, please enjoy our conversation with rum and Carl.

I think everybody knows Karl and Erum. They run the Grow Everything Podcast and they run messaging lab, 

they work with a lot of excellent companies and it's great to have them here. So the goal of this conversation is first to get to meet them and put human personalities behind the work they do. Give some basic introduction and kind of like enough to be dangerous. And then we'd love to start talking on the advanced level of some case studies or recipes that are working now.

And where I want to end this as we go into questions and rapid fire questions at the end is I think we need to own that the Sin Bio narrative is changing, right? A lot of the Sin Bio things that people pitched in 20 20, 20 21, some of them ended crashing and burning. Some of them are black holes, some of them are sucking in more money.

And I think it's really important for us to be both reactive and learning from as we craft our own stories. As always, the objective of this is to get the practitioners really talking. And so with that, I'd love to just get outta the way by asking Karl who are you and where did you grow up?

[00:03:48] Karl Schmeider: I'm trained as a biochemist. And what I will often say to people is I've got the weird background. I've only ever met someone who has the two. Sets of initials behind their name that are Ms. MFA. So masters in biochemistry and MFA in creative writing. And I grew up in Ventura, California.

The biochemistry degrees from uc, Riverside, and the MFAs from a weird Buddhist. Creative writing school called the Naropa Institute of Boulder, Colorado. I'll just let I talk about her background.

[00:04:19] Erum Azeez: There's a lot of interesting things about Karl, so we'll have to let him dig, give him some breathing room. 

[00:04:23] Karl Schmeider: I know it's such a great setup, by the way, 

[00:04:26] Erum Azeez: yeah. I am also a biochemist. I studied actually specifically forensic chemistry. I really wanted to be Scully from the X-Files. That was my goal in life as a 17-year-old. But then as I graduated, I ended up getting a great offer from pharma. I grew up in the greater Philadelphia area.

Go Eagles. But that's also known as p farm country, P-H-A-R-M country and lots of opportunity for forensic chemist, analytical chemist to work there. I ended up working in pharma for about six years before starting my entrepreneurial journey and making my way to messaging lab. 

[00:05:03] Daniel Goodwin: Riffing on your point Ira, I've gotta follow up by asking, did you ever expect when you were in the big pharma days that you would go into the marketing side?

Did you ever expect that in 10 years you'd be the leading firm and helping syn bio companies tell a story?

[00:05:16] Erum Azeez: Oh yeah, definitely not. I was thinking like my trajectory in my role. 'cause I was working in the lab, I was, doing analytical chemistry and the trajectory there was, go back, get a PhD and like just become like head of r and d. I'm like, okay, I could live with that. But then after a while in pharma and you, I'm also growing up, like I started my career, I was 21 years old, I just graduated a bachelor's degree, so I didn't go get my master's or PhD or anything, so I was like, wait, how does this pharma work exactly? What's going on? What animals? And then because I worked on the chemistry side, mind you, so I never saw an animal in the pharma world. Then I also had this personality where I was just very social and you don't really get a lot of social experience when you're in the wet lab.

So I was like, I gotta get outta here. Marketing really came to a forefront when I met Karl and, I had this experience in working with entrepreneurs and in this world, but, Karl meeting him really solidified it for me as a discipline.

[00:06:12] Daniel Goodwin: I would clarify that there are quite a few social interactions in the wet lab, but they're not always positive,

[00:06:17] Erum Azeez: exactly.

[00:06:18] Karl Schmeider: I was gonna say two things. So Iam and I were just talking about this before this call where it's I'm definitely like one of those introverts where it's okay, I can go out and feed off people for a couple of hours and then I gotta go and retreat for many days. And IAM gets her energy from interacting with people.

So I think being in the lab must have been extremely frustrating for her. 'cause I just know, like her personality, it's very challenging to not. Be out there when you're that kind of personality. And yet I know also IAM really thrives off of having those like super intense work sessions where we're just like staring at our laptops, but working across from each other and each of us saying to shut up, I have to keep working.

[00:06:56] Daniel Goodwin: I do love the personality differences for good teams. So there's a really good 1950s book of photography of portraits by this guy named Philip Hoffman, who was the photographer to the stars, to Nixon, Oppenheimer, you name it. And he would warm everybody up by making them jump.

[00:07:13] Karl Schmeider: Oh

[00:07:13] Daniel Goodwin: He has a whole book on jump portraits and he ends up writing this whole book just on the Psychology of Jumps. My favorite page on the book is a spread of teams. The teams that lasted the longest Simon and Schuster had very different body languages in their jumps, and the teams that had very similar jump personalities are the teams that didn't make it.

So I love the idea of kinda the introvert extrovert split. And I do wanna just come back to you then Karl on this, which is that, so if you are the introvert maybe on the team did you think that you'd be, running the leading firm of storytelling and synthetic biology?

[00:07:45] Karl Schmeider: To be honest, no, because, so here's something that happened to me. I was like, okay, I like the lab, but I'm not good at it. That's not gonna work for me. So I went out and I worked in the lab for a little bit and then was like, I wanna really learn how to write, so I'm be writing, I want to get an MFA to memorialize the fact that I was doing it.

And mind you, during both the masters in biochemistry and the MFA. I almost quit in the middle of both of them. I was like, what's the point of this? I'm just gonna learn this on my own. But I stuck it out somehow young Karl realized that having those degrees would make some difference to someone. But while I was doing the MFA, I ended up at this consulting firm in Denver that was focused on community relations and these guys were just ri, I shouldn't say it this way. They were writers, marketers. And I was like, oh, so someone's doing this. Someone's gotta be doing this in biotech or biopharma. And I ended up going, moving to New York and working in pharma marketing and I was like, I don't know anything about marketing.

So I had to learn on the job. And then after doing that for seven or eight years, I was like, I'm gonna go out on my own to start something that I wanna do. Because I don't really like having bosses. I like having partners and I did, I was worked like, as a freelancer, but then I was like, wait, I still don't really know what marketing is.

So I had to like really invest time and money into learning what marketing meant. And then applying my science the creative writing part of me to all that. This idea of having a leading firm, focused in a very specific area of the sciences was not really what I set out to do.

I really wanted to create something that would bring value to the world and also enable me to write about things that I really like.

[00:09:26] Daniel Goodwin: I love it. I love asking these personal journey questions because a lot of the best work is not planned, right? You're just doing your best at the margin. And I think we've said this a couple times what is marketing, et cetera. What the heck does marketing even have to do with a science project where I.

When you're the doer, you're only caring about making the technology work at first. And so I'd love to just speak to the people who are listening to this, they're building something they don't know what marketing means. They go to your website, they see, oh, you offer fractional CMO services.

What does that mean to them? What do you want that to mean to them? And I'm gonna toss it maybe to Iam first.

[00:10:01] Erum Azeez: Yeah. I would say , if, you're saying that as a scientist you're looking to see if there's something to work, but it's to work for who, and that who is the key in marketing, right? So who are you building it for? And the fractional CMO is really people that might not know what marketing is and

they don't really have a strategy on what it means. They might just have a vague idea and they need someone to come in, but they can't necessarily afford someone in a leadership position as a full-time employee. But they need guidance on what to do.

And maybe they're really good at learning very quickly. They can execute quickly, but they just need direction One aspect of a fractional CMO is to be able to set them in the right direction. Maybe they think they need to do a press release 'cause they started a company, and oftentimes that's not the case.

You might not need that. You might just need to have a stronger differentiation, positioning, and talk directly to people who would be your customers or talk directly to investors or other people and just start getting out there and talking versus. Hiding behind a screen and just putting out information digitally go out into the real world.

So that's my take. I know Karl has another perspective on that too.

[00:11:13] Karl Schmeider: I was also gonna say, we joke around and I'm very public about it. I say, look, half our job is therapy, half our job is education, and everything else comes after that.

as a fractional chief marketing officer, as opposed to Chief Medical Officer, which is a very storied position at Big Pharma, our job is to really understand what a company is trying to do, educate the team on how we get out in front of the marketplace. What are the ways that we. Are most effectively gonna do that. And then if we can execute that or we can direct someone to execute for the company.

And we've done all of the above.

[00:11:53] Daniel Goodwin: What you're saying here is very emphasizing the first word, which is chief. And I think a lot of the work that the chief marketing officer can come in to do is to give the frameworks and the ways people think about. What marketing means to the firm. And so there's two questions there, which is one does a company generally need a fractional CMO like messaging lab because they can't or they won't do the marketing themselves?

And I kinda love just to hear you riff on this and then where we're going with this is to think about what are the enough to be dangerous basics. Because I think there's, if I was in messaging lab's, shoes, I would think that there's a lot of people there that can do the first few steps themselves.

And it's probably most fun for people to begin to be speaking the language when they come to you. And so I want to touch on both, but does a company generally need a fractional CMO? 'cause they can't or they won't do the marketing themselves?

[00:12:40] Erum Azeez: Both. Either they can't and they're just it's just like a big nebulous. Concept and they just don't even know where to start. Especially as it relates. To their goals, right? It's so vast. Marketing is so vast, communication is so vast. Where do you start? Obviously there's a website and, having a foundation, but then are you gonna do an advertisement?

Are you going to go to a conference? There's so much and you have to prioritize depending on what your resources are, right? Yeah. It'd be great to have this huge instagram campaign, but it's gonna cost you like $2 million to get something really effective going. And the won't is also valid. Maybe they just won't do it because they're busy actually building the company and they realize that's not their strength. And they're like, it's not important. I'm not gonna do it, but I want someone else to do it because I know it's important.

[00:13:25] Karl Schmeider: Yeah, they definitely exist simultaneously with. Different people, and some people just wanna grind and do the bench lab or the computational work, and they don't want to think about it. But if there's no sale there's no company, unless you're selling something, money has to move.

[00:13:42] Erum Azeez: Yeah.

[00:13:42] Karl Schmeider: And marketing is one of the things that helps it move. As opposed to sales, which is direct. Hey, we're out talking to customers. Sales is like building that desire.

[00:13:50] Daniel Goodwin: So Karl, I'd love to just shake the tree of your knowledge on this topic because I, where we're going here is talking about the enough to be dangerous basics. And I think the first step is like admitting that you need some help telling a story, right? And I think it's probably one of the first reasons that people won't come to you or won't think about the marketing.

 Whereas the experience that I've had is that people don't think enough about their story from the start and do some science and, oh, what are you working on? I'm gonna give you a five page answer and academic ease and blah, blah, blah.

And then the marketers just I don't care. Give me the mimetic weight thing to walk away with. And I think this is. These are my perspectives, but you guys are the pros. So Karla, I'd love to just ask you to start laying down some basics for, what are the enough to be dangerous basics that a scientist needs.

And maybe a fun starting spot. And please answer this however you want, but I would just, I can't Help us start with the provocation of, sometimes scientists need to unlearn a few things when they need to think about being storytellers.

[00:14:46] Karl Schmeider: Yeah, I'll go into depth in terms of storytelling later, but this is something you Ram and I were talking about. Everybody thinks they're a storyteller because they can talk about what they did over the weekend, right? But that's not the kind of story that necessarily you need to tell if you're 

trying to make a sale, trying to get an investor, trying to get a partner, even trying to hire someone. That's a different storytelling skill, but I think also something that is enough to be dangerous knowledge besides just learning how to tell a compelling story, is understanding that you need to start thinking about orchestrating, something like an ecosystem that moves you beyond just this innovation that you're working on. That means you know you're gonna maybe coordinate someone who's gonna build the thing, make the thing, or manufacture the thing for you. You might eventually have to talk to regulators. You're gonna have to talk to funders, partners, people to hire.

So there's like multiple levels. That have to happen for there to be a business and one really big part of it I know we'll come back to is the storytelling part. But then the other part of it is being able to really orchestrate, and create this ecosystem or this value chain that surrounds you.

And this is something IAM and I talk about, IAM add to this because I think your insight to this is always so essential.

[00:15:58] Erum Azeez: I think a lot of people on this call or listening to this podcast for example are starting that ecosystem development part because you just need to have more people to talk about what you're doing that get it.

So that's part of it. I would say a big thing a lot of scientists need to unlearn. It's still something I'm working on too is being concise. We mentor other organizations that have, startups.

I am specifically working with the Merck Digital Sciences studio, which is biopharma. So if you can say not just what you're doing, but while you're doing in a very concise way that. Is a huge step towards getting your idea out there.

And also this is, you know when, people think that, marketing is when they're ready to sell something. No, sales happens soon as you have an idea and you wanna share it with the next person 'cause you're trying to sell them on an idea. So sales is, to me is always happening 'cause there's some type of, that idea has some value.

Obviously ideas are. Endless. But when you try to convince someone to spend time with you on it, that is a sale because they're giving you their time. And time is, I would say, more valuable than money, especially as we are very accelerating through time these days.

I think yes, you're selling immediately and then you know, unlearn, the technical speak and talk human.

[00:17:13] Daniel Goodwin: I think I'm actually getting to the very salty conclusion that academia is really verbose. 'cause they don't actually know what they're saying.

[00:17:20] Erum Azeez: To business, to the market. 

[00:17:23] Daniel Goodwin: Yeah. Or it's just if you have to be actually complete and give like a 10 page background, if it requires that much background.

I think like a much more tangible one that's riffing on the, tell me your story, I still have the PhD scientist had and like I still think about that forward sometimes and the pushback is don't tell me to tell the story shorter.

I'd have to throw away parts of it. And whereas I think what you guys are coaching them on is, no, let's just amplify the most important parts. And then toss the rest. Otherwise it's not gonna be memorable. Does that sound about right? 

[00:17:52] Karl Schmeider: Yeah. No it totally is. a big part of it is helping scientists understand that, look, we actually train people a lot and go into companies and train them in terms of how to tell your story. And we have these slides that we're like, here's how scientists communicate.

Here's the hypothesis. We're trained in the scientific method. We go through all the details, we wanna have this discussion and then come to conclusions. But that's not the way the public works. And these days, you've got this three second rule in play where if you don't get someone's attention in three seconds, you're screwed.

And so we train scientists and the people we work with, you have to get people's attention and cut to the chase. We say to each other too we'll be discussing. So I was just like. Karl, just cut to the chase. God dammit. You're taking too long. Christina Aga was there and so she and I were talking about it and she got like the thing where you know, they, she did this presentation and she was just astounded that, there's like still this.

The sentiment of, Hey, we're scientists, we don't really need to tell stories. The way that we absolutely need to tell stories, especially these days when funding is being cut and I'm like screaming at people because what's happening is that people don't realize the economic value of what fundamental research does, like all the businesses, and it's obscene that Elon Musk, who's the biggest welfare queen in the United States is cutting the sciences because he has benefited from decades of research and billions of dollars invested in research. So it's really up to us to be out there telling those stories. Sorry, I don't know where we were

[00:19:21] Erum Azeez: You got spicy, Karl. 

You got spicy. 

[00:19:26] Daniel Goodwin: I'm really curious to hear the way, I mean, the way you already said, the way you work with companies and teams to give them these slides and to help them with the storytelling, I think is so important. Because I think one of the derogatory lenses that scientists will put onto marketing is that it's just fluff and it's just polish and whatever.

Like we'll just staple that on later. But I think to take this idea of you're not just cutting your idea in half, you're encapsulating it in a more memorable point, actually requires a ton of executive capacity and it requires a ton of understanding where you're going and it seems like a lot of that stuff you can test together as a team, right?

It seems like you can just push teams like you pitch you. Make sure the person can play it back. Like it seems like there's so many things you can do, which is just cultural training to help scientists tell their story better. And that just comes from that, that can be taught across peers. Have you, you must see this all the time, right?

Yeah.  I would say like, it's not. Diluting your idea You have to come up with one core idea. Just like when you read the news, like a headline 

then breadcrumbs. You gotta be able to, see if there's an interest and allow your audience to then dig deeper and whatever channel medium that you're speaking with, that happens with conversation. When we go to conferences, I'll meet scientists, they'll just fire hose information at me and I'm like.

Hi. I don't care. Not the person you need to talk to. I'm sorry I can't help you, but it's it's a conversation, oh yeah. And this is what I'm doing, you know, I'm discovering greenhouse gas microbes. This is what I'm doing.

Oh, really? Okay. And then same thing online, just digitally you might put out like a little post, a quick brief post, and then it's linked to something and that's linked to something else, and that's linked to something else. Go back to your website, then that's the trail, the breadcrumb trail to the deeper idea, the deeper science that you really want people to know about.

Yeah, I would love to take us into a tactical question here, and this is, because I'm hoping this be really tangible, conversational, I'm gonna share something we've been really bad at Home World, and I'm gonna ask this to Karl because it's about writing. I'm extremely critical of our ability to put blogs out in the world and it drives me crazy because I have so many ideas and we want to write them, and then the team doesn't agree on what should come out and why.

And the goal here obviously is to have people know us before we show up. It's so cool. And for young teams one of the most powerful things is to walk into a room.

People already know who you are. They already know what your concepts are, where you're going. And I think blogs, have been a really powerful form of that. But as a team, we've had trouble. And I take all responsibility for this, right?

We've had trouble really understanding in our organization what value it really creates, what are good criteria, what the purpose of having a blog is at all. And maybe it's not even valuable anymore so I'd love to just hear your take on the blog and if that is the best way to build a following of your ideas.

[00:22:08] Karl Schmeider: I don't know why you're complaining you have a podcast, 

[00:22:11] Daniel Goodwin: have a podcast because, part of the motivation is that we were so slow to get blogs out and we're so fast to put podcasts out, and there's this dynamic nature which new stuff comes up, that doesn't come up when you write a blog. I think that is part of our organization that we're always learning every day.

And I think we're getting better from it. But I will say that's been a frustration of my own. And I'm really curious, talking to black belts in this. How do you think about the blog of laying out the breadcrumbs in the world.

[00:22:35] Karl Schmeider: I still think that there's a lot to be said for what we call the cornerstone or the foundational blog post. The one that just lays out, here's what we're doing and here's what we stand for and here's why it matters. But I also think that if you're able to express that in a podcast or a video it gives people different ways to consume the same kind of information.

So I wouldn't beat yourself up and, by the way, I beat myself up too, because we have a newsletter, it goes out very irregularly. I have a ton of blog ideas. They're finding their way into the podcast because it's easier to talk 'em out, and we just know that people are consuming information very differently these days.

And I, believe me, I'm a writer. I love writing. It's also something I hate, it's I love it. Hate it. But there's something to be said for having that idea very succinctly written as a blog post. Now, in terms of this dynamic where you and your team are disagreeing, I think it's like you should, figure out 

what are those messages that you want out in the world? And if you think that the blog posts are gonna do better than the podcast, just come up. With the editorial calendar, the list of the content that you want to create and create it.

 One of the things that I used to do when I first started doing a newsletter is like I, I was super self-conscious of my writing. I would just schedule it in advance and not think about it. Like I'd write it, I'd finalize it. And these days, the tools that we have, with. Chat, GPT, Claude, Gemini, all these tools, Lex, Grammarly, they make it so much easier for us and use those and then schedule in advance.

So you're not being as self-conscious about it. Iam, I'd love to get to your point of view because we work on this all the time and we deal with people struggling with this all the time.

[00:24:13] Erum Azeez: I will say a blog is just one thing, right? Karl had mentioned earlier that depending on where your audience is and Google has done a lot of research on this. If we're talking about you have a blog 'cause you want someone to read it, you wanna grab their attention, right?

So we're living in this attention economy and Google is the attention grabbing king, they know how to do that. So they've done a lot of research in this space and they have this rule, they call it the seven eleven four rule, where you want your audience to spend seven hours engaging with your brand or your idea and then have 11 interactions or touchpoints with the brand.

So you can three times on LinkedIn, the blog might be actually a newsletter that goes in the email. So the interaction, the touchpoint is email. Maybe you're at a conference or an event you have those. Places where your audience can actually interact. And then across the four is the different platforms.

So email your website, LinkedIn, or whatever it is. So 7 11 4, I think it's something that we look to and try to strive for. We have four platforms that we, speak across Probably more than that. If you. Talk about different conferences. And then like the ninja thing to do is match all the content.

So when you have like an idea, so you have this, greenhouse gas removal call for proposals, that it goes out across all this platforms, the same message on that same time. That's the engine. Hard to do if, if you don't plan it out, like Karl mentioned, like the editorial calendar.

[00:25:38] Daniel Goodwin: And I would love to start taking these ideas and landing them. One, if there are case studies that we can discuss. if there are any ones to talk about, I think it'd be really informative for the listener to get the idea of the biggest bang for the buck, right?

What is that high leverage thing? What are the big success moments? Was it a blog post that went viral? Was it a ten second clip? What does it take to get the idea of someone's effort in their mind? And then the other place that we're gonna go and we can just interweave them is how.

Symbio is changing how climate biotech is changing, right? The thing that pitched in 2021 and raised money in a zero interest environment is one thing. Now we're in a very different environment and I'd love to just leave that out in the air.

Totally happy for you guys to steer us either way. I'll toss it over to Karl to kick us off on this.

[00:26:23] Karl Schmeider: We did a lot of work with this company. K 18 hair. It's so funny, I had like their hair serum and I was gonna pull it up and show you guys and K 18 hair came out of nowhere. And they got sold to Unilever three years in for just under a billion dollars.

And we were lucky enough that they came to us 'cause they were like, we need help with science storytelling. And it was the opposite of what we'd normally do. It was not, Hey, we wanna. Simplify our story so that the general public will understand it. It was no, we want to beef up our science storytelling so that consumers can understand the science behind our technology.

And like I had to have three conversations with them before it finally clicked. the thing that, really got me interested in working with them was their goal was, , we're going on TikTok, we're going on Instagram we're gonna be on YouTube.

But our whole strategy is to really focus on a very specific audience of stylists. So we took a bunch of lessons from working with K 18 and part of the reason why we ended up working with them was because we're like, anything we learned from you guys. Is gonna translate across biotech. Like we're gonna be able to go to biotech companies and say, look, here's what K 18 did in the consumer market with a hard tech that most people don't understand and they were successful with it.

So let's look to them and what can we take from them? Like on TikTok, they had something like. 20 billion views on one of their campaigns. the numbers are just astounding. And I think it's one of those experiences, and I've had it twice in my career, where the marketing on the science side is so good that a bigger company goes, we wanna buy this because you guys know how to do something that we don't know how to do.

And for us, we look at Kate Tina as a playbook to say, you get very specific in terms of the audience you're going after. You can have multiple levels of your message. There's like the consumer message, there's the stylist message, and then there's the stylist message for the stylist that really wanna go deep into the science and read like the primary papers.

And all of those are available. To the people who want them. And it worked. It worked so well for them. So I think that's a really tremendous case study. I don't know Erum if I could say, I can't talk about like where I see this going, but I'd love to hear Erum. You choose one.

[00:28:36] Erum Azeez: So K 18 here was a good one. It was beginning before they were anybody that they had reached out to us. the hair industry is obviously very noisy, so science was a differentiator. And I think that's a huge thing. And depending on what you're trying to make, right?

So we're talking about climate, biotech, business as usual versus having biology be the core. Innovation, I think is a good spin for a marketing message. the Venn diagram between biology and climate is a circle.

How do we leverage biology to solve climate solutions? That whole narrative I think is very strong. Another thing I wanna highlight from KT and which I will then bring over to another case study is the stylist part was very big because you start getting.

These experts that have all the intelligence of products in the market and for them to be able to understand the differentiator and then share it amongst themselves was huge win versus just going directly to market without having this layer of experts that are on your side that understand what you're doing.

That I think was a huge win for them. And KT always shows up at the expert conferences like where all of the, stylists live and talk about biology there and no one else around them. The other competitors are not talking about that. So it's refreshing to hear about new innovation, especially as it relates to hair biology.

The other client that we worked with that we love, and it's part of our crew here is Verium. Love Henry. Love Neely, love their whole team. And for them what we really look to do is just get them started. They were building their company, they really wanted to know about our strategy, what would work.

And we did a variety of different things with them. Who would be their end user. So call that a customer discovery campaign. Operationalize that. So if you wanna talk to 5,000 people, are you going to do that on an Excel sheet and just, fill in cells as you go?

Or are you gonna use something a little bit more automated, like a Salesforce or HubSpot or, whatever tool you wanna use, we can borrow a tool to them like look this could help you really reach out to people and keep track. And then you can, target them, label them, and it's everything that works in an automated fashion.

So that was a good thing. And then. If you go back to the K team, like talking to the experts, talking to the users who can really help amplify the message, we help introduce 'em to I GM and we say, Hey look, this would be a great, group of people for you to start aligning with and let's, make that introduction. 

They show up at iGEM every year now, 

[00:31:01] Daniel Goodwin: I love that because you look at the cult variant's. Awesome. Love the team. And the idea at first is very deep science, right? We want to speed up the use of non-model organisms. And to make anything a model organism, and it's a beautiful mission. And what I'm internalizing from the way you've worked with both hairstylists and I GM, is you're manufacturing social proof, right?

What are the people that are the biggest players in the end user perspective? And then using them to validate. The effort which is once you hear it, it sounds so obvious, 

[00:31:29] Erum Azeez: I know a lot of this sounds

[00:31:31] Daniel Goodwin: why didn't we do? Yeah.And that's a sign of a good executive from my experience, is they'll say something that once it's out, it's the most obvious question to have asked.

So I think this is a good time steer this more into this idea of what's changing in the climate biotech space. Because I think four years ago people were raising rapidly on this kind of end user story of we're gonna make the climate better.

And everything was like, this is salty. But I think we have to be our harshest self critics, right? And I think what happened is we had stories that were, hey biotech to do, biotech to do mining is a story that I think came out a lot in 2021 ish.

and the reason I'm picking on mining is that we had Jesse Lou come talk to us and Jamie in our last podcast episode about needing to think economically about mining from the first minute. And so I think what got funded in 2021 was, Hey, syn bioo for mining, it's gonna be great.

Whereas I think a lot of that has now burned. And now the other side of it is that no, you're a mining company that happens to use biotech. To a critical subpoint that couldn't be done elsewhere. And I think mining is one very tangible example falling from last week, but I'm seeing it a lot.

 Are you seeing a cultural shift, a buzzword shift, a strategy shift the past few years?

[00:32:40] Karl Schmeider: How about just in the past few days, totally right and I think this is more of a dialogue than as to saying, oh, here's what we see, because it's like you're seeing it on the climate side. And what we are seeing on, let's just say the big consumer product side is for them, you're having unfortunately to move away from these sustainability messages.

And it's like this whole DEI thing. It's this false, attention grabbing thing. And I hate to say like we went too far because I don't think we've gone far enough. I think, sustainability is table stakes. And so now what we really have to do is craft narratives that are much more about, hey, here's this ingredient and it has these performance characteristics that are better than anything we've done before mining. We're able to extract better than anything we've ever done before. It just happens that we do it with biology, and it just happens that this thing is better for the environment.

So like those messages end up going down as proof points or reasons to believe. And so we're seeing that you have to lead with those performance characteristics, which maybe is not that different, but I think it is. Changing the shift in terms of where the narrative has to be right now? I don't know. That's the way I'm thinking about it, IAM has a different point of view on this. You know what? Do what? Argue with me, IAM, 

[00:33:56] Erum Azeez: I'm gonna argue with you. I think I agree with you. There's been shifts all the time. we talk to people in the government and, it's not climate change, it's climate resilience. So there's very tangible words that are being shifted.

Yes, that's true. 

[00:34:07] Karl Schmeider: Supply chain security is a big one.

National manufacturing, these things, all they play together.

[00:34:15] Erum Azeez: Yeah. In the end it's always the outcome, right? Even how we talk about science rather than talking about the what and the how. It's like, why is this happening? Why should we do this? 'cause you're gonna get this outcome. And again, it sounds so trade and obvious, right?

But it's very challenging to do that because you feel like you have to explain 'cause you don't know how much other person understands. And then you just talk and talk and give 'em the benefit of a doubt or just talk about the outcome and see if they're like, wait, so you're telling me that this is going to be 10 times more efficient?

That's exciting. How did you do that? Then you talk about all the science and technology about it. I think depends on who are the taste makers too when it comes to the terms, right? Like syn, bioo, I feel like SynBioBeta really, took that term and made it huge, but it's still within our niche group, right?

Like within our world, right? If you go to your friends that are not anyone biotech like, what the hell? Sin bio. Is that music and biology, is that what is that? It's that fake biology, and so it's still a word that has contention because I remember at Symbi Beta, not last year, but the year before that, I was talking to Paul Stats.

The father of fungi, and it was before he was about to go on stage and I was like, oh, how's it going? Just trying to play cool. Although I was like, fangirling, I was like, oh, I can't believe I'm talking to Paul. But, I was like, oh, hey, what's up? And he was like, oh, nothing.

And I was like, are you excited about your talk? You know, he's like, I don't really the term syn bioo. I wish it wasn't SynBioBeta. I wish it was bio beta. Just bio beta. And I'm like, yeah, do we really need the sin part of it? I don't know, terms are still up for debate and offer grabs too. 

Ginkgo has done a lot of good work in the early days on creating some vocabulary like organism engineering, this and that. And that was cool that they had a great marketing team. But it depends on who has the loudest voices that are going to, create the terms. 

[00:36:06] Karl Schmeider: We're in this place right now where everything is up in the air and things feel very uncertain, but. Business is gonna go on. And so having that, business narrative I think is gonna be incredibly important. The train has left the station when it comes to climate, biotech and synthetic biology.

And these things are not in the mainstream, but they're incredibly important. And people on the business side, I was just, I and I were talking about this morning. There are trillions of dollars. On the sidelines waiting to be invested and deployed. There is so much money and the businesses that are being created in biotechnology are really the businesses of this century.

The first trillion dollar biotech company is gonna be like some lifestyle brand that's gonna reshape human identity. It's gonna bring biotech into consumer experiences on a macro level, and we have to be thinking, not just, okay we're gonna save the planet. Absolutely. We are. We are the ones, the people in this room, we're the ones who are gonna save the planet, but we also have to help the business community understand not only we're gonna save the planet, but capitalism is a way we're also gonna help make some money.

[00:37:15] Daniel Goodwin: And I 

wanna riff on this with a really important tactical question which is, and you set this up perfectly when I said, oh, things have changed in the past few years. say it's actually changed in the past few days. If you are a practitioner today and there are blacklisted words that are now around science, I can imagine that some teams are gonna have to rapidly.

Perhaps go through and start scratching out or changing their language around, like the kind of the, band words, the DEI, the pronouns, that stuff. And this is interesting because this is touching on the same idea of buzzwords, right? To use a buzzword to not use a buzzword.

I'm curious. Is it happening where companies are rapidly scrambling to change their language now? Or do you think some people are just weathering the storm? I'm curious what you would advise or what you've seen. Whichever one of you would like to answer that.

It's a hard question. 

[00:38:02] Erum Azeez: It depends, right? I think anyone who's creating a narrative is going to. Create it for the market. If they're a business, they're gonna be listening and seeing what resonates and what's fresh and new. Obviously there's people that lead the message or they just hear what is going on in entertainment and culture and the, they'll leverage those words.

I will say like something that I do see a shift and is especially for us in the climate, biotech world is like, sustainability is not the word to use anymore. People are talking about obviously there's resilience, but there's like restoration, regeneration, like thinking about more active words because sustainability is just so loaded.

 But at the same time, vague it's overused. So there needs to be fresh words. There's also that too, our language changes as our, world changes and it changes every generation. What's fresh, what is more accurate? And I think that's gonna be really interesting because we are now communicating with ai.

And AI is also learning from us and we're learning from it. So like it might be spitting out answers and like giving us new vocabulary that we then introduce into the real world. I think that's really interesting to me is just to be able to see how, not only are we training AI on communications, but how is it training us?

In turn. And how do we then start disseminating that in our society?

[00:39:20] Daniel Goodwin: And I would build on that just to say decentralization is a word that I've pushed for a long time and I think that, exactly. I was just gonna pass it to you, Karl. I'm curious what your riff is.

[00:39:28] Karl Schmeider: no, I was just gonna say, Lisa, pointed it out until regeneration gets banned and we just saw how quickly all the DEI language got scrubbed off of. Every website. Every corporate website. It is incredible. And I think if we start to move into a place where all the science that we talk about and these kind of words are also, targeted, then we're in big trouble.

And we also haven't done our job but I think there's narrative shift and sometimes we just have to look at where the wind is blowing and how do we set ourselves that way. And I hate to say that because there is a lot to be said for being very firm in the narrative and weathering the storm.

It's a good chief marketing point is you gotta pick your battles. We talk a lot about startups and companies, but I just wanna underscore behind all of this, is that the same thinking to make a startup successful is the same thing to make a nonprofit research effort successful.

[00:40:18] Daniel Goodwin: Okay, so we're gonna wrap up with some playful rapid fire questions, and I'm gonna go back and forth that EAM goes first. Then Karl goes first four quick questions. First one. E room's gonna go first. What's a single book paper art piece or just idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist?

[00:40:35] Erum Azeez: I'll say the X-Files. X-Files was a great series that shaped who I am today and things coming back around. I think aliens we're getting close to that and they can't wait for that moment.

[00:40:44] Daniel Goodwin: Love it, Karl.

[00:40:46] Karl Schmeider: We are devo.

[00:40:49] Daniel Goodwin: Wow. Yes. Okay. Best advice line that a mentor gave you.

[00:40:54] Karl Schmeider: So it's, for me, it's indirect. It's like you can bend reality to your will. People talk a lot about Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field. For me the saying was more, nothing is true. Everything is permitted, , william Buroughs used that line a lot which he took from the guy who the assassins were named after Hasani Saba.

 to me that's like a recognition, that constraints are often, imaginary evolutionary. I think the best entrepreneurs, biotech or otherwise realize that we do have the ability to bend reality to our will.

[00:41:27] Daniel Goodwin: I love it.

[00:41:29] Erum Azeez: Yeah. So the best piece of advice a mentor gave to me, Was an executive coach. This was during, when I had a company which is venture backed customers team, and I was, it was also during, covid. It was getting really frustrating. There's a lot of things that were going on.

And the advice was, don't take your business or you idea or your research too personally because you are not your business. You're not. The idea, you are in service to that idea. You are in service to that business. And that really helped me think about things more objectively versus oh, this is all falling on me.

This is everything that's going wrong is like my fault. And when I thought about no, there's this. Organization, I'm in charge of it. I'm playing a role, I have a methodology to make decisions and get buy-in. And if it fails, then we're gonna do it again.

Luckily got acquired, things went fine, but there was very scary times, but it was so freeing to think that way and it really helped me become like better and with myself and my conversations with people were a bit, more business oriented. Versus before it was like dramatic oh my God, I'm so sorry.

Like it didn't do this. It didn't do that right. And I was kinder to myself. It was such a freeing advice and I hope that resonates with other people, but it's one of the most powerful things that I heard. 

[00:42:47] Daniel Goodwin: A hundred percent. All right, so it comes right back to you. If you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one part of biology, what would that be?

[00:42:56] Erum Azeez: Entertainment. It would be entertainment because that's where we learn about culture. That's where we blend culture, we blend ideas, and we are engaged. So I think more bio entertainment needs to happen.

[00:43:12] Karl Schmeider: I said education for that one, but I think I agree more with iam and I'll tell you why this comes up where people are like, I don't read number one. I don't read at all. And then there's the people who are like, I don't read fiction. And I'm like where are you getting your ideas from?

[00:43:25] Daniel Goodwin: There's so many things I wanna riff on there, but we're keeping this rapid fire. So Karl, you're gonna take us home. First answer for the last question, which is that and I'm gonna preempt this, you cannot say the answer is marketing. What's a skill that emerging innovators could invest more time in developing in themselves?

[00:43:40] Karl Schmeider: Yeah, I talked about it at the beginning. It's storytelling and I don't see storytelling as being marketing. It's like everyone thinks they're a storyteller because they know how to tell us what they did over the weekend, but that's not the same as telling a story that's gonna raise you money, get you a partner, get someone hired.

It's a different kind of storytelling skill.

[00:43:58] Daniel Goodwin: Love it. And to wrap us up Erum, what's your answer?

[00:44:01] Erum Azeez: I think the biggest skill that emerging innovators could invest more time developing in themselves is socializing because all our ideas grow with other people. And to have the empathy, to have the ability to listen, to be able to get people excited and be like, Hey look, this is an idea. Let's socialize. Let me let you know. And I think once you build up that skill and you talk with more people, you get them bought in or you helping them, it's a wonderful thing.

[00:44:28] Daniel Goodwin: It reminds me of my dad's favorite joke, which is how do you know if an engineer is extroverted? It's 'cause they look at your shoes when they talk to you. That's my dad joke of the episode. But I wanna wrap this up by saying that we wanna make sure that everyone knows how to find you.

And I'm sure the Venn diagram of people listening to this that already know about grow everything is surely very high. But I think for the practice of it how do people find you online and get in contact?

[00:44:50] Karl Schmeider: So you can listen to the podcast, grow Everything. It's on all the beautiful channels that you can listen to any podcast on. You can go to our website. Messaging lab.com and that has all our contact information on it.

[00:45:03] Daniel Goodwin: Awesome. IAM and Karl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate it.

[00:45:07] Karl Schmeider: Thank you for having us. This is so much fun.

[00:45:09] Erum Azeez: Yeah, fun times.

[00:45:10] Daniel Goodwin: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the climate biotech podcast. We hope this has been educational, inspirational, and fun for you as you navigate your own journey and bring the best of biotech into planetary scale solutions, we'll be back with another one soon.

And in the meantime, stay in touch with homeworld on LinkedIn, Twitter, or blue sky. Links are all in the show notes. Huge thanks to our producer, Dave Clark, and operations lead Paul Himmelstein for making these episodes happen