Getting Up to Speed

In more ways than one

The last few weeks have been about a lot of figuring-it-out, coupled with some really bad breakdowns (I am super grateful to everyone who held the space for me to feel what I feel, and gently nudged me forward). That’s also why you haven’t heard from me in a while.

Here are a few nuggets of wisdom I have gained in the last month, which might be of value to folks building in biotech (and hardware in general):

1. Procurements are a challenge to crack, but they could evolve into moats
   
   Given that we are building at the intersection of molecular biology, protein engineering, and electronics hardware it is often challenging to identify the right vendors (there is no Amazon equivalent for this), negotiate the best prices and figure out import (as and when needed).
   

   We have reached out to dozens of of niche vendors over the last month and a half in India and beyond. Some of them ghosted us, we rejected some, we are in talks with the rest to finalize. This takes up a significant amount of time for an early stage hardware team - and it’s super useful to account for these in timelines.
   
   The flip-side is also that once we have identified and locked in a vendor for certain components at a specific price, it’s not easy for a new player in the market to come and crack this in a day. They will have to spend time doing a similar exercise increasing their barriers to entry.

2. Raising money and money hitting the bank are two separate processes
   
   Even if you have raised money and have a decent runway, not having money in the bank for immediate access is anxiety-inducing. And this is partly also a function of setting up bank accounts, figuring out the right documents and getting the right approvals from relevant ministries. I am not sure if much can be done when you are in the early stages (where setting up structures or hiring a company secretary before having raised the first round of capital isn’t the most economical option either), but just putting it out here as something to brace oneself for.
   

3. My wellbeing as a founder is super important.
   
   Sounds fairly obvious at the surface, but not easy when you are so obsessed with building the world’s best company. You want to sit up late at night reading research papers or doing cost benefit analysis on quotes, a lot of screen time figuring out and reaching out to potential customers and sometimes 5 hour long calls with your best friend if you are super burnt out by everything else (and ironically this phone call burns you out even more, regardless of how fun it is). And being sick (tired, on medication) for almost an entire month was a massive wake up call.
   
   I have figured out that this is not going to sustain me in the long haul and am actively trying to inculcate decisions that enable (because we don’t necessarily get into the rut of wanting to maximize everything) wellbeing. Daily morning exercise routine, fixed sleep times (as much as possible and forgiving myself on days I don’t stick to it), fortnightly therapy sessions and some occasional breaks - I am setting myself up on a consistent path to healing.
   
   That’s it - I have gotten you up to speed on what we are up to. It’s a steep learning curve but we are also having fun figuring it out.

Image Description: A random AI generated image for ‘getting up to speed’, which also symbolizes the rocky ride of the last few months

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Now that we have landed on speed (albeit in a metaphorical sense), I thought I should address a question that many of you have been asking me.

DNA is just a long-term storage system and nothing more, right?

Can bio driven storage ever get to the same speed as the hard drives and SSDs we have?

I understand why you ask these questions - it takes you many hours to get a blood test report (the fastest in Bangalore is 6 hours); biology lab experiments still take 24-36 hours (or more) of manual monitoring and it’s crazy hard to trouble shoot without redoing experiments from scratch; it still takes a few hours on the best sequencers (aka biomolecule reader) to read a terabyte worth of data. These are your experiences with macro-level biological systems, and they seem incredibly slow and inefficient.

And yet these are bad approximations for the speeds and energy consumption of biological systems at the micro and nano levels. For instance ATP synthase, the enzyme inside mitochondria that produces the energy currency of cells spins at a rate of 4.2 million revolutions per minute¹, faster than the spinning speeds of components in a jet engine².

Image Description: ATP synthase³

This is a cool example, but these kinds of speeds extend to processes outside of cells as well. In case of solid state nanopore sequencing (a fancy way of talking about a nano-sized hole in a non-biological origin material like silicon nitride), DNA molecules tend to pass through the pores at microsecond speeds and the montage of noises makes it really hard to get good signal resolutions, as we don’t have hardware that can filter out thermal, ionic and capacitive noises that tend to become significant at nano scales. And this is a bottleneck to faster read speeds.

Image Description: Solid State Nanopores schematic⁴

But solving for signal to noise ratios at the nano level can be beneficial for applications beyond the realm of BioCompute - in applications ranging from quantum computing to space exploration.

TLDR: Biological systems are not always inherently the limiting factor in terms of speed. Being able to identify and replicate cellular level speeds outside cells, and building hardware to read into data at these speeds is the ultimate frontier for bio-based computation. And that’s where we are headed as a company, and as a species.

1. Stochastic High-speed Rotation of Escherichia coli ATP Synthase F₁ Sector
https://www.jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(19)48394-4/fulltext

2. Cells are very fast and crowded places, Ken Shiriff’s Blog
https://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowded-places.html

3. https://pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/72

4. Solid-state nanopores and nanopore arrays optimized for optical detection
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/nr/c4nr00305e