21. The Venn Diagram of Climate and Biology is a Circle: Kristin Ellis of Lowercarbon Capital

[00:00:00] Speaker: Food is medicine, and many of the things the biotech and synbio categories have to offer is also an important category of science that needs to come together and hold hands

[00:00:13] Speaker 2: Hi, Iram. How are you doing today?

[00:00:14] Speaker 3: I'm doing well. How are you, Carl?

[00:00:16] Speaker 2: I'm pretty good. You had a very busy weekend hanging out with your friends.

[00:00:20] Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. It's the time of year, and now that it's spring, and I feel like we're getting back to socializing pre-COVID levels Now people are like, "All right. Let's go back to the way things were."

[00:00:31] Speaker 3: And so I feel like it's there. I had, like, events every single day of the weekend, so from Friday evening to Sunday, and it was cool. Because new friends that I've been meeting, and some of my older friends, and usually we just talk about what's going on in Brooklyn, and our kids, and other things. But we actually had some time to talk about what we do, and I was telling them that I work in biotech, and what's been going on, and all of the companies that we're meeting.

[00:00:52] Speaker 3: And they're, like, very excited. There's a company that makes premium leather out of food waste using microbes. They're like, "Wait, what?" Like, "How does that even work?" And they didn't even know that some of the stuff was possible. And I did meet one person, though, who knew a lot about biotech because they work at Netflix, and they worked on the Unstable show.

[00:01:13] Speaker 3: And it was really exciting to talk to her. And she said, "Oh, you should be an advisor for Unstable." I'm like, "Who do I talk to?" So, yeah- Yeah. Who do we

[00:01:21] Speaker 2: talk to? We're down with that idea. Yeah.

[00:01:24] Speaker 3: Yeah, I think she works for, like, really on the production side more on the operations, so she's not really into the content part of things.

[00:01:30] Speaker 3: But that would be awesome to work with Rob Lowe and John Owen Lowe, his son. Just because they did film one season, filming a second season is still up in the air. They need to see how viewers receive Unstable. I think they did a good job, again, mixing science and comedy and relationships. So hopefully it pulled on the heartstrings and the mind strings of viewers that there'll be a second season.

[00:01:54] Speaker 3: So-

[00:01:54] Speaker 2: Yeah ...

[00:01:55] Speaker 3: if you haven't watched it, watch it so we can get the ratings up so there could be a second season.

[00:01:58] Speaker 2: Yeah, there was, there was enough open loops to definitely have a second season. And, uh, I said I was gonna tweet this, but I haven't tweeted it yet. But Thomas Middleditch, the fictional CEO of Pied Piper on Silicon Valley, is gonna be speaking at this year's SynBio Beta.

[00:02:14] Speaker 2: So we need Rob Lowe's publicist to get their act together and get him on the biotech circuit now that he's played a biotech CEO. That'd be awesome. You also told me that you noticed that Miss Maisel has some biotech in it, and I ended up watching the beginning of Extrapolations. Why don't we talk about those before we get into some real science?

[00:02:35] Speaker 3: Yeah. It's been really exciting to see biotech in the mainstream, and especially n- now that we're talking about it, I'm sure more of our listeners will now see biotech in the mainstream. But yeah, Miss Maisel, the opening scene, it's set in the future. Miss Maisel is based in the '60s, so the opening scene for this new season is based in the '80s.

[00:02:53] Speaker 3: And there's a character who is a scientist who is in therapy but is going through this calculation for, it sounds like genetic engineering. But it was really cool. That was the opening scene. It was a really popular character. I don't want to give anything away, but it's cool to see that. And I'm sure people are like, "What is she really talking about?"

[00:03:13] Speaker 3: It was a very good scene. She was very heated about it, and made it seem like she had a breakthrough. But I didn't go down the rabbit hole of what she was talking about, but I hope others do.

[00:03:21] Speaker 2: Yeah. And, and then I watched the first couple episodes of Extrapolations on Apple TV. So Extrapolations tells the future of the heated planet.

[00:03:31] Speaker 2: I would actually put it in the disaster porn category. It's pretty depressing. The first episode, the world is basically on fire. There's a huge debate going on about who gets water desalination technologies and who gets to mine the bottom of the ocean. And then the second episode has a couple of biotech companies who are competing to save genomes of mammals that are going extinct.

[00:03:55] Speaker 2: So it's pretty depressing. I'd like to think we could do better than that, and I feel like we need more positive biotech stories. I'm not sure that particular story is positive. There are some very funny positive things going on in Unstable, but I didn't see it in Extrapolations, and I'm only two episodes in, and it's the kind of show that is very hard for me to watch just because I don't really like watching reality unfold that way.

[00:04:17] Speaker 2: I've read enough bad science fiction and- ... feel like we've been set up for the disasters that are in front of us. I want to see more positive solar punk worlds presented in the media.

[00:04:27] Speaker 3: I hear you. So everyone was telling me, a lot of the scientists and people in our circle, they were telling me to watch The Last of Us, and I watched the first episode and I just couldn't, I couldn't watch the second episode.

[00:04:39] Speaker 3: It's not reality. Sometimes when I'm wa- watching the news and I'm like, "Oh man, this is tough," because that's reality. Yeah. But it's like science fiction and making that really sad and depressing, I'm not gonna opt in to watch that. I do need to know what's going on in reality and see if there's anything I can do to help people in the real world, but not in the fake world.

[00:04:58] Speaker 3: I'm not into that. pass.

[00:05:00] Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was having a conversation with a guy at my office yesterday, and we somehow got on this topic of disaster literature, disaster news. The news is definitely driven by clickbait headlines. And during the course of the conversation, I realized that we work with a lot of people, or know a lot of people, and have featured a lot of people on this podcast that are really making a difference when it comes to changing the planet for the better.

[00:05:24] Speaker 2: Just think about some of the people who've been on here. We've had C16, who is focused on saving the rainforest with their palmless product. Charles of CheckerSpot is creating alternative oils using microalgae, and they're able to replace many classic products. Elliott of Spira is using algae to produce dyes.

[00:05:44] Speaker 2: Again, it's a fossil fuel replacement product. We've got other episodes coming up that, for example, we're gonna have K18 with Suveen Sahib, the CEO and founder on. And they spent 10 years engineering this protein that basically changes haircare, and you no longer need as many products. But they're addressing this idea of shipping water around the world.

[00:06:05] Speaker 2: So there's a lot of good stuff going on. I say it often, we need every solution everywhere all at once, and I think people understand that. I spent part of my weekend getting ready for a talk I gave to a bunch of hairstylists, and they asked a lot of really hard questions. And so I was very excited about that, because I'm just happy to go out and talk to people who don't know anything or very little about biotech, and show them all the positive things that people in this space are working on.

[00:06:31] Speaker 2: So with that- Yeah ... why don't we, why don't we talk a little bit about the skin microbiome?

[00:06:35] Speaker 3: Another breakthrough that I came across in the biotech space is that there is- A team from the National Human Genome Research Institute that have discovered a way to engineer bacteria on our skin to fight cancer, and they've done it in mice, and now human trials are coming.

[00:06:54] Speaker 3: So that's really fascinating because when I think of the skin microbiome, I think of all these different bacteria, archaea, protozoa, all these different microorganisms that are living in an ecosystem, and they are already protecting us from dirt and healing us, and they have a lot of functionality. But now we have the tools to arm them with even more fighting power, and to arm them with the tools to fight cancer is just mind-boggling.

[00:07:25] Speaker 3: And we're just talking about the skin microbiome. The skin microbiome is very different and vast, just like the Earth is. You have deserts. You have moist areas like under your armpits. Like, you have different types of ecosystems, which means that you have different types of bacteria, and it's just fascinating to be able to coordinate a type of functionality.

[00:07:46] Speaker 3: That's why I'm thinking of this, like, army, um, analogy, 'cause you have multiple organisms working together to accomplish a mission, and I think that's really fascinating. And more people are working on the biome. I know that our friends at- K18 just signed a deal with Hello Biome. Do you know more about that?

[00:08:05] Speaker 2: Well, the K18 Hello Biome deal, we'll have Sabine talk about that when he comes on the pod. But basically, the idea is to, again, better understand the skin microbiome and the scalp microbiome. Since K18 is a haircare product, being able to better understand your hair microbiome makes a lot of sense. What most people don't know, number one, most people don't realize you've got this enormous ecology or this enormous ecosystem on your skin, and that lives on your scalp.

[00:08:31] Speaker 2: And probably have had the experience of over-washing your hair, your hair gets really dry. Every time you wash your hair, depending on the shampoo or the soap that you're using, you're stripping away these natural lipids, this grease that your body produces to protect your scalp- Mm-hmm ... produce your hair.

[00:08:47] Speaker 2: And that grease is something that these microbes and archaea and fungi that live in your head, they all live on that and they help keep you healthy. And when those things are out of whack, whether it's through food or environment or chemical services, like dyes or relaxing, any of those kind of things can throw off the microbiome.

[00:09:05] Speaker 2: So I'm sure that K18 and Hello Biome are working together to better understand those things so they, they can develop products that are gentler, that maybe promote the growth of the microbiome. I know that Jasmina, her first company was a microbiome skin product, which you talked about, that you would use, which was different because you had to refrigerate it.

[00:09:26] Speaker 2: But again, it's all about keeping this environment healthy, and our ability to keep our own environment healthy is really... should be a reflection of how do we keep the global environment healthy, which we need to do.

[00:09:37] Speaker 3: Yeah. Wow. Sing it, brother. That was great. I feel like there should be a cartoon about microbiomes, like the different microbiomes on our bodies, because when I think of the scalp microbiome, I think of a forest, like the hair on our scalp and, like, it's like a forest ecosystem.

[00:09:54] Speaker 3: And then, like, our armpits are kind of moist, maybe more of a rainforest, swamp area. And then, like, there's patches on, at least on my skin, on my arms that are very dry, I think it's 'cause of eczema, so it's more a desert area. And then, like, in our eyes, like maybe a little bit of an oasis because you have some, like eyelashes We need-

[00:10:13] Speaker 3: that's hair.

[00:10:13] Speaker 2: We need to do a kids book that is all about the different bacteria on the different parts of our body.

[00:10:20] Speaker 3: Absolutely. I think we should because I did just get some kids books for my son, and it's quantum physics for babies.

[00:10:26] Speaker 2: I love

[00:10:26] Speaker 3: that. Um, but there's, like, nothing in biology, and that's what I was looking for.

[00:10:29] Speaker 3: I really didn't see anything. I saw stuff for more like third graders or fourth graders, but nothing, like, really early. And then Ed was telling me that he asked ChatGPT to create the ideal curriculum from toddler age till to 18 years old, and spit out this whole curriculum. And they're saying to introduce robotics and AI at the age of three or four, because the way that kids are developing their minds.

[00:10:54] Speaker 3: They'd be able to make sense of it. I know that there's like coding, like toys and books for young kids.

[00:10:59] Speaker 2: Coding camps that, yeah- Yeah ... there's coding camps as well.

[00:11:02] Speaker 3: To help them think of logic.

[00:11:03] Speaker 2: The same thing should exist for biology or biotechnology. Oh, yeah. And at some point we'll talk about the famous Dyson essay that talks about what happens when biotechnology's completely domesticated, and it- he's t- talks about children playing with seeds and growing different things and like contests, and it's just a fun thought exercise.

[00:11:23] Speaker 2: Let's get into our podcast. I'm excited to have Ally Wing. She's the CEO of Oubli. Oubli is a company that is developing sweet proteins. You may not know what sweet proteins are, but they're an alternative to sugar. When they are digested by the body, they're like a protein in that they don't cause an impact on your glycemic index.

[00:11:43] Speaker 2: I don't completely understand all of that, but I do appreciate that there is a market for these, and you and I have tried the Oubli chocolate, which I quite enjoyed. It's very chocolatey and the sweetness is very subtle, which is something I appreciate in chocolate.

[00:11:57] Speaker 3: There is a whole Cambrian explosion of food ingredients that are coming out, and Ally and Oubli are leading the way, so I'm excited for our audience to hear about it

[00:12:10] Speaker 2: Hey, Ali. Thanks for joining us today. I'm so excited to have you here.

[00:12:14] Speaker: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here as well.

[00:12:16] Speaker 2: We were very excited to speak to you because you have a very interesting background, a lot in consumer, which is different from m- many of the people that we've spoken to, and now you're doing a kind of consumer product ingredient company that is rooted in biotech.

[00:12:33] Speaker 2: And I was wondering if you could tell us about the company, it's called Oobli, and how you came together.

[00:12:37] Speaker: Yeah, Oobli's awesome company to talk about, so I'm excited to tell you about it today. Our tech platform is what you said. We're definitely synbio and we're a precision fermentation platform. And we are working on this category of proteins called sweet proteins.

[00:12:52] Speaker: But the what and the why is where I get really excited, which is Oobli sweet proteins have the potential to help us rehabilitate the way we use sugar in our foods today. And in that is a huge opportunity, not just hopefully for better-tasting options for cutting back sugar, because none of us are particularly happy with the choices we have, but also a game changer for our health and our bodies, and a planet-friendly way, like most fermentation, which is one of the things I'm so excited about partnering with biotech as part of this.

[00:13:21] Speaker 3: Awesome. So what exactly is a sweet protein?

[00:13:25] Speaker: I'm gonna give a little bit of history. And I always say we have to remind ourselves, especially for the non-biochemists, back to Biology 101 a little bit. But I'll start with history to give you that context. Sweet proteins were found in fruits and berries, um, largely considered by scientists as probably having evolved with humans.

[00:13:43] Speaker: So they're in places like West Africa and Southeast Asia, and we've known about them for about 20 years academically. And we know today there's a dozen to 18, and I say that with a big band because we're not quite sure which are separate species versus related, but species of them today. And what we know about them is they were plants and berries that were growing in precious ecosystems, type of places we don't need to take more things from or certainly we don't want to go try to mimic to actually agriculturally harvest.

[00:14:13] Speaker: And they were dying because they weren't being attractive enough to the apes and gorillas that were necessary to come eat them and spread their seed. And so they biologically got busy figuring out their solution, and their solution was, "It's too expensive for me to carry carbohydrates and be sweet and attractive, but I figured out I could produce this one tiny little protein much more calorically efficient to me as a plant than what would be required to carry more green in this ecosystem."

[00:14:38] Speaker: And that actual protein tricks only apes, gorillas, and humans, um, T1 and R1 taste receptors, which is where we experience sweet in our mouth. But like any other protein, once you swallow it, it unfolds and digests just like any other protein. And so the history is sweet proteins came out of these plants and berries.

[00:14:56] Speaker: We've known about them, but only until precision fermentation, so post-CRISPR era, have we really been able to produce any and start to understand how you could use them. Because again, like I said, they'd be an agricultural nightmare for the planet, last thing we'd probably want to advocate. But yet they may be that perfect unlock that we need for humans today, where we have a diet that's recklessly abundant with sugar, and we certainly like it, we're biologically designed to crave it, but it's probably not in the ideal ratios.

[00:15:23] Speaker: We certainly know that from our health data in our bodies today.

[00:15:26] Speaker 2: For listeners who don't know the difference between a sweet protein and sugar, what is the difference? Why is this so interesting to have a protein that- tricks you to think it's sweet versus just pouring sugar on whatever food you're eating.

[00:15:40] Speaker: This is great. This gets us back to science class, right? The biology 101 from the history is that sugar today, sugar cane, any sugar form and sugar alternatives today that you know in the market are all small molecules, and a protein is a large molecule. So fundamentally, you can think of it as draw a line through.

[00:15:57] Speaker: Doesn't matter if you're asking me about sugar cane or natural or artificial or alcohols, any type of sugar alternative today, they're small molecules. And how are small molecules different than large molecules? They're very different in how our body handles them. And I'll remind us all from our early biology classes that 50% of our bodies are made up of protein.

[00:16:14] Speaker: Our bodies are really good at protein. We're really good at ripping it up. We know how to turn it into energy. Small molecules, which have history of been in our planet and our system forever, and some have been made, go through your system differently. And with sugars, they immediately hit your bloodstream right when they hit your mouth, so that immediate sugar, we love the hit, right?

[00:16:31] Speaker: But they're also interacting with our glycemic index all the way through your intestine, or all the way through your digestive tract, and they are then ending up in your gut microbiome. And depending on the different types of sugars, that has different implications, all of which are the conversations that are happening around sugar and sugar alternatives.

[00:16:46] Speaker: I'm super excited there's an innovation happening over there, but I'm even more excited about discovering innovation in proteins because, frankly, it takes all of that out of the equation. When you eat something that's sweetened with a sweet protein, it doesn't hit your bloodstream right away. It actually binds with your taste receptors.

[00:17:00] Speaker: There's about a one-second delay, and this is one of the reasons why we get to formulating with some sugar usually. And then the moment you swallow, it unfolds, and it moves through your digestive system just like any protein, which means it doesn't have a glycemic interaction, and it doesn't affect your gut microbiome, and it's super digestible, and that's what we're excited about.

[00:17:18] Speaker: None that goes without saying, those are at the heart of what we know are the big macro health issues, not just facing North America, but we've done a good job making that a modern food system issue in most of the world. Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, we all are in the 30 to 40% pre-diabetic to obese rates.

[00:17:39] Speaker: And even countries that we think of as super healthy, like I always think of the Japanese diet, even they're tipping close to 20% in pre-diabetic today. So it's really just a modern food system dilemma that our bodies weren't equipped for.

[00:17:50] Speaker 3: Yeah. People love sugar. It's everywhere. It's cheap. It's in lots of different products.

[00:17:55] Speaker 3: But Huble has decided to create a chocolate. So why did you guys decide to make a chocolate first as a sweet product?

[00:18:03] Speaker: I'll back up and say sweet proteins can work in any type of food category where there's sugar, and where sugar's playing a role of sweetness, right? Sugar also has many other roles, like- functional roles.

[00:18:13] Speaker: And chocolate was a lot to do with just time of year. We knew that we would be getting our regulatory approval sometime between Christmas and Valentine's, and we were very busy building what it- we're about to launch, you're gonna see coming out in about a month, is our sweet tea line. But we also knew that wouldn't be great for the holidays.

[00:18:31] Speaker: So we decided there's so much demand around the conversation in sweets, it's pretty obvious to talk about sweets when you talk about chocolate. So we thought, let's do a chocolate run, and let's introduce sweet proteins to the world around the holidays where we eat a lot of sweets. So that was really the inspiration for chocolate first.

[00:18:48] Speaker 2: And what kind of parameters did you guys have to test to get the chocolate right? It's not just chocolate plus your sweet protein that you taste. We got your chocolate bars. Oh, true tasted them, we unboxed them, they were delicious. What was it that went into making that product?

[00:19:06] Speaker: We do a lot of testing across every food and across every protein, and each protein, by the way, is a little different too.

[00:19:12] Speaker: We just is just working with our first protein through regulatory, and in some ways chocolate's one of the harder ones because a typical chocolate bar, 50% of the weight of that chocolate bar is typically sugar, just the function of sugar, forget sweetness. So you'll notice in our chocolate bar that we, we traded that out with acacia fiber, and we have a fiber in- loaded, if you will, chocolate bar that actually works as the bulk that normally sugar does.

[00:19:36] Speaker: And so when you're in something like drinks, where we really started, and honestly you'll just see the launch in a different sequence, but it's where we've probably spent more time, you actually get to the protein product matching faster because the only real role of sugar in drinks is sweetness, and so the rest is really water.

[00:19:53] Speaker: So if I give you an example, this is one of our favorite ones. If you take like an Orange Crush, and I'm not picking on any particular brand, just a 16-ounce colored soda, a typical one, very popular throughout the Midwest and South, is gonna be about 15 to 17 cubes of sugar in it, right? So that's just a visual that helps you see that stack.

[00:20:13] Speaker: With a drink like that, we can get rid of all those cubes of sugar with about .03 milligrams of a sweet protein and the rest is water. Mm. In something like chocolate we then also have to change, well, we took sugar out and it was also the bulking for the chocolate bar, and so in that case we had to put something in.

[00:20:28] Speaker: For our own products, we're very sensitive to a really clean label approach, and we're very sensitive as we're trying to put a spotlight on the role sweet proteins could play across foods, our own and others, in helping people tackle obesity and diabetes. We're very sensitive to not putting in bulking that would be a backdoor to diabetes.

[00:20:45] Speaker: So we were very intentional about our choices on our fiber bulking.

[00:20:48] Speaker 3: Wow, that's really interesting. One of the things when I was trying the chocolate and something that is like a experience of chocolate is the way it melts and the mouth feel, and we were actually on another podcast talking about fabrics and, like, the science of feel, and then Carl was mentioning there's also, like, mouth feel and how does that work.

[00:21:07] Speaker 3: And can you talk about how you guys approached the mouth feel? Is it with the fats and oils? How does that play a role in this, in their chocolate product?

[00:21:14] Speaker: It for sure does. In chocolate, and again, I should give credit where credit's due, we work with a really incredible confectionary expert who's part of the bigger Mattson development team who augments our food technologists who work and are experts in the science and the application of our proteins.

[00:21:33] Speaker: But in a case like chocolate, you don't go do chocolate without somebody who makes chocolate with you on that journey. So we brought on a really great guy from the Mattson development team who really did all of that tooling with us around our acacia fiber and what we use in the coconut butter, and the small amount of coconut sugar that we put in there is just to give that rounded feel that you felt in, hopefully, a creamy chocolate bar that tasted sweet- Yes

[00:21:57] Speaker: but it's 70% less sugar than a typical of a similar size chocolate bar.

[00:22:01] Speaker 2: Hearing you talk about the amount of the sweet protein that you have to use, it makes me think that you use much less, so when you're formulating any kind of food, it changes completely the way you formulate that. C- is that true? Can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:22:17] Speaker: It is true. So I'll back up and talk a little bit about drinks, not because I'm not excited about our chocolate, I am, but they're the good ends of the spectrum examples for you. Drinks, which is a big category for us because if you look at the global world problems, the biggest problem today in our daily added sugar is we're getting it through liquid form.

[00:22:33] Speaker: That's about 40% of the problem. And on that end of the spectrum, exactly what you just said, it's actually pretty easy because when you take out sugar, which is actually a lot of sugar, right, when you think of a stack of 15 cubes of sugar, and you put in only a few milligrams of something, the rest is just water.

[00:22:49] Speaker: So in drinks, it's actually very quick, and there's not much to it because that's the only role that the sugar is playing in that. In chocolate, yeah, it's a fine-tuned instrument which requires a confectionery expert partnered with our protein experts, because any confectionery expert isn't really familiar yet with working with only a few milligrams of this thing that's gonna sweeten it.

[00:23:12] Speaker: And so one of the challenges that I foresee as we go forward, and it's one of those that we lean into with excitement, is when we get to the point where we're not just doing this with our own products or partnering with somebody and very much have our technologists working with the food developers, how will we make this ultimately available to people to use?

[00:23:30] Speaker: We know there's a path to that. We haven't gotten to that yet. We're very busy, heads down, showing the first applications and getting through regulations, and we have a lot of ideas around that. But it's exactly to your point, because right now you need really a scientist product development expert with the category expert, because you do have to adjust for all of the tools and the volume differences.

[00:23:49] Speaker 3: It sounds like you've been in the biotech space for years. It sounds like it's been- ... quite a time, but you've had a varied career and now you are in the food space. What lessons have you learned from previous companies that you're bringing to biotech and food?

[00:24:03] Speaker: It's a great question. I wish- Jason, my co-founder and the CTO, were here, and he would answer that.

[00:24:09] Speaker: I'm gonna give his answer first. One, he said he would say I've earned an honorary degree at this point, but he would also say we're photo negatives of each other. I am to the consumer that he is to biotech, and that is actually a necessary combination if you're gonna innovate and disrupt in food tech specifically, not just biotech broadly, but if we're actually gonna make it something that's about consumer consumption, because it's as much about understanding the consumer.

[00:24:32] Speaker: My career from the outside in, I often get, "Oh, it looks varied." For me, it's a really logical path of having spent a whole career at the intersection of what I say healthy living with being disrupted by technology. I just happen to have now done it across five different industries, but the common theme is it's always consumer-centric.

[00:24:51] Speaker: My job is always to unlock the how do you get at what is driving the consumer behavior, and then how do you help facilitate growth to bring that innovation to bear. And now I have done it, everything from sporting goods to, to healthcare proper, to mental health, and now I'm in food tech. What's fun for me, and there are a few lessons that I bring from my past that are probably the most important.

[00:25:12] Speaker: One is I grew up or I cut my teeth in my first part of my career at Nike, which means I adore the relationship with the consumer. So at the end of the day, I don't believe you tell consumers things to do, and that's one of the greatest risk factors in biotechnology. You actually scientifically measure, listen, and follow what the consumer is looking for, and you solve for their need where they are.

[00:25:35] Speaker: And for me, I... That, that is great training and heritage that I got from the beginning. You also aren't afraid to build a relationship. I like to call it the woo with them, right? You can have some fun. People are people, and at the end of the day, how we make our choices, even if I haven't been in biotech before, I've been a consumer my whole life, and I choose food every single day of my life.

[00:25:56] Speaker: So how do I make those choices when I'm not a biotechnologist and I'm looking at one that happens to have been made out of biotechnology? Does it even matter to me, question mark? I don't think so. So starting from the consumer is my history and probably my greatest value. When I moved on from there and I started seeing it from different software and technology lenses, what I started to really realize too was this idea of measurement for fast failing.

[00:26:20] Speaker: And while I'm not a big believer in just this idea of measure and fail fast and pivot, because sometimes you actually have to nurture what you're figuring out, 'cause sometimes innovation takes a little bit more gardening, if you will, uh, than that, uh, I do think that understanding how to measure to understand what part of your thesis is wrong or right is really important early on, and being able to build those systems with agility is more complicated than most people realize.

[00:26:45] Speaker: And one of the things that I'm probably benefited the most by crossing industry experiences, 'cause I can bring the same tools to play in a new sandbox. And then I would say the third thing is, and this is really how I ended up here, our largest investor is Khosla Ventures. I have a lot of respect for Vinod Khosla, who- really thinks big in terms of decades and macro shifts.

[00:27:04] Speaker: And his number one rule for how are you gonna disrupt an industry is you're not gonna have it led by somebody who came from that industry, because it's really hard to be As willing to walk away from convention, you have to be willing to rip a lot of things apart. I always say you have to break eggs.

[00:27:20] Speaker: And some of that comes from having learned that pattern recognition by moving across industries, but not being wed to anyone so that you say you've always seen it done a few different ways. And that's an important philosophy that he has and that I share, and has led me to actually multiple of the types of moves that I've done.

[00:27:36] Speaker: So hopefully that's what comes to bear with this. And my particular point on that is that food tech in particular is a very baby industry. When you look at even the biggest companies in it today, and I have a ton of respect for brands like an Impossible Foods that have built branded equity within the category.

[00:27:54] Speaker: But even at the biggest size, they're not even billion-dollar companies yet. Most of them are half that size. And so if you look at that compared to any other industry, they're still tiny. We're still a really fledgling industry. And that's what I keep close when I look at sort of the challenges I get when I staff around me really expert people that come from food, and I keep pushing back on it, is the only probably guarantee of this industry is we don't exactly know its models yet.

[00:28:19] Speaker: So being comfortable with that is a really important part of how we approach problem-solving.

[00:28:24] Speaker 2: What you say about having a plan, a smart plan to fail fast and to really be consumer-centric, is a message that should resonate with a lot of the science founders that we talk to and deal with. We've been having a bit of a debate in terms of some of the ways people are talking about tech stacks and how they're being defined based on technology in, in the synbio space.

[00:28:48] Speaker 2: And I know for Yoram and I, one of the things we always say is, "Look, the biggest failing for any science-led company is focus too much on the tech and not focus enough on the consumer or the end user." And that's something that over and over again, these science founders who we love and we work with a lot with, they need to just be taught that over and over again.

[00:29:07] Speaker 2: And that kind of allows me to ask you this question. When we talked to you before, you'd mentioned that you work from a playbook. What is that? Can you describe it? What's the one or two messages you would give from your playbook to other founders, especially technical science founders?

[00:29:20] Speaker: I always jokingly say to my own teams that the only guarantee of my plan or our plan, hopefully it's never my plan, is that it's wrong.

[00:29:27] Speaker: That's the only thing I can be sure of. And this is how I also try my hardest to build the bridges with my deeply tenured biochemists, right? As I always say, it's just like science . The only guarantee in that is there's a discovery process, right? And what we have to do is figure out what principles we're holding constant and measuring so that we can adjust quickly.

[00:29:47] Speaker: And so principle number one is this philosophy of if you're not failing at some of what you try, you're not moving fast enough or taking advantage of the single biggest asset you have as a disruptor. Because I'm never gonna out-muscle Nestle. I'm not gonna outperform them on their own game. I have to outperform on where my unique assets are, and one of those is my ability to take some swings.

[00:30:10] Speaker: to take some swings that aren't probably possible in those environments. So That I would say is playbook number one and philosophy number one. I would say two is when I look at the talent that I put around me, and again, reflective a little bit, I have to pay attention to the fact that I don't- I haven't been selling food for the last 25 years of my career, so I certainly have to build that within the team.

[00:30:31] Speaker: But I also go back to this idea that this industry is really nascent, and it's biotech, it's consumer products. Is it products or is it ingredients? So is it a B2B or a B2C? And then yet today, how do you build any brand? So in our case, I believe we're creating a branded category, the first ever to really go after introducing a novel protein that's sweet.

[00:30:50] Speaker: There's been a lot of sugar alternatives. I don't really want to be in that. I actually want to introduce to the consumer that you can do more with protein. And for a bunch of reasons, that's not only a new product, that's a product category that I have to build. So when I look at that, I'm also thinking a, a lot about how do I build the right biodiversity of this team?

[00:31:08] Speaker: Skills, differences, tenure, regionality, exposure, so that they have the right sort of inherent blend to accomplish that first part of this, which was to assume that a bunch of what we have is good ideas, but wrong. So then how do we create the environment or the skills at the table to then really attack that problem in the right way?

[00:31:30] Speaker: And it is not as traditional as a lot of people think. Like, I often will say sometime when people will look in and see some of who I've structured it, and it's one of the challenges. I'll go hire somebody out of the food industry. I need their type of expertise, and their head will hurt a little bit at a couple of the different types of ways we have things structured.

[00:31:47] Speaker: But I have to spend a lot of time saying, "Challenge it, but walk me through how you would do this differently at this stage of an organization where you actually don't know A, B, and C that you knew in that big company." And so you're always kind of thinking about it as the framework. And I would say that's probably my third biggest philosophy in my playbook is my job is never to be smarter than the team I built.

[00:32:06] Speaker: It's my job is to build a framework that enables us to then be the smart team, right? The sum is greater than its parts, and that's how we actually get at unlocking change.

[00:32:17] Speaker 3: That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. Clearly, you're an awesome leader, Ali. I

[00:32:21] Speaker: have fun with it. I like- Yeah ...

[00:32:22] Speaker 3: the work, so.

[00:32:24] Speaker 3: As it should be. You mentioned creating a new product category, so that would require a lot of education. I received the Oobli chocolates in the mail, and then it had a insert with a bit of an explanation. But can you tell us, like, how important is it for Oobli to be biotech forward, to even use that language, and what was your approach to educating the consumer about sweet proteins?

[00:32:44] Speaker: Being biotech forward is very important to how I get the resources necessary to do this disruption, but probably very unimportant to the consumer, is my fundamental hypothesis. But none of that means that I don't think education, and I could talk it at a lot of levels in a lot of different audiences, is gonna be a really important part of our journey.

[00:33:03] Speaker: I will tell you, if Jason were here, I want to give him this credit as the head of our technology. I feel like I'm really lucky because I came into this technology, this huge space that has all of these sort of triple- Winning characteristics. Pretty mature tech that we have spent a lot of time in the last year really de-risking.

[00:33:20] Speaker: I'm worried much more at night about how to get through to the clutter of the consumer in a way that they trust and that gives them way finding that you could generally say they've lost in all things sugar and labeling today. They don't know what to trust. They don't know how to follow it. They're all reporting, three-quarters of them report that they're actively working on sugar reduction.

[00:33:37] Speaker: You look at the last 10 years and their health results would say the opposite, right? So I don't think it's because people wake up to be jerks, and I don't think they're trying to tell us what they're not trying to do. They've lost their way finding. And so that to me is the much bigger part of this, and I don't think much of that has to do with biotech Now, it's not that Biodeck doesn't play a role, or maybe even fermentation specifically, it's just that it's down the funnel of conversations.

[00:34:01] Speaker: So one of the reasons why we start with protein and introduce protein is because the research would tell me that regardless of what somebody remembers about Biology 101, they actually trust proteins. Generally speaking, consumers trust proteins, and generally speaking, consumers are frustrated and not sure how to operate in sugar, right?

[00:34:20] Speaker: So bias number one is go where the research is, go where the consumer is. They trust it. It's a trusting place for us to create introduction, and what do I really care about in food? Get them to try it. Because if they try it and it's delicious, I can start talking about sweet proteins. How it's made will come farther down the chain for the consumer, and there's definitely time and thought into where we'll place that.

[00:34:41] Speaker: You'll see that in our long form blogs. You'll see that in the types of things we make available. So when the person makes the decision to start to understand it, they can go research and find it. But I doubt it's how I'm getting the initial introduction or I'm h- I'm getting the initial willingness to taste something.

[00:34:55] Speaker: That's not gonna be a consumer thing. Again- Mm-hmm ... super important in all of my investor worlds and in all of the industry because credibility is important. Having a health advisory board, we're in the middle of putting one together because we care so much about not just the planet piece of this, but also healthcare.

[00:35:10] Speaker: It's gonna be an important credibility piece in the long run, and there will be an audience for that content, and that will have to talk a lot about the intersection between this thing that came from nature and what we're doing with precision fermentation. But I welcome that, and those are not Twitter level conversations.

[00:35:25] Speaker: Those are much longer form conversations that we can have in a different format. That's not how most chocolate bars are picked today, or drinks, right? Yeah. Different forms, different mediums.

[00:35:34] Speaker 3: Yeah. You need- Yeah.

[00:35:35] Speaker 2: Okay ...

[00:35:35] Speaker 3: like 60 minutes or something like that- ... and explain it that way. Yeah. I guess just one follow-up question to that, though, is that when someone maybe at first glance sees sweet protein, they might think whey protein or they might associate proteins with like protein bars or something like that.

[00:35:49] Speaker 3: So really it's more like a differentiation. How are we gonna carve out that niche when someone just looks at a label on the shelf? Because you are on shelves. You're in a store in New York City- Yep ... which is really cool, but that's another part of the question that I'm just curious to get your thoughts on that.

[00:36:02] Speaker: You're right, and they do all of those things. They're also somebody who's already following a keto diet or protein loading is immediately saying, "How much more protein did it give me?" And it's a trace amount, because remember, it's 2,000 to 5,000 times sweeter, so it's a small amount. So yeah, there's things to debunk as you go through that path, but we're not calling it sweet protein chocolate bars.

[00:36:22] Speaker: We're calling it Oobli chocolate bars, and we're talking about the reasons you might want this chocolate bar, and then we introduce this really novel, exciting thing- For them to start to learn about called sweet proteins, and the journey starts. It doesn't stop there, it just starts. So we definitely have that.

[00:36:37] Speaker: I also, I love our retail partners, and it, we couldn't do this ultimately without having the omni-channel execution of this. But when you think about it, think about yourselves, how do you learn about new brands today, or how do you get introduced to it? Most of the time that's not on shelf. You might notice a new package, you might get introduced to things that catch your eye 'cause it's designed, but mostly today you've learned about it somehow reading it, and then you're gonna go actually look it up, and that's all digital.

[00:37:01] Speaker: So what we need to do is make that available in every place that somebody's gonna go look to say, "Can I believe this?" And, "What is this?" And, "What does it mean on protein loading?" And, "What does it mean it's whey?" And, "Does this replace a protein bar?" And we have all of those dialogues going on now, and hopefully we're starting to have the content to support when somebody's going to look for that, they get that answer.

[00:37:20] Speaker 2: You did this first product, which was a chocolate bar, and your next product is a sweet tea, and they're based around the sweet protein, which eventually it sounds like you will make that available as an ingredient. But let's imagine that you wanted to do some kind of Willy Wonka type golden ticket marketing campaign.

[00:37:38] Speaker 2: What would motivate that, and what would that look like? I'm imagining both of the movies of the waterfalls, of the chocolate, and all the misadventures the kids go through, but, like, your factory would look a lot different than that.

[00:37:49] Speaker: It sure would, wouldn't it? Keep in mind, we still make a chocolate bar. In many ways you could say we do manufacturing of the ingredient and we run manufacturing of the end product, so we still have the environment of conching chocolate and blending the ingredients and tempering for a mold, right?

[00:38:06] Speaker: So we could probably share some of that, but that would be after the magic came. So I think of it as, I'll go back to my Nike heritage and say think of it more like Nike Air, this magical thing that created the cushioning, but you fell in love with the shoe, and then you either thought it felt good or not, right?

[00:38:23] Speaker: But if you don't know the history of that air cushioning technology was the only thing that never got manufactured outside the US. That was always secret sauce for them and what brought it to life. And I bet we could survey 20 consumers through those eras, and one or two of them would know the story of that, and most wouldn't.

[00:38:41] Speaker: They would've just fallen in love with the cool, fallen in love with the fit, said it fit great, and at some point in time they might have even bragged to people about their new Nike Airs, but they wouldn't have known really the why. That's a little bit of the same for us.

[00:38:52] Speaker 3: Awesome. When it comes to synthetic biology and creating ingredients, and you have, again, a engineered organism that can really make different types of ingredients with different types of functionality, have you thought about- different types of sweet proteins with enhanced functionality or just in general looking at the space, is there a super ingredient that you would like to see hit the market?

[00:39:13] Speaker 3: Now we're visioneering here a little bit. I

[00:39:15] Speaker: can tell I'm talking to people in the science world. I always speak with my own team about this. We talk a lot about should there be other things, and I'm gonna answer your question because, yes, I have a couple wishlist items. But for our business, if I just think about how big in the world the role of sugar and sweets is, and I'm talking across 20 different species of plants, I'm already working on six different proteins, I've got to take every one individually through regulatory, and the magic starts to happen when I do the combinations of them.

[00:39:44] Speaker: That's actually when the magic really happens. I better not think about anything else for a while because that's a big sandbox. And so one of the things that I bring to this is let's keep the scientific inquiry on the roadmap for the solution that is the one we're trying to solve for consumers, and that will be focused on sweets for now.

[00:40:04] Speaker: All of that said, yes, because of that, sugar does play a lot of different roles. There are people innovating in some really interesting areas, but I'm looking for a silver bullet partner that can be that perfect bulking role, that can be the magic bullet for the other roles that sugar has traditionally played.

[00:40:21] Speaker: Because when we become a solution for the sweetness in any one, where it's more than just a sweetener role they're playing, we have to think about what we bring in now because we have to ultimately make a choice if it's our own products to add something, and any partners we work with will have to make that decision too.

[00:40:34] Speaker: So I would love to see some silver bullets there just because I will be the last person to ever say that the only culprit of diabetes and obesity is sugar. We just know it's a chief culprit. So if we're gonna tackle or bend this global health curve, we have to be conscious of there are more parts to it.

[00:40:50] Speaker: We can take a big swing at the sweetener piece of it.

[00:40:53] Speaker 2: You are working on multiple sweet proteins, and then that means that they are each could be used individually. But then y- it sounds like you're very excited about the potential of using them in combinations. Could you maybe- Yes ... talk a little bit about them?

[00:41:07] Speaker: I'm actively on our platform on about a half a dozen of them, and when I say active, it means I'm actively scaling up enough production to actually not only do product formulation to see does this give me additive solution to the problem I'm trying to solve for the consumer, which is what I do before we decide scale up and tighter and manufacturing optimization that everybody wants to talk about.

[00:41:28] Speaker: It's super important, but I first need to know does it solve a problem that we need to solve? So we're studying that, and we have identified six that do. And then we have to take every one through a regulatory process in every market we go in. There isn't a long history of documented usage, even though we know there's tribal usage, so it's pretty high toxicology standards, which we're happy to meet.

[00:41:47] Speaker: It's important. It's food supply. Yes, we're working on six, but I want to go to the part two of what you asked, which is why am I excited about many proteins, is because what we've learned about the proteins, we had a hypothesis. A year ago, if I were talking to you, I'd only be able to speak in hypothesis.

[00:42:01] Speaker: Now I'm actually producing enough of all six that I'm testing in products, and we've learned a couple things. What we knew before is that each protein was about the same, maybe 60% of their homology is the same and about 40% different. Okay? Roughly across the board And we knew the differences in that homology were things like it, one would be more soluble than another.

[00:42:20] Speaker: One could handle more heat stability than another. Maybe more pH affinities than another. So we knew there were some differences, and we assumed that grew out of where they were in the soil, the problem they were trying to solve, et cetera. We had a hypothesis that, wow, if they were all really trying to evolve to mimic a large primate's identity with the Gaussian curve of sugar, I bet when they're together they do a more complete solution.

[00:42:42] Speaker: And I can tell you that we have found that. So I view our standard as any one protein, we can reduce the sugar in the food without materially changing a taste profile by anywhere from 50 to 70%, depending on the food, with one protein. We can go maybe to 80 to 90 when we're starting to use combinations of proteins, and it's partly because we notice that they round out the Gaussian curve.

[00:43:05] Speaker: And so they each were a little better at some aspects of becoming the trickster protein or the trickster sugar, depending on how you like to say it, that they were. And so that's really exciting to me. Like, we're very excited about our multi-protein product patent filings and where we're focused on some of that innovation.

[00:43:21] Speaker: But that's farther ahead than where I can be commercially because of regulatory timelines by protein.

[00:43:26] Speaker 3: You mentioned that you guys are testing products all the time. Can you share, like, what other products you were testing in the lab? Is there a cake? Is there... What's-

[00:43:34] Speaker 2: Some previews.

[00:43:35] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:43:36] Speaker: Yeah. We have what we call our model food system, and we have seven broad categories.

[00:43:41] Speaker: We can't make everything, right? And my team is super talented, but we are making an MVP level of those products, right? We're not going out to make chocolate different than anybody ever make it. We'll go pick a chocolate and then MVP it, match it with our re-engineered approach or rehabilitated approach.

[00:43:57] Speaker: And then we'll work with a product development house to then go make a signature chocolate. But across that, we have about 18 foods, so everything from sauces to Confectionary well beyond chocolate to dairy categories to frozen, which you can imagine. We do have baked and drinks, of course. We've done seven different, uh, types of drinks, everything from functional sodas to sparkling juices to sweet teas, so we, we have quite a few.

[00:44:24] Speaker: The headline is we've generally not seen a food that we can't be a material part of the solution for, and with one protein, I would say I can always at least reduce it without changing taste profile by half. I get excited about that, but I actually wanna get to 80 or 90. And I'm not anti-sugar. I actually think sugar's kind of like fossil fuel.

[00:44:43] Speaker: It's super important in the world. None of us disagree with that. We just need to use it differently. So it's mission critical to any of us in fermentation, right? We couldn't live without it. But we can make it an input versus an output product and really change the equation and match it back to what our bodies are happiest with, which is the perfect marriage that we're trying to go after.

[00:45:01] Speaker: But we're very excited about our different products, and we are working, I know you asked me this earlier, I can't announce anything we're working, but we are working with others and their products, what you would say as an ingredient. I don't really think of us as an ingredient player today because I'm not just shipping my ingredient to anybody.

[00:45:18] Speaker: I'm co-developing with a couple partners that are much better than me in certain product categories and already have a ton of experience, why we're also doing our B2C products, and you'll see us announce some of those later this year.

[00:45:29] Speaker 2: That's fantastic, Aly. I am so excited for what you guys are doing.

[00:45:34] Speaker 2: You've said so many things that our audience will appreciate, especially, like, when we talk about tech founders and kinds of the things that you overcome in your playbook. But I'm curious, you are a consumer biotech company in- playing in the food space. What do you think that looks like in three to 10 years?

[00:45:50] Speaker 2: How will it be different? You guys are, of course, gonna be on the market taking massive market share. You're gonna be a wildly successful company. But what else do you see happening in the marketplace when it comes to consumer biotech?

[00:46:01] Speaker: Hopefully people like me won't be as rare in it. Hopefully they'll just as a woman, even 2% of the leaders, there will be a lot more.

[00:46:09] Speaker: But let's also just say there will be a lot from other industries that come into it because to solve in the way that meets the needs, it's going to be a collaboration of industries, and I would like to think that we're gonna see that evolve quite a bit in the next five to 10 years. I'm excited, having most recently come from healthcare tech, and part of what I did was really leave healthcare tech to get more preventative.

[00:46:31] Speaker: I wanted to get farther up the chain where I could affect consumers a little bit more. Is I also think that we're confronting by virtue of necessity in our numbers some s- very fundamental issues about can we keep this separation from food and healthcare the way we have for so long? And the rest of the world hasn't done it as much as North America has, but I think it's looking inescapable.

[00:46:53] Speaker: That's a dangerous path. And so it's complicated, right? We all know it's easier to do double-blind studies on pharmaceuticals than it is in food for all the host of reasons, and there's reasons why the scientific protocols have biased that separation over the years, but it's insufficient, right? It's not reason for us not to figure this out, and our statistics Especially in light of our investment in healthcare and our investments in health population and our actual reality of results, the gap is just too big.

[00:47:23] Speaker: I maybe say that part with mission because, gosh, I feel like I've been feeling that for 25 years. That's how I've spent my career focus. But for the first time, I actually see movement in those industries because you have a complete mandate to get at the cost structure in healthcare that isn't working when we are ignoring it for so long, and then just dealing with prevention, or dealing with treatment of problems and not getting at how to live healthy.

[00:47:47] Speaker: So again, I say this very carefully, 'cause I have a ton of respect for my Western and Eastern doctors and friends, but the US healthcare is more of a sick system than a healthcare system, and food is medicine. And many of the things that the biotech and synbio categories have to offer is also an important category of science that needs to come together and hold hands.

[00:48:06] Speaker: And that, to me, would be among the most exciting things we could see. And I, I take my biggest comfort in that. I have a 20-year-old son, and when I hang out with him, he's at UCLA, and his contemporaries, they're gonna expect it. It's insufficient for them to not connect those. And that's what I take the most comfort in, is it will ultimately get driven by demand, and we have a generation coming up that's gonna demand it.

[00:48:28] Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, as they are more educated. And what you mentioned, the food is medicine, now that's something that Carl and I do talk about often, something that's close to my heart. Unfortunately, my mom is diabetic, and you and I talked about this before. And we would sh- switch to sugar-free, which is all those alternative sugars, and they still had an effect on her body even though we didn't know it.

[00:48:48] Speaker 3: We assumed that it was safe, and it really wasn't. So there is that part of the story, and also people are discovering, like, things where it's, okay, turmeric has great benefits, and they'll be taking turmeric pills. I'm like, "Just eat curry." Just like eat turmeric normally. You don't have to pack it into a pill.

[00:49:05] Speaker 3: You're missing all the enjoyment of the flavor. So I totally hear you on that and that healthcare part. Carl and I both come from the healthcare world, too. But you did come into this biotech world, so we'll bring it back to that. And just curious, when you came into the space, did you have to read any books?

[00:49:22] Speaker 3: Did you read any sci-fi? Th- is there anything that inspired you? Just wrap your head around what's going on in biotech.

[00:49:29] Speaker: I've read everything that you can read that is about plant proteins, fermentation, and certainly sugar. And I don't think you could be a me, like the type of person that goes into innovate and moves industry, if you weren't a learner.

[00:49:41] Speaker: Like, I, I'm a avid reader, and I am an avid journey woman in terms of I'm always willing to be humbled and start to learn again. But I would be wrong to tell you that any one book. It's a composite. I... And I was reading about it quite a bit when I was in healthcare, saying- Where we're going, we have to get earlier on this journey of health and taking care of people.

[00:50:01] Speaker: So I read a lot even before I came here. It was part of what my thesis was in making this move. But I would be remiss if I didn't give huge credit to this incredible tech team I came and joined, who has also had to educate me, right? I have pipetted, you will be proud to know, and I have been working with our LCMS, and I am in the lab.

[00:50:21] Speaker: Two things really help, other than just curiosity and willingness to learn, right? One is I'm legally trained. I also have my law degree. And one of the things my partner and I realize, I've realized this a long time ago, but most engineers and I think very similarly. We process information in a very similar format.

[00:50:37] Speaker: So I think being legally trained was the way that I apply my learning skills to new data, and I've always been intrigued by different data sets. And that's a really great thing that comes out of legal training in terms of how you process information. It's very similar to engineering. And then second is that I was always oriented in all of my brand background.

[00:50:55] Speaker: Even in my MBA, I focused on data and decision sciences, so I did behavior-based marketing, very focused on what you could wrap data models on, build agile structures on, do measurement. And so I'm very math comfortable, and I'm very comfortable in the data world that surrounds biotech and the methodologies of that.

[00:51:17] Speaker: So I th- it helped a lot that my favorite courses were probably statistics growing up, right? Those are things that all really apply now. Some of that is affinity and probably why I've moved across. I always get partnered with technologists. Since I left Nike, I've been paired with technologists my whole career, and it's because of those two things that are probably the biggest things that contribute to that.

[00:51:36] Speaker: I make no bones about it. You wouldn't want me to actually do the strain engineering over here. I work with a great team, and any great team I've ever worked with, there are people here with skills that far exceed mine in a lot of different areas.

[00:51:47] Speaker 2: This has been such a great conversation, Ali. I'm curious, was there anything that we didn't ask you that you wish we would've talked about?

[00:51:55] Speaker: My one ooblee thing is that we didn't really talk about sustainability, which I actually relished that you didn't, we didn't spend much time talking about that. We're the perfect marriage of the best of nature and the best of science, which can together tackle climate change. And what I mean by that is we are using nature identical DNA, and we're very committed to that.

[00:52:14] Speaker: There are people designing proteins, and we probably need that work just as much. But when it comes to food, we're the consumers, they really like what's come out of nature, and there's a lot of good lessons still to be figured out from nature. But not all of them should be plucked and then turned into our own farm.

[00:52:29] Speaker: We're gonna have to produce them differently if we wanna preserve the planet, and that, to me, is this beautiful intersection of precision fermentation or fermentation, whatever we all call it today, blended with nature. And there's so much unlock in that that, for sure, what I think we'll see in the next five to 10 years, to your earlier question, is a lot more...

[00:52:47] Speaker: I don't know if consumers will understand it more, but fermentation will be all over our food supply. It just will. And it has been in parts for a long time, this is just a new chapter for it, and because of that, that's a big deal. So that would be my Oobli comment. I would tell you that I just finished, I don't know if I'm gonna say, pronounce his name correctly, but it's Safi Bahcall, Moonshots.

[00:53:07] Speaker: I don't know if you've read it. He's from biotech industry. He's a really cool founder. He struggled like any good entrepreneur and had losses in addition to the win. He got lucky enough to have the win, and talks about what that journey is. But what's really cool about what he wrote about in Moonshots, which is an innovation book, but it's different in a really important way.

[00:53:26] Speaker: He gets at the role that structure plays to breed culture, and how the structure drives culture to drive innovation, and how you have to phase structure as you innovate. And so it's a really cool book to challenge convention, which I'm always, as you can probably tell, willing to do that, but it's so great to hear somebody else almost build a framework for it.

[00:53:47] Speaker: And I hadn't read something that had taken on structure in quite the same way that he did, and I highly recommend it for entrepreneurs. It's not just smart, creative people that come together to build companies. You have to actually structure companies differently, and you have to be willing to keep restructuring them as you go through phases.

[00:54:03] Speaker: That would be it.

[00:54:04] Speaker 2: Amazing.

[00:54:04] Speaker 3: That's awesome. Cool. This is great. I'm gonna have to read that. So we'll definitely put Moonshots in our show notes for our listeners to read as well, and we can certainly talk about it. We have a, a book club for Marketing Lab. Great. We call it our culture club, for several reasons.

[00:54:19] Speaker 3: But, uh, we'll have to put that one on. We do a, sometimes like a sci-fi biotech book, and then we'll do like a business book as well. So we'll put that in the rotation.

[00:54:27] Speaker: This one I can say, it's definitely a business book, but he comes from biotech, so you'll appreciate that he has a very diverse set of examples running throughout his whole book.

[00:54:34] Speaker: It

[00:54:34] Speaker 2: sounds like a great book. And biotech will

[00:54:35] Speaker: appreciate it. Yeah.

[00:54:37] Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah, sounds great. Thank you, Ally, for taking the time to speak with us today. This was a great interview. Thank you. Lots of fun, lots of good stuff. I feel different from a lot of the ones we've done, but in such a good way.

[00:54:47] Speaker: Thank you.

[00:54:48] Speaker: I really appreciate the dialogue and the-

[00:54:54] Speaker 2: Ally Wing is a tremendous leader. I really enjoyed this podcast because she said a lot of things that I think biotech founders need to hear. What did you think, Hiram?

[00:55:05] Speaker 3: She's clearly a great leader. She has the expertise in terms of growing companies. If I were to go back to building a product company, I'd hope that Ally Wing would take me under her wing.

[00:55:17] Speaker 3: Sorry, that's my mom joke But she clearly is very excited about what she's doing. I think that she also posts a lot about her company on LinkedIn, so you can see the pride that she has of Oobli and what she's doing, and she has an amazing leadership ability, and I'm so happy that we got the chance to speak with her and share what she's doing with our audience.

[00:55:38] Speaker 2: Yeah. And she covered a lot. And one of the things that I appreciate that I hope that any Symbio founders who listen to this will appreciate is that she did talk about the technology, but she spent a lot of time talking about customer development. When she talked about her playbook is the classic customer development playbook.

[00:55:55] Speaker 2: And when people ask us what the biggest failure for a company is when it comes to marketing or communications, I always say it's talking about your technology. It's not about- Mm ... talking to your customer and understanding how you serve them. So there is a customer development methodology. I really enjoyed the way that Ally put it.

[00:56:16] Speaker 2: What was something that stood out for you, Irham?

[00:56:18] Speaker 3: I love the story about how sweet proteins evolved along early humans to interact with their taste receptors. She said that the sweet proteins only reacted with the receptors of apes, gorillas, and humans. So giraffes and zebras, they may not receive or taste the sweet proteins.

[00:56:37] Speaker 3: I thought that was really interesting because like sight and hearing, where different animals can detect different parts of the sound and visible spectrum, it makes it seem like there's a flavor spectrum, and humans can taste specific flavors versus animals. I believe that humans have 3,000 taste receptors.

[00:56:52] Speaker 3: I know, like, dogs have 1,700 receptors, and I only know that because I just looked it up. I'm not an expert in taste receptors. But it's interesting that how specific molecules can be designed to interact with different taste receptors, and that's, like, a very different way of looking at food. I know it's, like, very scientific.

[00:57:11] Speaker 3: I think most of food development or creating recipes is just people tasting food themselves and coming up with the recipes. But to look at it differently and see, like, maybe there's new flavors that we've never experienced, like, what are they? And I'm sure that even if you try foods from different cuisines, you'll taste food that you've never experienced before, which I highly recommend.

[00:57:31] Speaker 3: I do that all the time. But I love that. I love food, and I love the science aspect of it.

[00:57:35] Speaker 2: It reminds me of a couple things. One is she was very clear and reminded us that food tech is very new. And I'm in the process of writing a piece about molecule discovery engines, and some of it is about flavor, which is complicated.

[00:57:48] Speaker 2: But to me, what's even more complicated is texture and mouth feel and how food is designed to last under certain conditions. And it turns out that's a science that's called food rheology, as opposed to- Mm ... it's, which is a subset of food science. I also really enjoyed the fact that she's admitted she's always been a more consumer products person, and I really appreciate the partnership between that kind of person and a scientist because I think that convergence Different fields coming together is really the world that we live in, and we need a lot more of that right now.

[00:58:21] Speaker 2: I joke around, I've said it already, we need every solution everywhere all at once. That's gonna be my new mantra. Ally is doing that with her company, and she's thinking about how does she educate people. And not just one type of education, which is something I appreciate when companies do this, but also multiple levels of education.

[00:58:40] Speaker 2: So consumers who just wanna know what makes these things sweet, maybe fitness people who wanna understand the interactions of these proteins and their keto diet, and then scientists who are still unraveling and understanding where these sweet proteins come from. Cheers to Ally Wang. It was really great to have her on.

[00:58:56] Speaker 2: Would love to hear what our audience thinks about that interview.

[00:58:59] Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. And she has other products coming out. This is not the last we'll hear of Ally. I'm excited to have her on again and see how the company evolves and develops. So we'll bring her back on. We have a lot of content in the show notes, so please check that out for more information about Ally and Oobli.

[00:59:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, so thanks to all of you who listen. We appreciate your comments. We continue to grow the fastest growing biotech podcast on the planet. Leave us a comment, tell us what you like, tell us what we can do better. If you know someone who you believe should be on the podcast, let us know. We've got a lot of exciting episodes coming up.

[00:59:36] Speaker 2: Thank you for listening.

[00:59:37] Speaker 3: Bye-bye.