202. Setting Sail for Biotech Scale: Jenny Rooke Steers Innovators at Genoa Venture

[00:00:00] So you gotta turn science into products and get products into markets and show product market fit. And that looks like building just a real business, but based on biotechnology

Erum Hola, Carlos. Bienvenido al Grow Everything Podcast, todos.

Karl Gracias, Eram. ¿Cómo andas?

Erum And that's where the Spanish ends.

Karl Oh my God, Eram, I thought you were fluent.

Erum I should be.Actually, we should probably talk more. I mean, I took a lot of Spanish classes from middle school to college, but I do understand it.

Karl Yeah. Well, I am getting ready to travel to Spain at the end of October to go to the ATG SynBio conference, where I'm gonna be giving a talk on lessons from, successful biotech hubs. and I'm super excited about that. But for our listeners, welcome to the Grow Everything Podcast, where we talk about how biology is transforming all industries.

Karl Eram, last week was nuts, wasn't it?

Erum I'm still recovering from Climate Week. It was just [00:01:00] back to back to back, and wonderful. we're still processing. We need some time for that, and I still have lots of follow-ups to do. So if you haven't heard from me, you will soon. But wow, how are you feeling?

Karl I mean, I think by the end of the week, I didn't want to talk to anybody. And then, you know, I was lucky I got to have a very, restful weekend. I mean, this week has been very busy, but not like last week. Because during Climate Week, you go to a lot of meetings, you go to a lot of events, and you want to see how people are thinking about biotech or biology when it comes to addressing the climate issue.

Erum Yes. Yes, and there are lots of solutions out there. We talkabout many of them here on the podcast. And even when I went to these events, you know, a lot of these events were very climate heavy on the energy side, and a lot of the solutions were measured in, carbon capture and everything.

Erum So, you know, when I come into the room and I'm like, "Oh, I'm in biotech," people look at me like I'm crazy. Like, "What? You're at the wrong week." Yeah. "Bio Week was [00:02:00] this other week." And I'm like, "No, no, no, no." Yeah. "No, no." I, I always borrow from our friend Kristen Ellis, who said that the Venn diagram between climate and biology is a circle.

Erum And, at one event, like they ask some people to come up and kind of share why they're there and what their hot take is on climate, and I got, went up there and sang the song of Grow Everything and, you know, talked about biology, and people were like, "Oh. Oh, okay." And they're like, "Wait," you know.

Erum It's like, "Isn't it, isn't petrochemistry? Isn't, isn't fossil fuels? Aren't, isn't that biology?" I'm like, "Yeah, it's dead biology and-"

Karl Right. "...

Erum it's one thing, you know, but there's many other things." And you know, we've got to get, creative, and that's what we like to do, is bring all the creative people that are actually building things and thinking of it from an entrepreneurial point of view or even, you know, deep academic point of view, and bring them on the podcast and have them share their perspective.

Karl Absolutely. And I think, um What I found, first of all, I walked away super optimistic from this Climate Week. and we are gonna [00:03:00] talk about it more in a future episode, but I just felt like all the talk about building, all the talk about clean energy, which is the cheapest form of energy. and when I would talk to people and I would say biotech is this restoration layer on top of everything, then people would want to know more.

Karl And so, you know, shout out to all the people that we got to meet, and I'm, I just walked away more positive about Climate Week than I have in years past.

Erum I think, one of the highlights of Climate Week is when we attended this roundtable to talk about the Americans' Living Library Act, which is right now a bill that supporting the idea of sampling our public lands in the United States and all the different, plants and animals and just really just getting a sample and, sequencing their genomes and to have that information stored and then being able to look within that database and see what kind of novel things.

Erum one of the things that, we wanted to represent, [00:04:00] from us at Grow Everything and Messaging Lab, and then we had our friends from the Biome Consortia, which I'm a founding member of, to talk about the microbial world and what's going on in our public lands because we found so many wonderful things

Erum Even from sampling our public lands, which was more of an academic exercise and not a nationwide exercise, you know, researchers found a unique microbe that was the,precursor or the idea of doing PCR, which is now a technique that's used across many laboratories when it comes to doing analysis on, biological samples.

Erum It was used plentifully in during COVID to do COVID tests. And that all was because someone went to our public lands to examine what microbes were doing in different environments and how they, withstood extreme environments. These are extremophiles that were discovered in Yellowstone National Park.

Erum So it's a valiant effort. And, we talked about bioliteracy, which we're championing here on the podcast. [00:05:00] But, we need more people listening, and we need other people to do their efforts, and what does bioliteracy actually mean? What was a great topic of conversation. What did you take away from that, Carl?

Karl so let me just put on my best, Lizette voice for a second. For those listeners who don't know what PCR is, it stands for the polymerase chain reaction, which is used to multiply strands of DNA. You need a lot of DNA to do experiments, and so PCR makes that possible. And it's done by putting DNA with this bacteria that Durim is talking about into a container, and you do heat cycling.

Karl so PCR is really a, a very important tool for biotechnology. What did I take away? You know, I mean, bioliteracy is super important. I just recently did a search where I wanted to know how many people globally are involved in the biotech industry, and the number is, like, between seven and nine million people.

Karl I don't know if that number includes agricultural. I'll have to go back and find out. That's not very many people doing something as important as [00:06:00] biotechnology, and I'd like to think that kind of given what AI is going to enable, more people will become interested. But if you think about, 10 million people responsible for, growing life and using life to transform everything, it's not really a lot of people.

Karl So I think this idea of bioliteracy. We have to do a better job. We need to do a more extended job. We need to do a lot more to just get people interested in what biology enables.

Erum Yes. Yes. And this roundtable and the America's Living Library Act was, orchestrated by the National Security Commission of Emerging Biotechnology.

Erum So they were represented there. They hosted at the American Museum of Natural History, which was a beautiful space. And alongside of bioliteracy, we talked about policy literacy because what actually goes on in government to get an, idea as big as, sampling the US public lands and sequencing the genomes of plants, animals, and microbes, what does it take [00:07:00] for government to Rally around this and, how do they collect resources and interest in the, the public, you know, imagination.

Erum And that was really great to learn. and really the, kind of the big takeaway is that we need more people to understand that this is an effort, people in government understand, and so people can continue sponsoring that bill. I think there's about 30 sponsors. How do we make that 300 sponsors?

Erum So we'll share some more information in the show notes if you wanna get involved in this, you know, as going to be like a write to your congressperson type of situation, but maybe there's more. But stay tuned for that. We're gonna have them come back on the podcast and share what we've learned from that round table and their efforts throughout the time that they created these policy recommendations to grow the bioeconomy.

Karl So you flagged, which I thought was a lot of fun, this idea that some states have a state microbe. Let's talk about that for a minute. What states have microbes, on their official list of official things like official bird, official flag, official plant?

Erum Yeah. Yeah. This came from, we had, had a [00:08:00] call with, my friends at the Biome Consortia and, one of the members, Leslie Robertson, mentioned this, and I was so surprised.

Erum I'm like, "I have to share this with our friends on the Grok Everything podcast." So there's only three states in the United States that have an official microbe as a part of their state microbe. there's Oregon, whothey have Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which many people may know as brewer's or baker's yeast, and they wanted to honor that microbe because of the state's thriving craft brewing industry, which is really cool.

Erum And then there's New Jersey, whose state microbe is Streptomyces griseus, which was designated as their state microbe in 2019 to honor the discovery at Rutgers University of the bacterium because it is, the first effective antibiotic against tuberculosis. And finally, Illinois has a state microbe.

Erum It's Penicillium rubens, which many people might recognize as the life-saving [00:09:00] microbe that was mass-produced during World War II, and it was discovered on a mold strain, I think in a, on a piece of fruit. And it was like, wait, what? this is a find, such a, you know, random find, and, Illinois wants to honor that microbe.

Erum and that's the US states. I will say, honorable mention, there's a official, India state microbe. In India, Kerala declared Bacillus subtilis as its state microbe to promote the awareness of beneficial probiotic bacteria and the role in agriculture and digestion, which is very cool.

Karl That is cool

Erum So what should New York State microbe be?

Karl So I looked this up because I was like, "Well, does New York State have a microbe?" It does not. And the Google search suggested three. One Penicillium roqueforti, which is what's used for ripening blue cheeses. I'm a huge fan of that.

Erum Yes.

Erum Yes, blue cheese. Blue cheese with chicken wings always. For all you ranch people dipping your chicken wings in [00:10:00] ranch instead of blue cheese, shame on you. Anyway.

Karl And then the other one, that was suggested for New York State was Lactococcus lactis, which is, a bacteria that's used in making, again, cheeses and yogurt.

Karl and New York State is actually a huge yogurt producer. So, I don't know how much blue cheese we produce. whenever I get domestic blue cheese, I always think it's made in, Wisconsin, but I don't know that I've seen blue cheeses from New York State. Now I'm gonna pay more attention because I really wanna taste my local blue cheese.

Erum So Iram, something else that's been going on, and part of the reason why you've been super busy, is you're taking the How to Biomanufacture Almost Anything course at MIT. What's that been like?

Erum It's been busy. I think one of the things is, first of all, I have to say that David Kung is an amazing instructor.

Erum He makes it very fun, interesting, keeps it high level so you don't get too deep in the weeds, especially for this class. This class is really, promoting the idea of using AI to really hone in on what you're [00:11:00] trying to do. And it was very interesting because, part of the class is like, "Well, what do you want to biomanufacture?

Erum What's your project going to be?" And you know, of course you and I talk about this every single day, every single week about biomanufacturing things and what's going on in the market, so we have a different perspective. I mean, there were students in there that were really, thinking of it on a very, Very particular PhD hat where it was like, "Oh, I just wanna find this mechanism and see if that mechanism works."

Erum And David was like, "Oh, no, no. No, what do you wanna make? Like, what's a creative thing you wanna do?" And so I love that aspect. And, I am getting introduced to all the software. So right now this week, I'm working on DNA design. so using tools like Benchling, Kernel. overall, I've been using Claude and Claude Science and kind of working with both of them to see, who's right and, seeing how Claude Science Claude regular, or other Claude as it refers to it.

Erum So that's been a very interesting exercise, you know, just to see how they respond to each [00:12:00] other. and then it was great to see, like, just how it works, like what is involved. I do have a background in biochemistry, so I had to, like, dust off a lot of, you know, terminology and like, oh, that's right.

Erum You know, we do need a promoter. We do need these start and stop codons. Okay, I see. of course iGEM created a lot of, you know, parts and that's integrated into the Asimov Kernel, system. So it was great to see, what information that they have that could be used.

Erum And, luckily I've been accepted into the GenSpace node, so we have a bit more homework. we have to do the homework. We have to, share it with each other. So we, there's like a group of maybe 12 of us. We share our ideas, some of the challenges that we're experiencing with the homework.

Erum and next week is learning about cell-free and how do you create cell-free. And, and yesterday we did this, well, I did the virtual tour. The class at MIT went in person to Ginkgo Bioworks to s- see their automated labs. [00:13:00] And so we were getting the, virtual tour. So someone's holding a camera and, you know, these are, smart students, but they're not production crew, so a little shaky, but it's okay.

Erum I got to see everything. but it was very good to see what's available to us, and I believe there's A certain amount of, as we had this conversation with Jason Kelly a few episodes ago, he talked about the labs and that there are these, modules, these, like, independent carts that have, the equipment on it, and a lot of it's liquid handling equipment.

Erum And there's about, like, 16 of them, I think, dedicated to this class so that we can run experiments virtually. So, so far I'm still in it. I mean, I'm... Part of me is like, "Should I be doing this? Oh my God, I've got this client work, you have this meeting."

Karl Don't forget, you are, gainfully employed, and we are very busy.

Erum Yes. Yes, I am, yes.

Karl But this also counts as professional development.

Erum Thank you. Okay, great. Because I also... I try to get into bed by, like, 10:00 PM, but now it's, like, you know, 12:30 because I have to do the homework, you know? And that's, like, a lot. So I'm trying to stay dedicated.

Karl Yeah. going [00:14:00] back to, you know, putting on your old biochemistry hat, 'cause I remember I had had a conversation with Aaron Schacht, who's been on the podcast, of Bioedit, and he told me that, I don't remember why or how he ended up taking, either biochemistry or, microbiology, and he was like, "We covered everything that I learned in college in, like, the first four weeks, and the rest of the semester was all new stuff that I knew about but had never covered in a textbook."

Karl So there's so much new knowledge and it just continues to, you know, expand exponentially and it's very exciting. That's what we're here for

Erum Yeah. And it's great because, when I was in school I didn't have, an application that I was passionate about. I didn't, connect anything. So I was just, like, learning to learn.

Erum But now I'm going backwards, You know, this project which, you know, part of submitting the homework is, submitted on this public webpage, and I'll share it when I, finish it so people can see this, exercise. But it was more like, all right, I have kind of a vision and I want to...

Erum I have, a question. And, like, we've had this conversation about biomanufacturing food dye. I'm like, well, [00:15:00] that work? How do you do it? And so this is my, exercise. I want to biomanufacture colors that are food safe. So let's see how far I get.

Erum It's very interesting, um, how it all works, 'cause color's structural, and there's things going on on the nanoscale, and biology's the perfect factory to build things on the nanoscale. So let's see. Stay tuned.

Karl that's awesome. I mean, there's so much good stuff going on in biology,

Karl There's so many good things happening when it comes to climate, health, AI, and we're bringing on the perfect person to speak about it.

Karl Jenny Rook, founder of Genoa Ventures. Jenny is a PhD, and I happen to know her for a very long time through SynBioBeta, one of my favorite people to talk to and get a sense of the pulse of what's going on on the investor side of the world.

Karl She's the founder and managing director of Genoa Ventures, and Genoa invests in early stage companies at the convergence [00:16:00] of biology and technology. By way of background, Jenny was a physicist who turned geneticist at Yale. She consulted at, McKinsey and managed a $250 million fund at the Gates Foundations.

Karl with that, let's let Jenny kick it off.

Karl Jenny Rick, Genoa Ventures. We've been wanting to have you on the Grow Everything for the longest time. We're so happy to have you here.

Jenny It is great to be here, Carl. Yes, we've been talking about it literally for years, and here we are, and it's a great time, which I think we will get into as we have the conversation.

Speaker 4 Excellent. So I'm gonna kick it off by just talking a little bit about your background. You studied physics at Georgia Tech. You've got a PhD in genetics from Yale. You consulted at McKinsey

Karl and you've launched several venture funds. What took you from solving physics equations to betting on the convergence of technology and biology?

Speaker 5 Well, I'm drawn to hard problems, as [00:17:00] you can probably hear from that journey. And each step was really, for the longest time, about learning the next

Jenny skill set. I'm just very curious, and I would be exposed to something new and I would need to learn about it, need to develop some level of mastery.

Jenny And so that, that kept building. I, had physics, I had software engineering. I fell in love with genetics, so went and learned about that. Then I wanted to learn about business and strategy and how you build businesses. Then that naturally turned into, well, how do you specifically build science-based businesses, startups, technology-driven companies?

Jenny Then ultimately, having had a collection of those experiences, found myself saying, "Okay, I think I have a basis set of knowledge here. What do I do with it? How do I use it?" that's when I moved to the Bay Area, started running around, seeing what people were doing, and found out, and this is I guess a little foreshadowing, that the world needed yet another venture fund, surprisingly [00:18:00] to focus on the kinds of companies that I care about, which I'm sure we'll get into.

Erum Yeah. Absolutely. And, thank you for your service. Um- Exactly. Um-

Jenny Well, it's selfish, as you can hear. Like I, I also love it, so .

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah. The world of venture capital and, you know, startups vying for those dollars can be very stressful on both sides. And you've started a bunch of venture funds. You built the Gates Foundation early

Erum investing function, and you raised a massive syndicate on AngelList, which I love that platform. But can you tell us what the biggest lesson you received about early-stage risk that traditional VCs regularly miss in deep tech?

Jenny It's true. I've now invested off quite a number of platforms and had the privilege of investing with a wide variety of types of investors who each bring their own passions, knowledge, frameworks, and limitations, which we all have.

Jenny I think one of the most surprising thing relates back to one [00:19:00] of my biggest surprises in transitioning from physics and software engineering into the lab, where I, remember doing my first PCR experiment as a graduate student, and it didn't work. My-- There were no bands. Back then we, we did things by hand and we looked at bands.

Jenny There were no bands on the gel. And I took it to my, PI and I said, what happened?" He said, "Don't know. Sometimes it doesn't work."

Karl Yeah. Classic.

Jenny I was flabbergasted, offended. It was a real immediate lesson when you're working in the physical world, a lot of times things just do not work.

Jenny And fast forward to investing, I think if you haven't had that kind of gut experience of you can't passion your way through it, you can't pivot your way through it. There are real physical laws that represent risk in investing in the physical world. And so if you don't take that into account in your risk evaluation, in your timelines it will get you because the probability [00:20:00] is failure.

Jenny It's a big old null set out there in the universe with very few things that actually work

Karl Yeah, failure's the default. You have to- Yeah ... work really hard to get away from that.

Jenny That's right. So

Karl so let's talk about Genoa and its origins. You named it not after the city of Genoa, so I,actually didn't know this until we started doing the research, but it's actually a sail that boosts a boat's speed and stability, and clearly

Karl you view founders as captains of their ships.

Jenny Yes.

Karl How do you balance giving founders autonomy while steering them away from fatal early stage problems?

Jenny I appreciate you calling that out. I would have started the firm earlier if I could think of the name.

Jenny It took a long time to come up with it, and I wanted to pick something that frankly wasn't about me or even about the technologies that I love personally, but make a big enough tent for my partners to come along and be excited about the next thing, founders to come in the door and be talking about [00:21:00] something that I hadn't heard of.

Jenny And so I really focused in on our, values and the values, what I want Genoa to stand for, which is, as you describe, honoring that it's the founders, the management team who are taking this incredible risk and striking out in uncharted waters to try to bring us all to a better future. I had met enough venture capitalists that I did not want to be like, who seemed to think it was all about them.

Jenny So in that, let's keep this front and center as we, we build the firm and and take it seriously, this privilege we have of supporting founders. But you're right, it's also our job as fiduciaries of our LPs' money to try to help founders avoid steering their ships on the rocks being called by the sirens, and all of the Odyssean challenges of being on a voyage.

Jenny And so that comes down to things like first, you know, always knowing that you're not in charge but building relationships of [00:22:00] trust and aligned purpose. So you can say, "Look, I'm not here to tell you what to do, but here's what I've observed in the last 100 companies I've seen like this. You can tell me you're gonna be the exception, but let's at least talk about why so that you're being clear-eyed about some things I've seen before that I hope will help you get to the success that we're all aligned around wanting for you."

Erum Yeah. No that's amazing and very, like, helpful to think about. So let's get a little bit more into the thesis of Genoa. So it focuses on this idea of bioconvergence, which spans research tools, diagnostics, med tech, food, ag, and industrial biology, which we love to talk about, and that's pretty broad.

Erum That, that's a broad portfolio of very different looking businesses. So can you tell us what characterizes a quintessential Genoa investment? And then what is the ultimate economic or technical reality that these hybrid companies face when moving from [00:23:00] lab into commercial markets?

Jenny in venture, the thesis has to be a, big enough tent to bring an exciting group of people together and build a portfolio, but focused enough that you know what you're not gonna do.

Jenny So the through line here for a Genoa company is turning impactful science into companies of consequence. And so they're almost always based on proprietary biology, but other kinds of technology, technological innovations. That's where that bioconvergence comes in, that multidisciplinary, bigger than the sum of the parts innovation, and then turning that into companies that are not limited to traditional, quote, "biotech."

Jenny So not limited to medicines or even healthcare, because biotechnology is a general purpose technology that's transforming all of those industries you mentioned. And so we're looking for those kinds of founders who are bringing an insight about a particular market and an application of biotechnology that maybe someone else hasn't seen before. So you [00:24:00] got to turn science into products and get products into markets and show product market fit. And that looks like building just a real business, but based on biotechnology

Karl And why do you think that term bioconvergence is maybe more useful or more expansive than, biotech? Which we do find it's problematic.

Karl I mean,to people who are outside of this space, you say biotech and they immediately-- if they even think about it, they say pharma.

Jenny Right. Right. Uh, well, I think you just answered your own question. I think the, the label biotech is in a sense a victim of its own success. And this was true even as of the early 2000s when there was a consultant serving big pharma at McKinsey, and they said-- our client said, we'd like help with our biotech strategy."

Jenny And I got super excited because, you know, the, the Human Genome Project was just done and we were trying to figure out how to sequence genomes, and this was gonna transform how we understand, human disease and interventions. And, so I said, "Okay, let's talk about a technology-enabled vision of the pharma future."

Jenny And they said, "No, no, no, no. [00:25:00] We want to know which antibody companies should we buy." Like they were already so clearly thinking biotech makes new drugs, which thank goodness it does, right? It really proves that all of these things we're talking about can make a huge impact on people's lives and build markets, and just look at the trillions of dollars of value created just from GLPs, right?

Jenny So that's all great. However if that's kind of stealing all the oxygen in the room, then it's gonna be really hard to talk about industrial bio and how biotechnology there can also make new products and businesses. So we thought it was important to pick a term that frankly people have to ask, what does that mean?

Jenny Because otherwise they're bringing the biases that limit themselves and founders when it comes to building these new bio businesses.

Erum Yes and you've seen this happen for many years. You've invested through multiple generations of biotech. So [00:26:00] there's biotech 1.0 with the bioethanol. That was the new in- industrial biotech was exciting, and now we're in a new place.

Erum what did the first generation of synbio companies teach you about what it actually takes to build a durable business, and what has changed that makes you believe this moment is different?

Jenny Yeah. I had, in a sense the benefits or the luxury of kind of watching from the sidelines during, I would say, industrial bio or synbio 1.0.

Jenny I was still at Gates Foundation, let's call it around the 2010 mark when, the first synbio beta, happened and came down to the Bay Area for that and people were kind of trying to define these other kinds of bio businesses. So by the time I moved to the Bay Area in the mid-20 teens and, was back to looking to back startups, there was already a generation of founders, managers, customers who had learned some of the lessons I think you're pointing [00:27:00] to here, uh, which made it a really exciting time to write checks to companies like Zymergen.

Jenny So you had a management team who said, "We know kind of what worked and what didn't." And also, the technology has come a long way for accelerating how we engineer biology in particular. So we want to do it faster, we want to do it smarter. I think we're seeing now in this generation that flywheel turning even faster, particularly with the help of AI to plan and interpret our biotechnology work

Karl Yeah.

Karl I mean, your, your portfolio is super interesting because it spans research tools like Intabio and goes to ag platforms like Miogenex. How do you weigh the long-term horizon discovery bet against an immediate revenue gen-generating tool?

Jenny I mean, as a scientist, I love it all, right?

Jenny And so I, I love the deep discovery. I love reading papers and going to conferences. As a venture capitalist, I have agreed to hold myself to a win condition, [00:28:00] which is returning a multiple of my investors' capital in the seven to 10-year timeframe. So that is a lens that we bring to actually writing checks into startups, is thinking from the outcome backwards.

Jenny And that kind of long timeline, whether you can start from a napkin sketch or basically a, a beta, a prototype of a product, really depends on the sector. you mentioned a couple of very different ones. Yeah. RNA tools, there's a fairly well-defined journey from concept to product and market and scaling that fits within that window.

Jenny If it's something like an engineered crop, you have to take into account the life cycle time of that crop, which is very different for something like tomatoes that Miogenex does versus, say, bananas that Trafig does.

Erum Yeah, that's, super helpful. love the fact that we're looking at ag and you're also looking at pharma too, in the world of healthcare.[00:29:00]

Erum And you were at J.P. Morgan this year

Jenny This was my 20th J.P.

Jenny Morgan, by the way, and it felt bizarre to go from a confused baby associate 20 years ago who had to fly cross country to get here, to a person who took a robot car to my office to meet my portfolio companies. Like, what a different world.

Karl Wow.

Erum That's amazing. So during JPM, you highlighted that there's this world of next-generation clinical assessment tools. So what is your primary filter here? Are you looking at n-novel biomarkers, faster, cheaper infrastructure for existing clinical assays? What are you really looking for in this world?

Jenny Yeah, I love how you described it, which is, fundamentally about getting information about biology that can inform clinical decisions.

Jenny So this is another area where the term, the conventional term diagnostics, I think, is freighted with a lot of biases and, and learnings from the past. But that's really what we're talking about, is a, a test [00:30:00] that a patient can take with a clinician support to get information about their health and their healthcare.

Jenny But to answer your question, we look at the full spectrum of, is there a new, say, compartment in biology that can inform better diagnostics? That's where our companies like Interven and Actual come in, where they look at either glyco- proteomics or the distribution of DNA fragments in a patient's blood, respectively.

Jenny So that's just a whole new lens on the patient biology. In some cases, like our company BrainBox, specific biomarkers that we believe are going to be more informative for managing concussion in a way that has historically not tapped into molecular biology. And then companies like Codeta in the portfolio, which are enabling, whether it's researchers or clinicians, to look at multiple types of markers simultaneously, DNA, RNA, protein, all at once, to get a more complete picture of a sample, whether that's for [00:31:00] research or for diagnostic purposes.

Jenny So we're up for the full spectrum. Certainly, we believe that the realm of clinical assays and getting better information there is more and more part of the value in delivering great healthcare in lockstep with those new therapies.

Erum Sorry, just a quick follow-up. is this a split between diagnostics in the world of, like, a h- healthcare system or there's consumer diagnostic tools?

Erum What, what are you seeing there? 'Cause we've been seeing a lot of, um, you know, you can order a microbiome kit and they'll test your microbiome, and they'll recommend different things 'cause they'll diagnose your microbiome of, like, not having a certain amount of, you know, microbes in it or something.

Erum And I'm curious to know, your thoughts on the more hospital system side of diagnostics versus the consumer side.

Jenny Yeah. Really interesting times, isn't it? Because the technology is making [00:32:00] it possible to generate data.

Jenny so you end up with this more of a continuum of solutions rather these kind of rigid categories, which is exciting and sometimes confusing. I have a few fundamental beliefs about it, which is a diagnostic test delivers information and insight on which a clinical action can be taken So whether that happens at the home or in a clinical setting, it has to change behavior for it to be an effective diagnostic test and often for it to be paid for, so therefore for it to be a effective business.

Jenny Otherwise it's information and sometimes infotainment.

Karl Yeah.

Jenny Where we, we can generate a lot of information about our sleep. Like I look at my sleep chart, it's fun. Yeah. Um, did it make me actually go to bed earlier? Maybe.

Jenny Yeah. Am I gonna skip that second glass of wine? Maybe. So that, that's part of it, is changing behavior and decision-making.

Jenny And then I think it [00:33:00] always has to be in the context of a bigger question of implementation. So for at-home test or consumer test or information, the question is: Does the consumer by themselves have everything they need to take action? So maybe yes, in the case of sleep data, not so much in the case of a cancer test.

Jenny They can't interpret the information, although increasingly that's getting better, so I'm excited about that. They can't take action because they don't have the available treatments or facilities. So in those cases, it's no one's fault but those tests really need to be impactful for patients in the healthcare system.

Jenny They do need to sit as I like your word, Carl, professional. They need to sit in a professional setting where someone has access to all of those resources to bring it to bear on the actual, decision-making and patient care.

Karl Yeah. I like how you said it contributes to infotainment because it, [00:34:00] it's true.

Karl And I mean, this was my beef with 23andMe, you know, when they first came out. It's like, here's all this information about your genetics, and 99% of people who are getting that information had no idea what it would mean. And yes, you know, oh, they're gonna gate some of the information because it might hurt you to know that, you know, you're carrying two genes for Alzheimer's or something like that.

Karl But it is infotainment because most people don't know what to do with that information.

Karl I want to go back to this idea of bioconvergence. one of the things you've said is that bio-based products are an on-ramp for your LPs, your limited partners, who basically have stayed away from biotech because of the risk in drugs.

Karl And I mean, drug discovery and drug development is very risky. It's like one out of 10,000 chance that you're gonna hit it. And if you do, you might hit it very big. I mean, look at the GLP-1s. It took decades to get there. Make the case, why is bioconvergence an easier yes for some investors than biotech?

Jenny Yeah. you've framed it well, which is, as we know in, quote, [00:35:00] "biotech," meaning making new medicines, you spend many, many years, you know, up to a decade, and many hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions these days, to find out whether it worked. And most of the time it doesn't Which that's just the odds, and that is

Jenny one game that one can play, and if played well, can make the world a better place and generate a lot of value. That's terrific. Also pretty terrifying. And particularly what we found is LPs and investors who maybe come from the technology world, deep tech, software, come from building businesses and entrepreneurship, like that doesn't feel like the kind of, vision for building the future that they're familiar with, where you can, over time, take a series of risks and see if they work out and just keep, and keep growing and building.

Jenny Whereas the world that we're talking about, like bio-based products, [00:36:00] technologies, businesses, the journey looks a lot more like what you might know from building a software company or a deep tech company, or frankly, any company. Again, you, you need to know about some customers that live in a marketplace where they have a need, and you have a belief that a bio-based solution could meet that need in a proprietary way.

Jenny And in the course of a few months, a few years at the most, you can test that belief that your technologies can do something that no one else can do. And so that gives people a chance to get some exposure to this incredible time of biotechnology, where new solutions are coming online but a, a chance to kind of learn alongside the companies, to bet on the kinds of entrepreneurs they see themselves in, which is business builders who care about customers and markets.

Jenny Just a much more accessible way to apply biotechnology to value building and entrepreneurship.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, and, [00:37:00] throughout the years, we have seen some in- some incredible companies come through. But then with those companies, there's been incredible failure for some of these companies where there's massive amounts of money put in and unfortunately it didn't pan out.

Erum I don't know if you've read the "Graveyard Report" from First Bite Ventures. They kind of did an evaluation of industrial biotech and tried to pinpoint certain reasons why these companies have failed. But can you tell us what are the challenges of venture capital when it comes to evaluating these companies, maybe how they're financed or built?

Erum Can you give us a your diagnosis of maybe why some of these companies failed, but it's not just the companies, but how venture capital maybe needs a little, rethought a little bit. Yeah.

Jenny Yeah, I mean, you're getting right to the heart of why we're bothering to build Genoa, right?

Jenny Which it's, you know, it's hard to build a new venture firm. There are plenty of them out there, but what I saw in some of those early investments that we talked [00:38:00] about was if you don't bring sort of a fresh mind and a beginner's mind to these companies, which are, in a sense, a novel category, at least for the entrepreneurial venture-backed world, then the kind of pattern matching that VCs are famous for will fail you, will get you into trouble because the rules for where things are risky and where they fail, as you're describing are different, and so really understanding some of those.

Jenny One that I'm sure you've talked about many a time on this podcast is the challenge of scaling bio-based products, And I was, fortunate to, again, talk to some, some of the real pioneers in this space early on who called that out, who said the predictivity of success at the lab bench to translating that into success at commercial scale is very poor.

Jenny It's very hard to know what's going to work. it's an analogy, I would say, to some of that fundamental science work, the R&D. If [00:39:00] you're still in the R&D, you don't know whether success is right around the corner or 20 years from now, and that can be true for scaling as well. So taking that into account when someone is building a business in that space, when someone is investing in that space is critical for understanding how much capital's going to be required, how much time is going to be required, what sort of expertise you need around the table, whether that's on the investor base or in the management team.

Jenny I think that's a great example, is just the scaling challenge. It's very different than pharma, for example, where that's not really the question. Can you make enough of the drug? At least in small molecules, is pretty straightforward.

Karl Yeah. It's interesting because we're recording this just after-- climate week, and before this we had traveled to Omaha to this bio innovations conference where the entire conference was built around scaling, and particularly in the Midwest where there's a lot of these ethanol plants and people are putting together these pilot plants.

Karl And I think that, and this might be my bias, I think that ma-ma-many [00:40:00] founders that are working in this space don't really have that vision of what does that, million-liter facility look like? what does it take? What are the steps that it's gonna take to get there? And, for other people, biomanufacturing can mean anything from fermentation to enzymes to these big, huge production systems that I'm describing.

Karl When you use that term, what future are you actually describing?

Jenny Well, I like it as a broad label. Again, sort of biomanufacturing being making Things out of biology or using biology to make other things, so it can go in, in both directions. You know, we're really excited about a just closed-

Jenny the fourth investment out of Genoa's newest fund, Genoa Fund III.

Jenny I'm super excited about it. It is-- despite having founded Genoa to make investments in industrial bio, it is the first one we've made in our eight and a half years. Yeah. Because it is so hard. It is so hard to get these things right that you're describing and [00:41:00] we're taking a bet on this one, and it is in biomanufacturing,

Jenny pretty excited about that one. It's, brand new, uh, but, you know, watch this space.

Erum Yes. Watch this space. Exactly. and so then what else? Are you looking for more tools, picks, and shovels? what do you envision for the next, you know, five to 10 years

Jenny So at Genoa, we don't have target allocations to our different sectors, whether it's tools or diagnostics or agriculture. It's really best idea wins every time. And so, I can't tell you what that's going to look like for fund three or for the next 100 years. And that's kind of intentional because what we know is at the convergence of innovation of biology and AI and materials science and automation, where that has impact changes over time.

Jenny And so we want to be able to react to that in real time in conjunction with our, founders. But what I will say, if I look at fund three, so we, we know what the first 5 of the 15 companies or positions is, and there's [00:42:00] a very strong through line of biomanufacturing. Again, biomanufacturing writ large, but using biology to make things making the inputs that are required in biology.

Jenny One of our companies, it looks like a tools company, it's called, uh, Hermes Bio, came out of Stanford, and they have a better way for isolating exosomes, which are the little vesicles that run around in our bodies. There's orders of magnitude more of them than there are cells. Lots of information in there we need to get at.

Jenny That's a tool, right? But one of the, the applications that people are most excited about for exosomes is using them as payload delivery in medicines and diagnostics. So even that we see as not just getting information, but as a prep step for, again, making things out of biology.

Karl Yeah, that's super exciting.

Erum Okay. So we are at the part of this interview where we're going to ask you some quick-fire questions.

Jenny Oh, boy.

Erum Are you ready?

Jenny Sure.

Erum All right. Here we go. If [00:43:00] a founder's pitch deck had to be replaced by a single emoji, which one are you hoping to see?

Jenny Wow. Okay. Well, there's the part of my heart that will always just love genetics so much, so a double helix will get my attention, if that were the emoji. but more generally, it would be an emoji that is a chimera of other emojis. Like, we're constantly looking for something that is an unusual combination of parts that maybe the world hasn't seen before.

Jenny That's that bioconvergence concept. So I don't know, maybe it's a, a smiley face with a Christmas tree growing out of its head. I don't know. You tell me. But something that makes me say, "Oh, I, I recognize those parts, but I've never seen them in that combination before."

Erum Not the, um, the rocket ship? The rocket ship or, like, the graph with the exponential curve?

Jenny No, actually, because I would say those are the same kind of pattern matching that doesn't work here. Like, our graphs are, like, an extended J curve. [00:44:00] You, it looks more like biotech, where you've got to wait for the climax.

Karl All right. Fill in the blank. relying on traditional VC playbooks for bioconvergent startups in 2026 is like trying to navigate a ship using

Jenny A, a printout from MapQuest

Jenny Or let's say a, a printed atlas, right? It's, it's so yesterday

Jenny There's useful information in there, in a printed atlas or map but it's not dynamic. You can't ask it questions, right? So I feel like that's the kind of pattern matching that gets VCs into trouble, is they're not asking dynamically what fundamentally is this company, its technology, what are they trying to do today in today's environment, that I need to take into account and be creative around.

Erum Yeah. I love it. I love it. So if Genoa Ventures had an official rally cry printed on a canvas sail, what four words are on it?

Jenny I'm [00:45:00] gonna take the liberty of giving you my four words. This is Jenny Rook, not necessarily Genoa, although I can't tell the difference between the two anymore, so. So, my personal creedis four words, and it is a combination of know or learn all, that's that curiosity, and then with that, make good.

Jenny So in Latin, that is omnia discere bonum creare. That's my personal motto.

Erum Wow. so sophisticated.

Karl Curiosity and learning. I love that.

Jenny Yeah. Like, try to learn as much as you can, th- that's an endless well of adventure, and then use it to make good things, and that looks like biomanufacturing to me.

Karl So if a Founder 60 slide pitch deck was replaced by a single Spotify playlist, what song needs to be on the track for you to write a check?

Jenny Uh, I feel like that's a personal question to them, right? I wanna know what their playlist is. And certainly I'm not gonna [00:46:00] react and spend my LP's money just based on

Jenny You know, it's like whatever's, whatever speaks to you. For me, it's, uh, I have a soundtrack that I put together, a playlist that I call All I Do Is Win. Oh, snap. What I listen to when I'm pitching, because I have to fundraise, too, and it does include the titular song, All I Do Is Win. Um, it includes a lot of Broadway.

Jenny You know, a lot of like-- 'cause in just about every Broadway musical, there's that triumph over adversity song. You gotta have some of that. Yeah.

Erum Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Okay. we're getting in to learn more a little bit about your music taste. I wasn't sure if you were gonna say like hard rap, hip hop, and you're like, "Oh, okay.

Erum All right."

Jenny Oh, yeah, no, that's Mama Said Knock You Out is on the list. Oh. All right, Jenny. Don't call it a comeback. I've been here for years.

Erum I love

Karl it. It's funny because when Lisa Rosler of, you know, of Amyris came on and we asked her about yeast and, what song [00:47:00] she would choose, she chose like the Def Leppard song, Pour Some Sugar On It.

Erum On me. Pour some sugar on me.

Karl Sorry. Sorry.

Jenny That's perfect. Yeah. If there were more songs about genetics, I suppose that would be on my list, but I have to go with metaphors, I guess.

Erum Oh, yeah. No, yeah. if you are making any music around DNA and genetics, call us.

Karl Yeah. You need to get away from Devo's Mr.

Karl DNA or Adolescents' Amoeba.

Erum So Jenny, thank you so much for f- joining us on the Grow Everything podcast. We're so happy to have you on. Great champion for biomanufacturing. I'm sure a lot startup founders are listening. They're gonna reach out to you, so you're gonna have your inbox full.

Jenny No, it's delightful.

Jenny that's what we're here for, is to make that, that home. We sometimes say it's like the island of misfit toys. We're that firm that if you are too bio to go to the tech funds and you're too tech to go to the bio funds, that's where Genoa lives, so come see us.

Karl [00:48:00] Thank you so much for your time. This was great.

Erum Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Erum Carl, what'd you think of that episode?

Karl I mean, Jenny's always such a pleasure to speak with. I'm pretty sure you had met her once or twice before as well, and I just feel like she's a really deep thinker and a lot of fun to talk to. And, when she talked about bioconvergence, I kind of was like, huh, is this a better frame for biotech or biotechnology?

Karl We know that biology is this [00:49:00] general purpose technology, it's a general purpose platform, and it combines engineering, data, AI. And so that means that research tools, diagnostics, agriculture, industrial bio, they're all in the same category even though they don't look the same on paper. And this is why we have this podcast, because in our podcast, we are talking to people who are creating colors, creating foods, you know, using biology to make mining more efficient.

Karl And so this technology just has so many applications. I think we're still just scratching the surface. Yoram, what did you think?

Erum Oh, yeah. I mean, I had met Jenny through, you introduced me to her at events and, what a pleasure to speak with. And then, like, I saw her background and I suddenly became very intimidated.

Erum I was like, "Holy snap." I gotta-- I don't wanna curse. Um, Jason Kelly cursed a lot in his episodes. I'm trying to keep it, you know, friendly here. But, um, but yeah, it's just like, it's so amazing. And I, of course, we loved speaking with her because on one hand she is looking in the world of, [00:50:00] pharma and drug development, and that's, you know, the binary bet.

Erum drug development is pretty mature in terms of how it can commercialize, but this idea of bio-based products, that could bring new money into this world of biology. And she talked about tools, of course. from diagnostics to bio-based products, there are more ways to win early revenue, right?

Erum Drug development takes such a long time to realize that revenue. Maybe a lot faster these days, for sure.'cause it's been going on for a while. But we just need, earlier revenue, which, consumer products can afford.

Erum and we've seen that with K18 Hair. that was an amazing story, a three-year story to acquisition. and it's great. So I think for Jenny, she's always, looking for startups to support. Of course, looking for limited partners to raise money to grow her fund. And, she made it easier for these limited partners to say yes to, bioindustrials or bioconvergence.

Erum Love that, love that concept. What else, [00:51:00] Carl?

Karl Jenny talked about, like, that kind of first wave of synthetic biology, kind of what happened, uh, you know, after the biofuels failure. And, that idea really taught us that unit economics and scale-up really decide who survives, and that's been something we've been talking a lot about here.

Karl It's like, how do you build that ecosystem from the beginning, not just what you're doing on the bench? Because the bench is very important, but, like,

Speaker 3 How do you get it to the scale where you're gonna hit cost, volume, and customer pull? All those things together are really that ecosystem that needs to be built. And what I also appreciated about this conversation is she said right now it's kinda different because tools, AI, and manufacturing are much more mature

Karl and a lot of founders are more commercially minded. I think we see that all the time and these are the kinds of people that we've been bringing on the podcast.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I love the the story of how she came up with the name Genoa Ventures. It's not from the town in Italy.

Erum But it's [00:52:00] the Genoa's sail, so like this idea of, you know, a ship. And she really looks at, you know, the investor's job being a sail. They're not the captain. The founders are the captain, and I love that analogy.

Erum Um, but the VCs, what they do is they add speed and stability. They help figure things out. They flag fatal mistakes, you know. They do their due diligence. And otherwise, stay out. They want you to sail to growth.

Erum Some people use rocket ships as the vehicle, but here at Genoa it's the sailboat. So, I really love that aspect of the conversation too because, a lot of it's mission, a lot of this is storytelling. You can make such great technology, but if you just talk about it in a very cold, you know, factual way versus how it can transform, how people live and how, you know, things work, it's just, it's just not as strong of a story.

Erum It's just not as captivating, as you can say.

Karl There you go. Well, with that, I think let's, wrap up this episode.

Karl We've got a lot of exciting [00:53:00] episodes coming up. We've got some really interesting people working in at the interface of conservation and biotech. We have a few science fiction authors that we're gonna bring on, and then some, people working at some really large companies looking at biotechnology as a solution for what they're trying to do.

Erum Yes, absolutely. Can't wait for those. Thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us. We love to talk to you guys. Our contact information is in the show notes. And don't forget to subscribe to our Substack so you get that dose of Grow Everything in your inbox.

Erum So let's grow.

Karl Let's grow. Thank you.