creating a new company inside a pandemic. a massachusetts lab that has fascinating science to help fight against coronavirus and the backyard -- between wasps and bees. silicon valley is taking side and arming the bees. this week on "press here." good morning. i'm scott mcgrew. 2020 has been pretty tough so far.

if there's anything that kind of went a little right, it's that the murder hornets never showed difficult. even bees deal with coronavirus, they do have to deal with sudden colony collapse. ironically, they have to deal with hornets. this is video of hornets kidnapping bees. it's fascinating video recorded by a palo alto company called bee hero which has developed sensors to watch for incoming hornets. they have made radar for bees. now for the record, these are asian giant hornets, not murder hornets. but i don't think the poor bee cares one way or another. we'll show you more video later. i promise. we'll get to the ceo and cofounder of bee hero. a man forever stuck happily on the bee team. i have so many questions. let's go with the fact that bees are very important to farms.

farmers actually bring bees in to the farms and the bee keepers release the bees. you don't raise bees, right? you're not bee keepers. what do you do? >> yeah. my cofounder is a bee keeper and that's how i got to know that bees are not only responsible for producing honey but responsible for pollinating pretty much everything we eat. so our goal in bee hero is to help bee keepers and farmers get better quality hives, to get better quality bees. improve the food production process. >> you put sensors in beehives. i hope your bee radar and it's sonar. i want to call it bee radar. i was hoping your bee radar warned the bees. but it warns the bee keeper, right? >> yes, of course. we provide keepers is.this is t

colony. we measure the prompters that help us understand and listen to the bees and know exactly. we can help bee keepers address any needs on the beehives before the colony collapses. >> and you can hear the hornets coming, right? that's how you know the hornets are coming. you're listening for them. >> yeah. you're trying to listen to specifically in this instance in the beehives you can classify different -- and identify what exactly the problem is. we deployed the largest network of beehives worldwide of more than 20,000 hives and scaling to 48 hives now. our ability to identify very fast new instances of new problems brings a lot of power and a lot of responsibility to identify the problems. and the -- in the u.s. it's a major thing we need to address to make sure that we secure our

food processes. >> the video of the hornet carrying off the bee is just -- it's astounding. is he going to eat the bee? what does he want with the bee? >> yeah, so basically, the european honey bees we use now mainly for pollination services are used for the local hornet coming from u.s. or europe and they developed a way to deal with the hornets. they eat their body when they enter the colony. it's a different species that can kill an entire colony. it's a group of hornets that comes near the hive and just eats the bees like they're snacks. >> serious question, you're alerting the bee keeper when these hornets arrive. we know bees communicate. have you ever thought or looked into somehow communicating with into the bees? >> so at the moment, we do not -- we cannot speak to the bees but understand what they're saying basically. i think the later stage once bee

heros technologies gets more and more hives, we can open a plat follow for other companies to look for ways to propel the bees to address any issues. whether it's the giant hornet, which is huge problem or other problems. so this is yet to come but an interesting future. >> this is not a niche industry as we were talking about earlier. bees are critically important to american agriculture. particularly here in california. we've got all the flowering nut trees and whatnot. there's a huge industry in bringing bees essentially renting bees to come to your farm. >> so the farming industry do have different and small areas or different crops all over and then you can depend on bees.

get more insects in their field during the blooming season and we've seen how the agriculture industry has been developed using the processes of decision making and helps pollination which is one of the critical factors in the process was left behind. the quality of bee colonies today and the level of them is not very strong and it affected the pollination process. >> last question for you, which came first? the idea or the bees? in the sense this is technology being used in a very unusual way. was your cofounder's interest in bees first? and you figured out a solution? it was a problem you went hunting for? >> my cofounder is a second generation commercial bee keeper three years ago and i had question why bees were dying and why no one is trying to solve the problem and we have challenges and things to explore

and identify whether the technology can help in this process. so me coming with a technology call background and my partner as bee keeper helps identify the needs. it's not only bees. it's not only bee keeperers that are suffering but farmers in the food chain, this is what we found the big opportunity and decided to tackle it. >> omar is the ceo and cofounder of beehero. the guy on the side of the bees in the wasp/bee war. thank you for joining us this morning. we'll be right back.

welcome back to "press here." my next guest is an experienced entrepreneur who has created companies and venture capital firm, as well, selling app dynamics to sisco for nearly $4 billion. then cocreating the venture capital firm unusual ventures. joyti bansal joins me this morning. this new company you're creating is traceable. i want to talk about starting a company in a pandemic. how do you do that? you can't or at least you shouldn't be interviewing people in person. how do you build up an entire company in the middle of a

pandemic? >> you have -- that's how it is about start ups, you have to adapt. one thing we have done is, you know, if have gotten -- done everything other video. you take a walk in the park and, you know, 6 feet apart or 10 feet apart and get to know someone you're going to work with as you interview them. >> i talked to many entrepreneurs about raising capital during a pandemic. they've had to talk to venture capitalists over a zoom interview, as well. in your case, it's a little unusual because unusual ventures is funding your start up. you are both going to be the ceo of a start up that is funded by unusual ventures and you are a venture capitalist at unusual ventures. how did you prevent, you know, there being a conflict of interest there? >> well, you have to be up front and very clear.

what is the draw in you running the company and you guiding the company? i mean, you could hire somebody. you have this idea and we'll get to the idea in a minute. you have an idea in your head what the company ought to be and what it looks like and you vtd money to fund it. why are you in charge? >> well, look, i like to build good products. i like to solve problems that i'm passionate about. the reason i'm doing the company is not just because i wanted to do another company and make more money. this is a problem that i wanted to solve. >> so let's talk about that problem. i'm going to sort of sketch it out. you tell me if i have it right or not. >> sure. >> and sort of continue on that thought. you're going to protect apis and they're application program

interfaces. let's say you have a door dash or something app. it's not just door dash that is running all of that. they're reaching out to a mapping company to get, you s.ow, figure out where your reaching out it your bank to figure out if you have the money for the order. they're reaching out to facebook, if that's how you sign up for the app. so there are a lot of sort doors into a program that a hacker can get into and you want to protect it. how well did i sum it up? >> you did a great job. i think you have to look at it, you know, every software system -- the programmers advocate a lot of those because they need to allow other software systems to interact with them. a lot of different applications and websites cannot -- same with the door dash or almost any software system you would see in this case. but the problem is -- almost all

the data breaches you're seeing almost all of them have some kind of api. if someone came into the ap tharks a programmer said and someone misused the api. they're building a picture around those. the only prediction is ask the programmers who have a job and don't leave sort of a gap behind or a whole behind. but, you know, there are billions and billions of apis. it's not possible anymore. that's -- that's a problem. if you're going solve the problem, you'll have a successful company. it will be in a longyourself an

silicon valley. a lot of employees. a number of do you have any notion how many of your employees have become millionaires? yeah. that's something, you know, i personally have done a mix. -- who are we creating the platform for? we wanted to be much more -- about it. one of the things we wanted to do day capital from the limited partners to invest in the venture capital firm. for the, you know, people who -- being able to participate in the -- silicon valley many

times. we're among the first to encourage them to start and from hospitals and the foundations. if we do these things on silicon valley and the companies and where does that go and? so the process and the people. >> we wish you the best of luck. cofounder of unusual ventures and now the new company traceable, as well. up next on "press here" we take you inside the massachusetts lab where they are frantically working to defeat coronavirus. "press here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press here." american industry has helped us get through tough times before. during the second world war, chevrolet built artillery rounds and ford built airplanes. a boston bio tech company is doing something similar as we fight a different enemy. work on genetic manufacturing is retooling to conduct coronavirus tests. in hopes to do thousands of tests every hour and sunk tens of millions of dollars into the effort. jason kelly is the cofounder and

ceo of ginkgo bio works. let's talk coronavirus first. the machines you're using in your normal research can actually be used to test for coronavirus, is that right? >> in our normal course of business, ginkgo cells almost like you program a computer. the reason that's possible is because inside every cell is digital code and the form of dna. you can read that code with dna consequencesi sequencing and that's the technology we're reproposing for covid-19 testing and write the code with dna synthesis or printing. if you can read and write code, and have a machine to run it, that's of cells in the world. we dna thanake cells do new things. we saw an opportunity to help with covid using the dna reading

technology. >> one of the problems is not the speed of the machine. it's getting the samples, the coronavirus samples into the machine. that's the arduous part. otherwise you can do thousands per hour. >> one of the devices -- so what we use are human genome sequencers. so about a month ago we announced $100 million investment that was with funding coming in alumna, which is is a strategic partner and they make these washing machine size device devices that allow you to read human genomes. what it means is inside every one of your cells is 4 letters of dna that make up a human agree known. device can do ten of these that it reads out the code. we're saying let's look for the very small fragment of the covid-19 virus and use that same horsepower of those billions of letters of code the machine can

read to read something like call it about 50,000, we think, we haven't gotten this scale yet but 50,000 covid-19 tests per day on one machine like that. that's what we're aiming to do. and that's to alleviate the bottle neck today in sort of test availability. >> and because we're talking about dna here, it doesn't have to be the nasal swab that touches -- feels like it touches your brain. it did be a cheek swab or saliva. >> yeah. what we're aiming for is a saliva-based test. that's because we want to use this in workplaces and schools and to broadly do much larger amounts of testing in order to help prevent outbreaks in those communities. so we believe we went with the saliva-based approach. one of the biggest challenges is how do you get 50,000 samples into the one washing machine size device.

i'm at a facility here in boston, behind me we have 120,000 square foot of laboratory infrastructure with a big investment in robotic automation. what we have is robots doing the laboratory work to prepare those samples to ultimately get them ready to go on the machine. and that is really the hardest part of the challenge. it's enormous logistics effort. we never had to runny diagnostic test at the scale that the country needs to test for covid-19. >> now, you know, i'm so glad you're doing this, but you were working on what you thought were very important things. very probable things and i suppose you'll get paid on the tests you could have said no. you could have said we're busy doing what we do and lots of other people are testing. we're not participating. >> you know back in march, you know, around when italy had their outbreak, it became apparent to us that this was sort of, you know, a once in a generation or maybe once in several generations biological

event. and you know what ginkgo's mainline business is to program cells. like the tech companies out in silicon valley, you know, google, microsoft, and so on. that wanted to provide computing across all markets, that's what we're trying to do. we're trying to provide cell programming across all markets. one of the first things we said can we help program cells to work on the covid-19 problem? for example we're working with moderna. that's fine. that's closer to the normal operations. but the other thing we realized was, well, if you're going to program cells like computers, just like google would have cybersecurity, we better have bio security. just like paypal would have fraud detection, right. we need to be able to respond in the event we have autocontrol biology out in the environment response what we're building off with concentric, which is the new brand we launched to do the

pandemic response, is the beginnings of that muscle. right. and i think going into the biological sentry where you're going to see the last 50 years are about computing, i think the next 50 years are about cell programming. we'll need this. so we're excited to be building this out as a capability at gingko. we see it aligned with our business. >> i read that, you know, you saw jurassic park. you're younger than i am -- when you were in high school. and that's one of the things that got be you thinking about this. you're able to do this. not maybe to make dinosaurs but you use the example, this sounds crazy, but you said of it, of a tree that knew how to grow into a table. >> i used to try to explain to people how amazing biology was. right. how powerful it was. think about it you plant a seed in the program. and you add air, water, and sunlight and this thing self-assembles the plant. the leaves are solar panels and the fruits if you look at them

on a molecular level they have nano technology placing atoms at a higher resolution than intel would on a chip. it's unbelievable manufacturing technology. i do like to highlight that to people. now covid-19 makes everyone aware that biologies is powerful but, yeah, jurassic park, i think, telling the story well. it demonstrates the wonder. like my gosh. dinosaurs. then at the same time it sends a message life will find a way. life can get out of control. and here we sit. right. and i think that is an important lesson for -- as we enter this century of biological engineering that those building the programs to program cells need to internalize. we have to be respectful of the technology and need to build out the tools and social infrastructure to be able to respond when life does find a

way. and so it was a very, very informative piece of art for me, for sure. >> okay. so, yes, biology by itself nature is a builder. it manufacturers things. that's what it is. and use my example of a tree that grows into the shape of a table. what sort of things would you be developing that are, you know, tangible to the consumer? >> there's a company out in your neck of the woods called impossible foods. it's the impossible whopper at burger king. you bite into it and it bleeds. that's interesting. how do they make veggie burger bleed? the answer is, they took brewers yeast, the sort of yeast you brew beer, and programmed it to have the gene for hemoglobin. what makes your blood red. when you brew. the yeast, instead of beer coming out, you get home bloeben. it turns out that protein when

added to the veggie based product it makes it msmell and e like meat. that was due to cell programming that makes that product so good. >> i think we have a least opportunity there. i would be convinced to eat a burger that bled out beer. that would be okay with me. your company is worth billions. it may be the most valuable company in all of boston. i'm sure that's due to your hard work and your cofounder's hard work. it also speaks to the understanding that investors have that biology, as you were saying, this is going to be a biology decade where we had a computing decade before. >> what has become aware to investors is what had been previously thought of as limited insight therapeutic sector, which is the biggest market for bio technology today, is ultimately, you know, a cell is programmable just like a computer, except a computer moves bits around.

it moves information. right. if you look at the industries that computers disrupted, you know, advertising, you know, finance, you know, all data and information-based industries. cells are programmable. you can put in different code but they don't move information. they move atoms around! the industries that will get disrupted by mature biological engineering are the physical industries. all of them. food, medicine, building materials, talk about growing tables. right. electronics. right. anything that is physical, i believe, over the next 50 years, ultimately will be made in a biological -- you'll grow it instead of manufacture it. it's so much cheaper to grow things. >> extraordinary idea. we also thank you for your hard work on coronavirus, as well. jason kelly is the cofounder and ceo of gingko bio works. "press here" will be back in a moment.

that's our show for this week. earlier i was talking to unusual vitamintures that is creating yet another company. i invited him do a pod cast with me, as well. we'll talk about the fact he came here on a visa and in that time, has created a staggering amount of wealth, not just for himself but for hundreds of people in silicon valley. you can find "sand hill road" wherever you find your pod casts. at for this week. thank you for making us part of yo

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