The Climate Biotech Podcast
Are you fascinated by the power and potential of biotechnology? Do you want to learn about cutting-edge innovations that can address climate change?
The Climate Biotech Podcast explores the most pressing problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how to solve them. Hosted by Dan Goodwin, a neuroscientist turned biotech enthusiast, the podcast features interviews with leading experts diving deep into topics like plant synthetic biology, mitochondrial engineering, gene editing, and more.
This podcast is powered by Homeworld Collective, a non-profit whose mission is to ignite the field of climate biotechnology.
The Climate Biotech Podcast
New Funding and Innovation Models in Biotech: Combining Blockchain and Decentralized Coordination with Albert Anis
Cryptocurrency and climate biotechnology might seem like an unusual pairing, but Albert Anis, founding steward of ValleyDAO, is showing this combination has remarkable potential. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are creating entirely new funding mechanisms for scientists working on our planet's most critical challenges.
At the heart of ValleyDAO's approach is a radical rethinking of how intellectual property can be governed and commercialized. Through "IP NFTs" (non-fungible tokens representing intellectual property), communities of token holders can collectively participate in funding research, making governance decisions, and advancing technologies from lab to marketplace. By creating aligned communities around specific scientific innovations, ValleyDAO provides more than just funding – it delivers expertise, connections, and sustained support through the challenging commercialization process.
While traditional science funding faces significant cuts and challenges, new tools like AI and crypto could help create opportunities for bottom-up innovation. This tension is precisely where transformative new approaches can emerge.
Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and technology to the world of technology and actually crypto, managed to enable a research project creating a real world product that is going to be tested in industry. To me, that's a huge deal and it shows the impact that crypto can have.
Speaker 2: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. Our guest this week is Albert Anise, and he's going to be talking to us from the investor perspective, but it's not the traditional investor perspective that you might be expecting. Albert is the founding steward of something called Valley DAO. Dao stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization and, yes, you guessed it, we're talking crypto. But I think it's an important time to talk about crypto because a lot's changing and while, yes, there's some noise and there's some nonsense, there's also some really good ideas that are in their very early days. If you've never touched this idea of crypto, you've probably just seen the noise floor and, yes, a lot of it is fraud out there. So this can be your first opportunity to get conversational exposure to some of these mechanisms that get scientists excited about cryptocurrency and their funding mechanism.
Speaker 2:Albert himself is a very credible individual. He studied bio in undergrad, he did a master's in biotechnology and he worked with iGEM when he finished his master's degree. He was working on the entrepreneurial side of iGEM, helping projects that went through the program potentially advance to the next step, and then COVID happened. Now, as we all entered the Zoom era, albert started getting connected into these communities and realizing that, as the crypto mechanisms were developing, communities around science were also developing, and so, while there's been other crypto plus were developing, communities around science were also developing, and so, while there's been other crypto plus science efforts, albert leads the one. That is, climate biotech plus crypto.
Speaker 2:Albert gave us this great metaphor at the end of the podcast and I want to put this in your mind front and center how do you think about the changing world, with a lot of changes happening at the top of science and, yes, most of them are cuts versus the bottom up changes that are happening. So, at the bottom up science, we have innovators now being empowered by artificial intelligence, big open source communities and, yes, crypto, and Albert's response was to push this metaphor that we are just cells sitting inside a nutrient-rich media, extreme selection pressure, and I think that is the exact right way to think about where we're at today. I don't know how things are going to play out, but I know there's a lot of room for optimism, and the goal of today is to help you get perhaps one more sophistication in your arsenal as you create your own action-oriented, optimistic path. So, albert, who are you? Where did you grow up?
Speaker 1:Thank you for the great introduction, Dan. I was reflecting on that question before the call. I would say I'm a builder by heart, so I like to do things. I love to meet people, share insights, exchange ideas and just build together with other people and see where we can take things. I have an ache for solving difficult problems that can also drive real world impact, and I feel biotech is at this very interesting intersection, which makes me feel that this is a field worth spending time on and fighting for. I was born in the Middle East in Iraq, but not Iran, Iraq and when I was five years old I moved to Sweden. That's where I grew up. That's what I consider home. Currently I am situated in Belgium and Brussels, so I've moved here for the last four years, but looking to move back to Sweden soon.
Speaker 2:Wow, all right From Iraq to Sweden, to the biolabs that you worked in. Did you ever know you'd be a crypto degen running a big discord server to help biotechnologists accelerate their work?
Speaker 1:No, I couldn't predict that. I feel like in the biotech industry so far, there's very few people that I can directly relate to and say, okay, we're doing the same thing. I've managed to carve out a very niche little place. It's called Validau today. But yeah, I could never predict that I would be working on crypto and biotech at the same time. To be frank with you, like 90% of my time I spend having technical conversations with researchers. I studied biotechnology, graduated from Lund University and, despite working in crypto and blockchain, I'm still using the skills and knowledge that I picked up from my biotech courses, which I'm really happy for, because I was worried that I would lose a lot of the technical aspects of my degree. But don't let the blockchain aspect fool you. I'm not sitting coding and writing cryptic code all day long. Other people are doing that part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to create something of value for it to be worth encrypting in the first place, true, but I think it's. You know, there's something to riff on there, which is that I've noticed from my own perspective. I think my scientific intuition has gotten better. Taking a step back from the bench and then working with scientists, seeing them present their ideas I think it's what a good venture capitalist does too. It's really easy to talk bad on them, but it's actually like building scientific intuition. What questions to ask, what questions not to ask, is a super important part of science.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's my favorite thing to do having technical conversations with academics, particularly like the type of academics that we focus on. I call them entrepreneurial academics, so academics that want to do something beyond reiterating doing the same academic blueprint. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's the type of academic that I spend a lot of my time talking with, and every conversation is different. Just the complexity of biotech let alone climate biotech every scientist has their own approach, their own way of thinking and also, by the end of the day, their own type of data that they've generated using something that is very unique to that particular lab. So constantly learning new things and also realizing this is really difficult.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And before we go into ValleyDAO I think there's a great part of your history which is that iGEM, I think, played a big role in your development as a scientist and what you choose to work on. I've seen mentions of this, but I'd love to just hear in your arc, as a scientist, developing student and scientist what did iGEM do for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no. Igem is an amazing initiative and thing for students to enroll in. It opened up my worldview to this whole idea that biotech is just more than human health right. Our first iGen project, which we did back in 2016, focused on creating a detection device for microplastics. Our goal was to express two fragments of a GFP and whenever a certain plasticizer would bind, they would merge together and give off a light that potentially could be measured. Didn't manage to get them to merge, but it was an amazing learning experience and also a great primer to ClimateBio.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good project. That's very ambitious. I can feel the value and then also, I'm not surprised it didn't work. So let's talk about ValleyDAO, because it came and through this, I think we want to explore both the specific projects, but then there's also a timeline and I think it's probably easiest for people to understand the timeline, because crypto, for many reasons, had a huge hockey stick experience in the COVID era and a lot of junk came out. A lot of progress came out of it. There's these big ideas that we'll explore together, I think, with IP, nft, innovation. I think these are the things that we want.
Speaker 2:People that have never touched crypto stayed 10,000 feet away from this like pixelated monkeys smoking cigarettes, right, and instead you know to start giving the intro for people that have never touched these things, what it means and that, and so I'd love to just maybe go back in time to COVID era, albert, and you're working on things. You could do anything. You've got a very well rounded skillset, very good intuition, very high EQ, iq. Can you tell us the arc of when you're seeing these things happening? What got you into? What became ValleyDAO?
Speaker 1:After graduating. Around early 2020, I graduated and I started working for the iGEM organization right after school, and so this was the same time when they wanted to expand their entrepreneurship activities and establish an entrepreneurship program. So the goal was that can we get some of these iGEM projects that performed quite well in the competition? Can we encourage them to consider commercializing their research or go an entrepreneurial path? So stimulate entrepreneurial thinking amongst iGEMers, which, if you think about it, it's a great progression. Right Like you, student, you work for one year to develop a POC and during that time time, you also think about can this be applied, etc. And then, after the competition, you would start an entrepreneurial process. This was being ideated, frameworked and planned like january, feb, and the goal was to have a bunch of in-person stuff. We were going to do hackathons, we were going to do one week educational programs, we were going to be in paris and bar. We had a great budget. None of that happened in real life, but instead we had to adapt like crazy, and so the Zoom age started, and actually it was to our advantage because we were able to have a much bigger program and include way many more people and just orchestrating that hosting different workshops.
Speaker 1:By the way, I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship. I have in mind, like I just came out from uni, I was basically LARPing the whole process and just you know, trying to make things work as best as I could. But I learned about entrepreneurship during that time. But, more importantly, I learned about the power of the internet, the power of the digital in aspects such as like knowledge sharing, insight sharing you can learn so much more from like peer to peer rather than reading a research article and like the internet just makes that frictionless right. And so I started thinking more about collective intelligence approaches to solving really difficult problems. That was a little bit when I started thinking about online communities to solve or to drive some sort of impact or value.
Speaker 1:After iGEM and my work there, I was going to start my master thesis and that I was going to do in Stockholm. So I had to move from South Sweden to Stockholm, moved into a really remote house in the forest together with a couple of friends, and then I was commuting back and forth between that and Stockholm and so by day I was pipetting, I was expressing Calvin cycle enzymes that I had mutated and then I was testing their activity because the Calvin cycle, carbon incorporation, carbon capture, climate, et cetera. And by night I was getting back home. My friends, both computer science guys, they knew about crypto, they were trading it and so naturally, I just started, you know, do what they were up to, and so I was spending a lot of time researching different cryptocurrency projects. This was like 2021. So this was a good time to be in the market, right and literally, you could buy any token and it would go up because there was just so much money in the market. Right and literally, you could buy any token and it would go up because there was just so much money in the system.
Speaker 1:That time, reading about many projects and getting exposed to it and learning about centralized technologies, blockchains, ledger, opened up my worldview. Can you create a distributed financial system that is more transparent, more accessible? And what was interesting with blockchain is that it was a great way to aggregate capital. Capital formation was something that crypto was really good at, because there were projects that were raising 20 million, 30 million, without any VCs, because it was just given that it's global, permissionless, it's borderless, anybody can participate in it. It comes with upsides and downsides, of course, but it just made capital formation so efficient.
Speaker 1:On one hand, you have climate biotech. We know there's a big funding gap. We know that there's also a big orchestration coordination gap, knowledge sharing et cetera. Nobody knows how to efficiently commercialize these technologies because there's no blueprint, there is no linear progression. And then you have crypto. On the other side, you have very efficient capital formation, but you also have people who are very risk-taking, they're willing to take a certain risk and also they're, at the same time, very interested in investing into the future.
Speaker 1:And so I started thinking okay, is there something potentially that can be combined? Can I pursue these two interests at the same time? And I started getting involved in different Discord servers, entered the field of decentralized science before it was called decentralized science and so basically DeSci is applying blockchain to solve a particular issue in like academia, science, data et cetera, so that's like the term for it. So I just started dabbling around in different Discord servers, met some people and literally I wrote up a message. I can probably find it if I scroll back far enough. I said, hey, let's do something in climate bios and bio.
Speaker 1:I noticed there weren't any initiatives that was focusing on the climate aspect of biotech. I'm like why is nobody doing this. This is such a brilliant use case of biotech, with all of the challenges to the side, and so I just literally wrote hey, whoever is interested in doing something like this or just have a conversation about it, I'll meet here. Here's a Zoom link. And a couple of people showed up enough to get an initial snowball rolling and then eventually we got a Discord server, started, wrote a light paper and that's like a little bit on the Genesis story of how things started with Valid. There was no super deep thesis that I had or that I had read a book about or an article written by some VC. I was just fucking around and see where destiny could take me.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of the best things come organically, and so sometimes there's a tension that we see at Homeworld is top down versus bottom up science.
Speaker 2:Right Top down is the classic centralization model, where you say we have a billion dollars and we're going to distribute it by some roadmaps and then the bottom up is just we try some things, we fund some things, we see what happens, and I think it's really fitting that the Valley Dow story is a very organic one. I'm going to put myself in the shoes of people that listen to this, that have no idea what we're talking about, and the first word that I'm going to step over very quickly, which I've said a few times jokingly, is the word of degen, which is just like a kind of a crypto community joke, which stands for degenerate and it's just oftentimes is used when crypto people are being playful. Right it's, we're being silly, we're just gonna f it, do it. I think a lot of these like online communities like you, have these kind of things. Now it refers like technically refers to people doing just like awful scams. So I just wanted like if people wondered why the heck I was using that word.
Speaker 1:It was like the term of endearment to do good things. Like a degen is a builder who comes with a super controversial idea as like it could mean that as well and it actually works. It can also be somebody who invested in a stupid dog token and put a bunch of money in it like degenerate. That's the very degenerate behavior, because that's like the riskiest thing that you can do, and they either make money of it or lose. But that's very degenerate behavior, because that's like the riskiest thing that you can do, and they either make money of it or lose. But that's like degenerate behavior. And there's a lot of rich degens and there's a lot of poor degens as well.
Speaker 2:I think, because we want to, we have to deconvolve the noise from the signal, and I think the people who have no idea what we're talking about the very brief thing that I would say is useful is that Bitcoin came out. It was idea. What we're talking about, the very brief thing that I would say is useful, is that Bitcoin came out. It was the first time that you had this idea of programmable money. Nobody needed to anoint it, people just had to agree this thing was good and then that was done. Then you had the follow on things, where you had Ethereum come out saying, hey, we can do programmable smart contracts, meaning that it's more than just money. You can start doing money with stipulations, and I think that's where things, at least from my outside, look. I'm like maybe one foot in, one foot out. That's when things started getting really interesting, and so where these things have progressed now is you get into these DAOs, right, and so I think we have to spend maybe just one kind of back and forth.
Speaker 2:Briefly talking about the DAO decentralized autonomous organization the reason that I think it's important is that when I asked for the intro to crypto, you immediately talk about community, right, which is not what people thought. I think people normally think oh, I bought Bitcoin a couple of years ago and got lucky right, but your answer to the funding model was immediately talking about community, which I think is the best form of talking about these new funding models, and I think that takes us to the DAO. I'm not the person to explain it. I'd really love to just if you can explain to the scientists to listen to this and people in climate biotech community what is a DAO and why has it been the right thing for ValleyDAO to support climate biotech projects?
Speaker 1:I love that you highlighted that keyword community because one thing that drew me to blockchain and one thing that drew me to blockchain and one thing that I noticed was missing in biotech is exactly that Blockchain communities are super tight-knit, they work in unison, they're very synchronized and they all have a shared incentive, and that incentive fundamentally stems from that. They all hold Bitcoin or they're all holding Ethereum, so they have a financial incentive in it. But when you combine that with human behavior and the dynamics or they're all holding Ethereum, so they have a financial incentive in it. But when you combine that with human behavior and the dynamics or the emergent properties that arise from that is naturally community type of behavior, so it aligns people.
Speaker 1:Going to your question about what a DAO is a decentralized, autonomous organization the one thing to note here is there isn't a perfect example of a DAO. There isn't a perfect decentralized, autonomous organization. All of the DAOs that are out there are attempts at creating a distributed sort of organization. That simplest way to put it, is like a community of people with a shared bank account, and so how is that bank account covered? How is decision-making being done? So how do we make a decision if we're going to put money into a certain type of research project or not. So that brings us one step up, which is through tokens. So these tokens, they're basically like digital representations of shares in the organization. I want to use the word share carefully, but because it's not the same thing as the shares in a company, you can see it in different ways. The way we see it, it's a governance right. So this share gives you essentially one vote, and when we launched Valida, we had an initial crowdfund for the main treasury, so people could put money into the treasury and, in return, receive these tokens that are called we call them grow tokens, so we could decide this ourselves. We call it grow because biology, and so it's really through these tokens that we govern the different activities, such as which projects do we fund and why, and so we have a community governance process in place for that. It could also be if we are going to spend a significant amount of money from the treasury which is above 10 or 20K, we have a governance vote.
Speaker 1:So in this way, the evolution of the DAO, like how the DAO progresses over time, is also with the input of the community.
Speaker 1:At the same time, I can try to give a practical example.
Speaker 1:So, for example, let's say the DAO funds an academic research project and becomes like a co-owner of the intellectual property, what the DAO would be able to vote on, and what this community of people around it that hold tokens can vote on, are things such as how do we want to license this IP, or how do we want to commercialize this IP, or under what terms and conditions and to whom. So it creates like a new type of way of looking at intellectual property and a commercializing biotech. Our ultimate goal with this shared type of governance structure is to align people and also incentivize people to care enough about this particular research project or this asset or this IP to support it in getting to market. That's one of the main dynamics that we want to create, align incentives and ultimately progress these assets through the different commercial stages. And so, with time, we've attracted academics, phds, postdocs, professors that are directly involved in the community, knowledge dropping and contributing with their insights to the different researchers that we've funded. So it's like this collective incubation Maybe that's one way to put it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think we've laid the basics. There is a DAO is a bunch of people co-managing some treasury. The amount of formal votes people have is proportional to what they've put in. There's other ways to receive votes for work, I'm sure, and so that's the big idea, which is extremely democratic. And when you talk to the maximalists, this is what they say, this is the future, and we really believe it. I think this is where it's really helpful to go into specifics now.
Speaker 1:The challenge with creating these organizations and governance is a really tough problem to solve. Give me a chance to be a little humble. Validau is not democratic right now. Right now it's quite centralized, in a sense that there are certain stakeholders that have a significant portion of tokens. What we've done is we've tried to encourage them to not vote yes or no, but to try to be a bit more passive and try to encourage the smaller token holders to vote yes and no. But technically they could come in and veto a certain decision. That is a possibility.
Speaker 1:But we spend a lot of our time like doing stakeholder management. So far we haven't had a problem. Everybody's super aligned. Our goal with time is to distribute. People will at some point probably sell their tokens. Those tokens will be sold to maybe smaller or non-token holders, for example, and so with time, what we can see with other crypto projects as well is that the centralization decreases with time because people at some point sell their tokens, et cetera. But I just wanted to clarify that Validau is not democratic yet. Our goal is to be as democratic as we can be.
Speaker 2:Got it. I see what you're saying here and I want to land on something specific. So you've funded quite a few projects and would love to just get a little bit of an overview of roughly how many projects have been funded. And can you start by telling us a story about one of them.
Speaker 1:It's funded to date and on top of that we have two projects that we've spun out, so a total of six projects right now in the overall portfolio. Interesting story to tell let's go with Imperial. It's the first project that we funded, so this is funded in the lab of Rodrigo Ledesma Amaro. Kudos to him for letting us in. We were coming there. Hey, you want to try out this funding model? We're doing X, y, z, we're going to tokenize the IP. I know we haven't gotten to the IP NFT part yet, but yeah, he was surprisingly very open to it and what he's working on. I would say he's one of the top experts in the field right now when it comes to metabolic engineering of fat yeast Yaroia lipolitica, indigenous yeast and what this project is about is essentially taking all of the work that he has done and try to bridge it to the next level. So our goal is to engineer a strain of yeast to produce fats that are very similar to cocoa. That is the current goal and we've come pretty close. This project has been running for around a year and it's done a couple of engineering iterations. Now you want to tailor the fatty acid profile. Yes, you have the C16-0, c16-1, 2, et cetera, and we've managed to push it to the point where it's almost identical, and so we're going to actually test it soon with a Swiss chocolate manufacturer, which is that's going to be exciting because, like now, as we're going from on to off chain, and actually you know, crypto managed to enable a research project creating a real world product that is going to be tested in industry. To me that's a huge deal and it shows, like, the impact that crypto can have. And so maybe tell you a little bit of how this project got funded. So, essentially, it got funded through the initial treasury that we raised, right, and so it was funded in a sort of like a, not directly in a crowdfunding way, in a crowdfund. We would not fund it directly through our treasury. We would put it on a sort of like a launch pad and then anybody could contribute capital to it and receive tokens for that particular project. Okay, so now we're entering the area of IP, nfts and IP tokens, and so there is the Validau Grow token. You can see this token as like an A it's governance for making decisions in Validau, but B it also serves as like a proxy index for all of the research projects that we have funded, if that makes sense. So if one of them becomes super successful and the value of the value of treasury goes up because one of our assets is worth like 10, 20, 30 million, the market is going to price that, so there will be a reflection of that value in the final token. Now, ip tokens they are tokens for individual projects, so if a trader or a Daniel Goodwin in the world finds this project hey, oh, I think enzyme-improved hemp textiles could become something in the future you can buy a small amount of that particular token. So this is a different project that we've crowdfunded for and then hold that and be part of that sub-community. So why is it called IP NFT and IP token? Maybe that's something that could be worth going into.
Speaker 1:In a startup, the thing that investors get or the thing that capital allocators get it's the classic, it's equity right. The challenge is what can capital contributors receive one step before this, before it's even a startup, when, particularly, it's still in academia, and what we found is that the value bearing asset is the intellectual property. That is the one thing that is holding the value and sort of like a promise of value in the future. And so what blockchain enables. Or actually, let me take a step back. When we fund a project, we enter a partnership with the academic and their institution. So in this case, imperial College London with Rodrigo. With Imperial, we sign a so-called sponsored research agreement, which basically says, in return for capital, validau receives an ownership stake in the intellectual property, and this is all in alignment with the researcher. So we wouldn't make a deal with Imperial if the researcher and the inventor wasn't, like, fully aligned with this setup.
Speaker 2:And just to jump in there, a sponsored research agreement is done every day, right? So this doesn't look any different to the university. They just say, oh, we're writing, it's a sponsored research agreement. Change these parameters where they would normally change. But instead of Coca-Cola, it's a bunch of people on a Discord server moving tokens on the backend.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly. So. The sponsored research agreement is like the promise of future IP ownership. That contract is a legally binding contract. So what we do with the IP NFT is the IP NFT enables us to bridge that contract on chain and so it becomes a digital representation of that contract. And so when you have a digital representation of something, it can then also be programmable and transferable. And so if it's programmable and transferable, that enables an online community of people who are token holders to essentially govern it and decide who gets to be the owner at a certain point in time.
Speaker 1:So let's say, if we wanted to license the IP, it would be as simple as transferring that IP NFT to a new holder, for example.
Speaker 1:But so far we're not at a stage with any of the projects that we would start licensing the IP and, quite frankly, it's not part of our strategy to license. We want to build the IP within the community together with the inventor and, through the community, find potential founders, spin it out into a company and just always have the community around and alongside the startup and continuously nurture it and try to continuously develop it and bring it to different maturity stages. And try to continuously develop it and bring it to different maturity stages. So right now, the IP NFT is more of a way to connect the research with the digital community. So once it's represented on chain, it brings it closer to the token holders so that they can actually feel that, hey, we actually govern this intellectual property, which is like the first time we've had community-governed intellectual property.
Speaker 1:And this doesn't mean that people can access the IP and see the secret sauce. That's still confidential and only a restricted set of people can actually see it, like the inventor, the core team at Validow, for example, because we have to sign these agreements and so on. If somebody really wants to see it, they can sign it and they need a good reason for it. And usually these are people who are vetted by us, who've worked with us for some time, because when you work in an open setting like this, the likelihood of things leaking, et cetera, can increase. So that's something that we're really careful with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I want to just riff on this for a little bit, because it's so easy to throw around the word community, and some people totally get it and some people don't, and I would say community is what made Bell Labs great, right. Community is what made Y Combinator work for its heyday of, say, 2009, 2019, right. And community in the case of ValleyDAO is that not only are you getting money through some tokens, but you also have an online community of people who are now incentivized to see a project succeed. And there's this thing that's empowering this idea of community to follow behind a science project, which is this IP, nft. And I think we've done a really good job of stepping over that, because we could just spend an hour talking about it.
Speaker 2:But to me, this is one of the innovations in crypto that got me most excited, and the one thing that I think people need to know is that NFT, when it first came out, stands for non-fungible token. It became a bunch of images that people were sharing back and forth. There was really just price-based trading and people were making money, but then there was this really good idea that actually taking specific ownership of a digital object, that digital object could be a patent and now suddenly you found a way to connect DGN online money behavior to IP being created in science, and so I think and that's had successes in a bunch of other parts of bio and science but it was you who brought it to climate biotech, and so it's really exciting. I'm curious on the human element of was it difficult when you talk to the technology transfer offices saying, hey, I'm Albert from an online community, or did they just get it and for them, a pound is a pound when you're funding Imperial?
Speaker 1:I think it helps to get the researcher excited about it, and they're excited about the idea Because they're also part of the tech transfer conversations. So if the tech transfer office sees that, okay, there's a good relationship here, the vibe is good and these guys are professional or they're professionally enough for us to enroll in this. Visually, the response has been good. Now here's the thing tokenizing the IP is something we can do independent of the tech transfer office. Technically, if the contract that we have with the tech transfer office says this IP cannot be licensed without the tech transfer office approval, then that is like the final say. So if we had an IP like that and we would want to, let's say we want to transfer it to a new code that we spin up, the community can vote on it, but we would still need to seek support from the tech transfer office, and so the chronological order of actions there would make more sense if we got the approval from the tech transfer office first and then we set up like a governance proposal with the community saying, hey, we've got an approval, Now you, the community, you have the final vote here and this is ultimately your decision now, instead of doing it the other way around, and so it's like you need a certain type of finesse when you deal with governance, universities and it's just so much complexity to these things sometimes.
Speaker 1:But tokenizing the IP, that is something we can do independently of the tech transfer office. So we don't even need to talk about IP and FTs with the tech transfer office because by the end of the day, we're signing a contract that they're familiar with, if that makes sense. And, by the way, this whole organization of IP IPNFTs it's still an asset class that is defining itself right, and so an IPNFT doesn't have like a legal backing to it yet. But there are people out in the world who are actively working and trying to make these assets legally backable, like that they can stand in court, for example. That's a different chapter and something that needs to be developed.
Speaker 2:Cool. So there's three places I want to go with the end of our time. One is there's a defensive question about what do bad actors do? Could you have a rich person come in and change the voting? So I want to just ask a defensive question there.
Speaker 2:I want to ask an overview question of just talking about more of the projects that Valley Dow has funded so far. We want scientists who are listening to think about what might be for their projects to be a fit for ValleyDAO. And then the third thing is I want to just hover on the future of science funding and I want to make sure we have plenty of time for that, because I think that's very interesting and I think you and I both have theses that are intertwining and complementary. But to go back first, hopefully it's a quick question, but let's just do the what if right. The what if is you fund me. I signed over the sponsored research rights to my project and then some random person on the internet comes in and buys a bunch of Grow. Does that make the future of my project uncertain?
Speaker 1:Here's the challenge project uncertain. Here's the challenge. There isn't enough grow trading on the market for somebody to buy a bunch of them and sway a vote. The total pie 100% of all tokens. Around 20% of those tokens are already allocated to different people, and we know everybody who is like a majority shareholder as well, and so, in contrast to a lot of other crypto projects, we don't have an anonymous culture type of vibe or culture in our ecosystem. So we know everybody and we have good relationships with everyone.
Speaker 2:Suddenly, that's a big deal in crypto projects. It's not everyone does it like that. That's very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it's theoretically impossible for somebody to buy enough tokens on the market to sway a vote because there isn't enough tokens available for somebody. There is enough for somebody to buy maybe 2% or 1% of the total supply or of the total voting power, of the total supply or of the total voting power. So this is done like intentionally, by design, because if you would have too many tokens on the market, you would also have a little bit too much dilution and you also run the risk of somebody like buying a lot of tokens. But also there's a big risk of buying a lot of tokens because if the price of the ask of grow goes up by, let's say, 10,000%, there's going to be people who might want to sell it, and so you also take the risk of losing a lot on your purchase by buying a lot of tokens. So it's theoretically possible yes, likely. No, it's very unlikely that something like this can happen. So it's something we are worried about or that we lose sleep over.
Speaker 2:Got it, and so let's go through the quick overview of the projects. I don't mean to make you recite a book report, but what are some of the other projects? We talked about the fat producing yeast. What are some other projects you're excited about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm super excited about Hempi. So if you go to wwwhempyscience it has its own page. This is together with two amazing researchers in Austria and Vienna. So hemp, it grows super fast, it needs very low quality soil to grow, it uses very little water and you can make fabrics out of it. You can make textiles. But the challenge is that it's very rough, it's not soft, it's not flexible. But you can treat it with enzymes to degrade, let's say, the lignin or the cellulose and to make it more similar to, maybe, cotton.
Speaker 1:That's what we're doing with this project is we are basically developing like an enzyme treatment platform. We're trying it out on different samples of hemp with the goal of making the hemp fiber softer but also adding function to it by adding additional molecules and binding additional molecules to the hemp fiber itself. And we actually got. We funded this around two months ago and we already have positive results. So after testing one of the enzymes, we noticed that the sample itself it looks like a bunch of threads intertwined, and with an increased enzyme concentration we noticed that the sample itself it looks like a bunch of threads intertwined and with an increased enzyme concentration we could see that the texture and the color of the hemp bundle became brighter, which indicates that we were able to break down the lignin. So this is just one enzyme, but we're going to test a couple of more enzymes as well.
Speaker 1:And the coolest thing with this project is that the scaling is already in place. The production of this fiber is already there, so we don't need to do some crazy spider silk reactor type of deal. And that's why I love this project, because it's more about using a small amount of biologic to create a big impact that could have a climate impact. Usually a small amount of biologic you instantly think biopharma, enzymes. Big opportunity there. And we have a project in Australia, so we're intercontinental now. Australia is big on mining and naturally it became a biomining project. Not mining, but more e-waste recycling, and so we're shredding down printed circuit boards. This is by Dr Anna Kaksonen from CSIRO, basically the National Labs of Australia. They printed circuit boards. We're mixing them with a leaching agent to extract different metals.
Speaker 2:Wow, there's something really cool about crypto money going into a national lab. It feels like a subtle first of kind.
Speaker 1:It's like a very, very Kafkaesque what is going on.
Speaker 2:So this is where I'll jump in just to.
Speaker 2:I think it's a perfect segue to this last thing, which is that everyone who's listening to this right now is going through their own moment of trying to find a thesis of what's coming next in science funding right, and the overwhelming feeling is negative and afraid, and that and I'm actually pushing against that.
Speaker 2:The reason I'm pushing it against it is if we just had cuts and destruction, it would be bad, but if we just had AI coming through and changing everything, then that would also be bad, and I see that we actually have both right. What we have is we've got a massive rethinking about how federal governments fund science, but at the same time, we've got AI making small teams super powerful. You have crypto now you can have permissionless money going anywhere on these new, fully internally baked legal systems, and so my view is, yeah, it's scary, but actually I think this could be great, because we have this intersection of massively changing from the top, but also lots of tools and power from the bottom. And so I'm curious, when you get excited, how this resonates with you and what sort of thesis you're pushing forward with the ValleyDAO and what gets you excited over these next few years.
Speaker 1:I think you put it really well there. It feels like you're a cell and you're growing in super rich media, but at the same time, there's insane selection pressure on you. That's like the current state of the world right now. As you said, ai super big opportunity, make people much more efficient. And, of course, there's always going to be that denier in the room saying, oh, ai is not really driving that impact that it's had, but it's happening, we're just not actively seeing it. But at the same time, you have this geopolitical situation, the COVID shift in US politics, which ultimately affects the whole world and clearly has affected biotech, and there's an opportunity.
Speaker 1:I don't know what that opportunity exactly is, but every situation like this presents some sort of opportunity to just rethink how we do things, to rethink how we fund science, just rethink how we do things, to rethink how we fund science, to rethink how we serve scientists with, for example, different tools, different AI tools, and so that's something we've started also looking into is can we develop AI tools that can act like bicycle for the mind, for entrepreneurial scientists?
Speaker 1:Can we help them create a competitive analysis in 24 hours instead of three months, and what impact could that drive to technology commercialization. Can we help them at the research stage, hear the direction of their research to resolve in a more commercial outcome? That's something that we're now also building out internally to make ourselves just much more efficient but also really serve the industry and really start creating this playbook of climate biotech and I think the answer is stuck in a bunch of people's head all over the world. I think AI can help us aggregate all of that and derive useful insights when it comes to opportunity. Potentially, that's one of them is AI combined in just commercializing things and steering the direction of different research.
Speaker 2:I think that's awesome. And the last question I'll ask before we go to the rapid fire at the end is looking at the labs you've funded so far and this goes back to the US question it seems as if there's not an American lab been funded yet. Is that just been the right fit? Hasn't come, or are there unique challenges to bringing in crypto funding into the US market?
Speaker 1:Yes, back when Biden was in office, the climate on crypto was very tense. The SEC was coming after everyone, and so we were a little bit hesitant to do things in the US. But, at the same time, us labs are very well-funded and US they're just like a different culture regarding IP, different culture regarding entrepreneurship. I think US founders are much more like. It's super important for them that they are the only owner or co-owner of their IP, for example, whereas in Europe it seems like people are a little bit more flexible, a little bit more open to experiment with such a model, but on top of that, like newest tech, transfer offices are just like a different game. They are, yeah, just a bit more aggressive and a bit more like.
Speaker 1:They have a lot of screw you money and they always have the leverage in the negotiation, even if we are in the process, like our goal is to negotiate a deal that is good for the inventor, right, but in the US that's not their goal, right. And so now, with the Trump administration, with the funding freezes, with the pro crypto environment, maybe there could be a valid US project in the future, and so people hearing this are interested. Who wants to come and work with us dabble around, figure things out. Yeah, we can always reach out and we could do something together.
Speaker 2:We'd love to see that. So let's wrap up with four quick questions. We ask everybody. So, Albert, first, what's a single book, paper, art piece or idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist?
Speaker 1:Honestly, I don't see myself as a scientist. I feel like I need a PhD to feel, to embody that idea of being a scientist. I do see myself as an engineer, and a bit unrelated to the question, but so the book, it's not a technical book, it's not entrepreneurial book or any. It's called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Have you ever read that book? Yep.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:So I read this book back in 2017 and I think learning about the flow state, learning about how it governs your behavior, other people's behavior and just it really it decides your perception of the world and your, like, current experience. So learning about how like how to get yourself into a flow state, but, more importantly, how to get other people in flow states together with you Usually that's a recipe for success in my experience. So that's a book that definitely, yeah, changed my perception of the world and the human experience.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. I haven't heard someone push specifically social flow before and I love that. Second question best advice that a mentor gave you?
Speaker 1:Enjoy the process. Honestly, I think it's really easy to forget. When you especially like entrepreneurs, founders, people who are doing PhDs, where you're like really in the grind and things are just challenging, it's always try to find a way to enjoy the process. So never forget about that aspect of still try to have fun. Even if it's not like being out having beers with your friends, there's always a way to look at things that makes it more enjoyable for you.
Speaker 2:Love it. Type two fun is my favorite phrase. If you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one part of biology, what would it be?
Speaker 1:I would say consumer biotechnology. And the reason for that is if you talk with people in the open and you utter the word biotech, their understanding of biotech it's so distanced from your understanding of it you as somebody who was working in the industry it's just it's not real for them. Like they may allocate a medicine maybe, because that's what it's usually conflated by, usually conflated by consumer biotech. Just the idea of getting a biotech product in the hands of somebody on the street. That, to me, is an extremely powerful thing, because you bring biology and biotechnology closer to somebody. It's a conversation starter for them, it gets them thinking, it makes biotechnology real for them.
Speaker 1:And I think if we want to see the biorevolution and that whole solar punk future, it's not going to happen by us scientists developing technologies for industry or anything like that. Of course, that's still something that I'm super passionate about. I want to see happen. But when we get products into the hands of a consumer and when they can hold them like, oh, this is biotech right. And so that's why I really love things that have to do with houseplants, and we actually have an up and coming project of houseplants that can secrete fragrances to different types of fragrances, so that would be my answer to that question.
Speaker 2:Love it. Last question what's a skill that you think bioscientists need to invest more time into developing into themselves?
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say like a skill here, but instead of just like a change of, maybe mindset and attitude towards biotech. There's this term that everybody I think it started in 2021 after the industrial biotech bubble and food biotech bubble is, yeah, things don't scale. We know things don't scale, but there is a risk of a lot of ideas and a lot of proof of concept technologies getting completely squished and not really getting a chance to be fully tested and developed. And I'm not saying to stop doing your techno-economic analysis, but don't put way too much emphasis or value or energy into that particular idea that biology can't scale, because it might potentially misguide you. That's how I think about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would be my answer, and also I go really hard on biotech right right now it's not as optimistic as it used to be, but it's also our responsibility to flip the narrative. So I think we need just crazy optimism the space. In the same way that, like these ai people, they're hyper optimistic about the future, and is it a good thing or a bad thing? It doesn't really matter we should also be hyper optimistic about the future that we integrate with biotech, and so that would be my final thing. That I say is don't think that things can't scale and just be hyper optimistic about biotech, because that is the way to go in my view awesome albert.
Speaker 2:it's been such a fun conversation. I'm really inspired by not only what you've done, but how you've done it and so, just to toss it to you to wrap this up, would love to hear how do people find you and find ValleyDAO and get involved?
Speaker 1:Yep, from an observational point of view, twitter. So it's okay, I don't have time to involve, but I want to see what happens in the Valley. Go to Twitter. It's Valley underscore Dow. So at Valley underscore Dow we have a Discord server. I know you guys have a Slack. We have Discord because we're more degen than you guys. You can find us on Discord and you can go to our website, valleydowbio, and then from there you can find a link to our Discord server. Our Discord server is just much closer to us.
Speaker 1:You get to be part of the action, to see more like real-time updates, upcoming opportunities, funded projects, community conversations and, most importantly, you can get involved so you can join one of our work groups and work directly with the funded researchers and supporting them in commercializing. So, for example, with the Hempy project, right now we're in the process of establishing like an online store because we want to create a brand and so we're thinking of selling hemp clothing that are 50-50 cotton hemp not applied. It's not the final technology that is being applied to it, but we want to develop this store as a way to test product market fit and build the initial brand. So that's something that we're working on and, yeah, so much things people can learn by participating in these initiatives. It's a great pathway for people who potentially want to enter, like business development in biotech or VC, or just hang out with a bunch of nerds and learn what one senior scientist learned from having scaled up a hundred thousand liter bioprocess at a big company and gain insights from their experiences, for example, Wonderful.
Speaker 2:Albert and Nis, thank you so much for joining us, and I really had a wonderful time. Likewise, Thank you, Dan. 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 Collective 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. Catch you on the next one.