Tim O’Reilly on what companies should be doing during these dark economic days: “Work on stuff that matters“. Of course, this is probably good advice regardless of the economic outlook. Tim talks about “[sensing] a storm coming” and we may actually be entering storm season with an uncertain energy future, an ever increasing world population [...]

There’s been some buzz over the past few months about how to use government funding to kickstart your new business.  Forbes had an article about MIT spin-out IntAct Labs getting some money from NASA and the Department of Agriculture.  There was also an MIT Enterprise Forum on the topic.  It makes sense … non-diluting capital [...]

Recently the Ginkgo team had the pleasure of paying a visit to NEB in Ipswich, MA, and Reshma gave a talk on some of our past and current work. For those of you who’ve never heard of NEB (impossible if you’re a biologist, quite likely if you’re anything else), NEB was started in the mid-1970s [...]

Ginkgo BioWorks and co-founder Reshma Shetty profiled in Forbes Magazine as part of the DIY technology movement.

One of the projects that inspired us to start Ginkgo was working together as advisers to the 2006 MIT iGEM team. iGEM is the international genetically engineered machines competition and it challenges teams of undergrads to spend the summer competing to engineer the coolest biological system. If you haven’t done much molecular biology you might [...]

The sight of humans riding on horseback for the first time must have been a startling sight for onlookers. One wonders what those onlookers made of the event. An objective observer might have noted that the harnessing of a natural organism for personal transport was a major step forward for our species. A forward-looking observer [...]

We’ve learnt a lot while reading the 37signals blog, both about building a great company and also about having a blog worth subscribing to.  So, taking inspiration from Signal vs. Noise, we’ll share things we learn along the way about starting a company.  We hope these tips will be of some use to other start-ups, [...]

So far this summer we’ve had plenty of long days but few lazy ones. This is particularly true for one of our founders, Austin Che, who is defending his PhD thesis today at MIT. Austin has been doing some very exciting work to engineer ribozymes that can be reliably used in genetic circuits. He’ll also [...]

Ok, late post here (must get better at blogging). Reshma and Barry recently attended Foo Camp in Sebastopol, CA. We had a fantastic time, even the grass we camped on was super soft! We met a very interesting group of people and got a great reception for Ginkgo. We led two sessions. The first was [...]

Welcome to the Ginkgo BioWorks blog.  We’re going to use it to talk about what we’re doing and what other cool things are happening in Synthetic Biology, especially under-reported stories.  In the spirit of “release early, release often” you may see this blog change a bit in the near future but we have stuff to [...]