Reshma Shetty Speaks at Y Combinator's Female Founders Conference 2016

TL;DR

Reshma Shetty, cofounder of Ginkgo BioWorks, describes founding the company on a mission to "make biology easier to engineer" rather than starting with a product or technology. They bootstrapped by living cheap, buying secondhand equipment from bankrupt biotech companies, and spent five years iterating on business hypotheses using the scientific method until they found product-market fit in cultur

Key insights

• Biology is the most powerful manufacturing platform on the planet: it self-replicates, self-repairs, self-assembles with nanometer precision.
• The first step in starting a company should be defining a mission (a core compass), not inventing technology, building a prototype, or raising money.
• Living cheap is the single best qualification for starting a company, because it allows founders to survive on minimal revenue while iterating.