
Ginkgo Bioworks: Organism Engineering at Scale - apsec112
https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/our-platform/
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xvilka
Reminds me of the cloud laboratories like Transcriptic[1], Emerald Cloud
Lab[2], DeskGen[3]. Ginko seems similar, but for a synthetic biology.

[1] [https://www.transcriptic.com/](https://www.transcriptic.com/)

[2] [https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/](https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/)

[3] [https://www.deskgen.com/landing/](https://www.deskgen.com/landing/)

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g82918
The subtitle gives away the issue. They make biology easier to scale. The one
and only one way to do that is to reduce complexity. They have some method
that works in a restricted case. That is the benefit and deficit of using the
platform. From working on flow cytometry software for >3 years I can say that
has to be the case.

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kayhi
What's the revenue of Ginko? It seems like it's a platform in need of users
that can create commercial value and they're unable to do it themselves.

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wiredearp
Ginkgo's CEO explains in some interview [1] how they seek to become co-owners
in the companies they involve with since apparently they are well funded for
now.

"You’re a big company, and you have an idea for what you’d like a cell to do.
You come to us, and we agree on the spec. We program the cell to do it. We
give you that cell app. That’s our product. It’s essentially an intellectual-
property license. We’ve written a piece of custom software for you, except
it’s a custom genome inside a cell. You then take that back and build a
business around it. The key is: I need to get a piece of that. It could be a
royalty or - we just announced a partnership with Y Combinator - we can take
equity in companies that are building on top of our platform. We want to make
it so that everybody uses our platform to program cells. It’s much cheaper
than it’s been historically. You want to start a biotech company? You’ve got
to build a lab. You’ve got to get equipment. You’ve got to get all the lab
materials. All these things are an enormous upfront expense, and it really
limits innovation. So what we’re saying to the Y Combinator companies is: Just
use our platform. We’ve already built all that. We have that huge fixed cost,
and you get a low marginal cost. And I will program that cell for you in
exchange for a chunk of your company. That’s the deal."

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-06/ginkgo-
bi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-06/ginkgo-bioworks-ceo-
wants-biology-to-manufacture-physical-goods)

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echelon
Imagine if tech worked that way. If you had to give up some % of your company
to rent a server.

Wow.

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bsenftner
In the early 2000's I was seeking to license some ML software that performed
3D reconstruction, similar to photogrammetry, but specific to being accurate
for 3D versions of people. In the forensics and medical fields there are
companies creating these types of trained algorithms for their industry's
needs, and the quality of what they produce is acceptable as a starting point
to create a 3D model of an person that looks like the real person. However,
every single company I located providing any useful piece of software wanted a
piece of my company, or they wanted a revenue share of anything my company
sold. I found outside of "traditional software" there is another software
industry where the developers are integrating themselves into industries as
key suppliers, never selling their (surprisingly simple and basic) software,
but licensing to companies that pay them for every single use - as if the
software were a person being paid for every use.

