I read a handful of books this year, primarily on my Kindle (my current preferred medium since I can read it at night in bed with all the lights off and won’t wake any sleeping toddlers up). My tastes are generally pretty varied, and I usually try to alternate non-fiction and fiction to keep things from getting stale, but even that isn’t really a rule.
The books below are written down in the order that I read them in 2025. I did not include any books I did not finish, nor any book that I read this year that was not new to me (ie, a re-read). I’ve included a brief write-up and a score ranking. I did not include any discussion around plot on the off chance that you want to read the book. (I have, however, included Amazon links in case you want to buy one. You can see a bit more about the book there. They aren’t affiliate links, so I will not get paid either way).
The score is not based on anything scientific, but is simply an attempt to put a number around how much I enjoyed a specific book, or the impact that it had on me.
The rankings:
5 – Excellent, phenomenal, highly recommend
4 – Quite enjoyable and a lovely way to spend an afternoon or evening
3 – Worth the time, but probably wouldn’t need to read again
2 – Probably not worth the time to read the whole thing, but may have some redeeming qualities that you could enjoy if you are really intent on reading this book and finding them
1 – Did not enjoy, not worth the time, barely scraped through out of a strange misplaced sense of duty to not letting the book win
Hopefully this helps you find something new to read (or, selfishly, inspires you to send me something new that you think I would like to read).
Thoughts: This is the best business book I’ve ever read. I’ve given multiple copies of it away to people and am planning on buying more copies to continue that practice. Slootman was the CEO who took both ServiceNow and Snowflake public (and took Data Domain to a billion dollar exit too). A phenomenal playbook on how to get things done as an organization, and the importance of moving quickly with focus and intensity in the workplace. I’ve literally used multiple things from this book at my own job and it is shocking how much you can accomplish. Everyone who works for a living should read this book, especially if you want to be a leader in the workplace and to be on a winning team. The only downside is after reading it I watched every Frank Slootman interview on youtube and now my wife makes fun of me.
Thoughts: A classic for a reason. What a rollicking good time. The original swashbuckling adventure. The black spot. Long John Silver. Rum all over the place. Dudes shooting each other with muskets. Cutlasses flying. Poor Jim Hawkins holding his own among a rash of dastardly mutineering pirates. Buried treasure. It’s Treasure Island baby. What more do you want?
Thoughts: This was Frank Slootman’s thoughts after heading his first major company, Data Domain. A good read if you like Slootman, but just stick with Amp it Up – it’s way more fleshed out. You can probably bang this one out in an hour or two. Glad I read it and have it, but his later book is better.
Thoughts: Loved this book. This is the first book in a series of three by Scott Lynch. It’s essentially Oceans 11 set in a historic, stylized, fantastic Venice. I’ve always been a sucker for characters that are thinking like ten steps ahead in their little schemes and plans, and this book has that in spades (but also every once in a while the main character here gets caught and punished, and realizes that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, either). What fun. Great world building, fun characters, lovely capers. Prose can be a little clumsy but who cares. Great book if you’re into this sort of thing.
Thoughts: This is the second book in Scott Lynch’s series. This one is is like if Oceans 11 and Jack Sparrow had a baby. There are even some scenes in the book that the discerning reader will note seem to be directly from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Whatever. I loved those films and I enjoyed this book. Ending felt a little rug-pully and flat, but who cares. Would read this again. Fun read that just takes itself seriously enough to not feel like junk food. Hooray!
Thoughts: This book is a classic management book. Ultimately I liked it. It will be good to have on my shelf to refer to now and then. Some good thoughts on performing high leverage tasks, time management, etc. I liked this book but didn’t love it. Worth a read if you’re interested in this type of thing though.
Thoughts: A great, anecdote-driven meditation on the virtue of courage. I enjoyed it. Seems like something I would find in the airport or in a monthly subscription box for men. However, there really were some great thoughts in there and it did get me thinking about the idea of courage for a while, so I guess it did its job. I read this book because Frank Slootman mentioned it in an interview.
Thoughts: This is the third and final book in Scott Lynch’s series. There were some really neat elements to this book; the setting was fun and the main characters are now trying to rig a high stakes election. Great stuff. Who doesn’t love a good caper with both sides trying to stay two steps ahead of the other? Ultimately though, one of the central narratives of the main character’s romantic history with the antagonist dragged this whole thing down. You could tell the author was either going through, or just went through, a divorce. Glad I wrapped up the series, just wish it went out on a higher note.
Thoughts: This series is about a lady who owns a tea shop and solves murder mysteries. Formulaic but who cares. Banged this out in an afternoon. Lots of descriptions about scones and teas and interior decorating and lilac in the countryside and whatnot. Not gonna blow your socks off but again, I wanted to read a mystery solved by a lady who owned a tea shop and that is what I got. Tremendous. Can’t wait to read another one.
Thoughts: A guy named Tom Quigley who runs a biodiversity based venture fund called Superorganism gave me this recommendation in the comment section of a LinkedIn post. This book is wild. Extremely inventive and exceptionally sobering, it’s part madcap adventure, part ecological horror, part science fiction apocalypse, part financial market fiction(?) It’s essentially biodiversity banking and environmental destruction taken to a dystopic scifi extreme and is worth a read for anyone in the green adjacent space.
Thoughts: If you are going to raise a venture capital fund, read this book. A phenomenal resource that covers everything from legal and compliance to LP updates to fundraising and more. Easy to read too, which is always a plus when you’re reading what is essentially a cleverly done textbook. I immediately went out and bought a hard copy to have on my shelf as a reference guide for a project that shall be named later.
Thoughts: The first part of this book rocked. Ned Land is an all time character. Finding the mysterious submarine and attempting to harpoon it is fantastic. Really fun to read how an author in the 1870s explains how a submarine can breathe under water. You can really see Jules Verne’s mind at work here and why he is one of the fathers of science fiction. Unfortunately, and this is probably something that everyone went nuts for and loved in the 1870s, I don’t need to read just pages and pages of Professor Pierre Aronnax cataloguing random fish and seaweed and rocks that he sees outside the window of the Nautilus. This book is tremendous for what it is, and you can see why Jules Verne is so revered; it just has a few passages in there that might be a slog for a modern audience who already knows that different fish exist and that they live in the ocean.
Thoughts: Prose was miserable. Hyper violent. No idea how anyone grows old in this world if everyone in every village is getting brutally slaughtered all the time. Overly relied on some (terrible) faux-Norse stylistic language. Got great reviews, but I can only assume the reviewers were just the author and his friends.
I read this in one sitting at the San Francisco airport, waiting for my flight which had been significantly delayed. A beautifully written book. A phenomenal meditation on life and what it means to live it, as well as memory, duty, etc. A lovely narrator who is ultimately unreliable. I guess it won a Nobel prize. I can see why. Parts of this book stuck with me for a long time.
Thoughts: I really wanted to like this book more. The first half was wonderfully atmospheric, with some really interesting meditations on memory, exploration, etc. It really had lots of potential. The second half was essentially just an exposition dump that you could see coming from miles away. I feel like the author wasn’t sure if she wanted to explore a philosophical concept or write something plot driven, and ultimately chose to do both – and failed to do either satisfactorily. If she leaned hard towards one way she probably would have saved it. Tremendous idea and some really strong writing ultimately marred by just poor execution. If you want to read someone who’s written what this book should have been, just pick up some Italo Calvino.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of human-centric infrastructure. After going deep into Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns a few years ago, I’ve been really contemplating what a “better” city looks like – not just in terms of clean sidewalks and new buildings, but how cities can, through their design and infrastructure, intelligently improve how we live, work, and play with each other.
That’s why I was excited when I was able to sit down with Ari Isaak, the founder of Photometrics AI and Evari GIS Consulting. After talking to Ari, it’s clear that he isn’t just optimizing lights—he’s answering the question I’ve been wrestling with, how does a city optimally function, at the most granular level. From safety and sustainability to neighborhood identity and community resilience, Ari is exploring what it would mean for public infrastructure to meet us where we are, both in physical space and in real human need.
We talked about where he thinks resilience really comes from, what government gets wrong (and right), and how one light at a time, we can make our cities more human.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
I had to think a lot about this one – this is good!
I’ll tell you what, I’m not a fan of the idea of the self-made man. There’s a famous sculpture of “the self-made man” where he’s chiseling himself out of marble, and I don’t really think it’s that accurate.
I think our strength and resilience comes from the people around us, and that security net is what enables us to take risks and make decisions. If you’re worried about where your next meal is going to come from, if you’re worried about the basics, it will be hard to take any sort of risk since that’s the top thing on your mind.
I think resilience comes from family, friends, and the world that you have around yourself that enables you to make it through any challenge that comes your way.
Pictured: The source of Ari’s resilience!
Resilience is born as a result of having the safety of a social sphere around you that lets you bounce back from challenges and risks more easily?
Yeah, whether it’s just taking risks in the first place, or overcoming challenges, or just having the ability to fail. You must have people that love you even after you fail! So I really think resilience comes from all of the people around you, who may not say it explicitly, but believe in you.
And would you say that you have that resilience safety net around you?
Oh, absolutely. When I started both companies, I couldn’t have done it without the support of my wife. She was going to experience either the benefits or the challenges right alongside me.
When we launched Evari GIS Consulting, she was a college professor in Irvine. She was commuting from San Diego to Irvine twice a week, and at the same time, I landed a small contract. That left us with a big question: Should I stay at my government job at the Port of San Diego, or should I go all in on the business?
We talked it over, and she said, “Go for it.” At the time, we didn’t have kids yet, and we were living in a one-bedroom place. In the end, it turned out to be a good bet—but none of it would have been possible without her support.
In a previous interview, Bill Simon said that it always seemed to be less risky to start his own company and bet on himself than to work for someone else – since he would have more control over his own career. Would you agree with that?
I generally agree with that. But I think the idea of becoming an entrepreneur is seen as more risky than it actually is. There’s this concept that losing a dollar hurts ten times more than the joy of making one. I think that holds a lot of people back.
We have safety nets—unemployment, family, personal savings, whatever—and while you don’t want to tap into the safety net, that security also enables me to invest in an idea that might not pay off for four or five years.
I also agree that there’s a false sense of security in having a job where someone else pays you. Unless you work for the government—but even in the government these days, that’s not necessarily secure.
You’re currently the founder of an AI startup, Photometrics AI – but you’ve previously founded another company, Evari GIS Consulting, Inc. Can you talk a little bit about your experience running your own company?
Evari GIS Consulting is a GIS consulting firm that found a niche in supporting street lighting conversions. When a major city wants to convert its streetlights to LED, they need to know where every light is and what type it is.
A lot of the time, these projects are funded through ESPC (Energy Savings Performance Contract) agreements. Essentially, the contractor guarantees the savings upfront—before the job is even done. It’s like getting a home remodel where the contractor guarantees your house will increase in value by $100,000. And then, the project is financed through that model.
To make it work, cities need detailed data: what streetlights are out there, their wattages, energy usage, things like that. That information allows them to calculate the new lighting plan and determine the energy savings. Our job is to collect that data. We’ve done this in cities across the U.S., including Honolulu, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Boston.
Beyond just meeting the financial requirements of these contracts, GIS data is critical for managing the construction process. Crews need to know exactly where each light is, which lights to load onto trucks, where to replace them, and a ton of other things. We’ve built entire systems to support this process, including capturing before-and-after photos as part of the audit and linking everything back into GIS data.
Evari GIS Consulting also uses AI to analyze these photos, helping cities better understand and manage their street lighting infrastructure.
There’s a better way to light our streets.
What drove you to start Photometrics AI?
When I was doing this work across the United States, I realized something and I’m just going to say it: they’re doing it wrong. There’s a part of this process that isn’t working, and I was in a unique position to fix it.
So right now, cities design what are called typical layouts—cookie-cutter lighting plans based on standardized guidelines for road design. These manuals dictate things like road width, bike lane dimensions, sidewalk placement, and the type and spacing of streetlights. The idea is that engineers can use these templates when designing new roads or developments.
But in reality, cities weren’t built this way. Many older streets don’t follow a standard pattern. In some areas, like North Park, we have a grid layout. In others, we see sort of dendritic street patterns with cul-de-sacs, and then there are major arterial roads and stroads.
The way lighting is currently designed follows these cookie-cutter templates rather than adapting to the actual street layout. Cities like San Diego, Phoenix, or Oakland are broken down into a handful of typical layouts—maybe 20 for a city with 100,000 streetlights. Then, using Excel, they extrapolate the lighting design for the entire city based on those few templates.
The problem is it misses critical details. It doesn’t account for whether a road curves left or right, whether a light is mounted on a mast arm, whether intersections don’t meet at right angles, or whether there’s only a sidewalk on one side of the street.
So my idea was to bring the lighting design process into GIS—so we can actually see where the light falls on the street. We built this tool within Evari GIS Consulting, called EvariLUX, and it’s now being used across the country. It was a huge investment five years ago, and it’s just now paying off.
Now, Photometrics AI takes this concept one step further. Today, many streetlights are connected to control systems. So the question becomes: How can we tap into those systems and get the lights to perform exactly the way we want?
I developed a patented concept called the Target Lighting Layer. It allows cities to specify exactly where they want light to go—down to precise illumination levels. For example, 7 lux on the street, 4 lux on the sidewalk, 1 lux on front yards, and 0 lux on the windows of your house.
Instead of running every light at 100% brightness, our system calculates the optimum dimming level for each one—maybe 85%, 72%, or whatever is needed to meet the lighting goal. Using GIS and AI, we calculate the exact dimming level for every light in the system, which results in about 25% energy savings.
But the benefits go beyond just energy savings. A city like San Diego spends $4 million a year on electricity just for streetlights. With our system, that could drop to $3 million. Even bigger savings come from maintenance—running lights at an optimal, lower level extends their lifespan, reducing failure rates and replacement costs. Most streetlights are designed to last 50,000 to 100,000 hours at full power. By running them at a lower wattage, we can significantly extend their lifespan.
Ultimately, our goal is to bring precision to an industry that has relied on rough approximations for too long. The standard approach of dimming all city lights by 30% after midnight is a step in the right direction, but it’s not truly data-driven. We use math and AI to calculate the optimal dimming level for every light, making street lighting smarter, more efficient, and more cost-effective.
And that’s what we’re doing.
And how has the industry received this so far?
It’s definitely an uphill push. There are a few key challenges. When you’re optimizing light levels, the question comes up—is there really a business here? Is lowering lighting levels really a venture-scale opportunity?
There are also obstacles when it comes to getting new rates from utilities, and then you have multiple players involved in the government space. It’s not just one department making the decisions. The people managing energy and utility bills aren’t the same as the ones maintaining the streets. The police, who are concerned with lighting’s role in crime prevention, are separate from transportation safety teams, who care about encouraging people to use crosswalks. It’s a mix of different priorities across multiple departments, which makes progress more challenging.
What we’re hoping to do is keep our costs low enough that the decision becomes obvious for any one of those stakeholders. We’ve worked to calculate the average direct financial benefit of implementing Photometrics AI for each of them, and our pricing will come in well below that threshold.
For example, if adjusting lighting levels could reduce crime by even 1%, that translates to about ten dollars per light per year in savings for the average local or state government. Our goal is to come in well below that—say, at two dollars per light per year. That way, the police department decision-maker we’re talking to sees an immediate benefit.
But then, they might need to check with the energy department, and then they might need to check with transportation safety, and so on. So yeah, it’s challenging, but we’re making the case as clear and compelling as possible.
It’s interesting you say that, though. It echoes your opening point about how resilience is community-oriented and not just one person in a vacuum. The product you’re selling can be painted that way, too! The benefits of street lighting are community oriented, and it sounds tough to sell and impress the benefits of improving street lighting to just one person in a silo.
I want to preface this by saying that I’m a capitalist. I believe in capitalism, I believe in making money, I believe in all of that. But I also believe it’s okay for us to work together on things that benefit everyone, and that doesn’t always have to be financially driven.
The classic example is the fire department. People used to have to buy fire insurance, and if you didn’t have it, the fire department wouldn’t come. So if Joe had fire insurance but Steve next door didn’t, and Steve’s house caught fire, the fire department would let it burn. But eventually, that fire would spread and take out Joe’s house too. At some point, people realized it just made more sense for everyone to pitch in and create a public fire department.
I have no problem with that. We can work together on things, and that’s okay.
There’s this attitude that working for the common good is somehow a bad thing, and I don’t understand it. We can improve street lighting across the entire U.S., and that’s not a bad thing.
Photometrics AI optimizes each streetlight for where it is, lighting the area correctly.
In a previous interview, I talked to Sam Dettman, who was running for a Trustee position in his city in Wisconsin. We talked about how resilience can be built into the way a city is designed – the character of the architecture, how roads and neighborhoods are designed, and even the interplay of the natural and urban environments can influence how we interact with our cities and communities, and can create a resilient environment. Would you agree with that? How does street lighting play into that?
So both answers are yes, in my opinion. We absolutely design and choose the neighborhoods we live in, the places we work, and the places we go out to dinner because those spaces make us feel a certain way and support the kind of activity we want to do there.
If you want to live on a street where your kids can play catch in the middle of the road, you move to that kind of neighborhood. Downtown Manhattan probably isn’t the right spot for that.
The infrastructure we build is purposefully designed to support our lives and to discourage behaviors we don’t want. Now, that doesn’t always work. Sometimes people want to do something badly enough that they’ll ignore what the infrastructure is telling them. So it’s not a perfect system, but it is one of our most powerful tools—and we should design our cities and our spaces to support the way we want to live.
Streetlights are a part of that. We should be using lighting to encourage the behaviors and activities we want to see—not with a one-size-fits-all solution, but in a way that’s dynamic and responsive.
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet about Photometrics AI is that, because it uses AI, it can figure these things out in seconds. Photometrics AI can quickly calculate the optimum lighting performance for a specific setting. That means we can do things like adjust lighting for Halloween. That doesn’t need to apply everywhere—maybe it only affects quiet, single-family neighborhoods where the parcel sizes make it good for trick-or-treating.
You’re probably not going to walk a mile between houses, so we know where those neighborhoods are—and we can use light to encourage that kind of activity. Our kids should be able to go out and trick-or-treat safely, and we should use lighting to support that. We should be treating the street like a place for walking kids, because for that night, it is.
That’s a good point.
I think a lot of people only notice when there’s an absence of street lights, or one is broken. If things are working, most people tend not to think about it. Can you talk about how you educate people on that streetlight improvements are actually necessary?
I’d say when I talk to people about Photometrics AI, a lot of them say, “Oh, I never even thought about that.” And I’m like, well, they’re everywhere. Streetlights are on every street. There’s about one streetlight for every two houses in the U.S.—so roughly one for every five people. They’re freaking everywhere, but people often confuse them with traffic signals.
I’ll hear things like, “Oh, I want the red light to go away. Isn’t there some sort of motion thing?” And I have to say, “That’s not what I do.”
Streetlights exist to bring a little bit of the day into the night, but people don’t really notice them unless they’re not doing what they’re supposed to. When a streetlight’s out—or on during the day, which happens constantly—that’s when people pay attention. And that’s part of the challenge I’m trying to solve.
Every single day, there are lights that are on when they should be off and off when they should be on. They’re too bright, shining into people’s windows while they’re trying to sleep, or they’re wasting energy lighting up front yards that don’t need it. What we need is much more precision in how street lighting is managed.
But to go back to your question—no, people really don’t think about this stuff much. When I go to investor events and explain what I’m working on, they’re like, “Wait, what? Streetlights? How’s that a business?” So I have to do a little bit of education. I explain there are different types of lights, we can dim them, we can place them more strategically. But yeah, it’s something most people just don’t pay attention to.
That sounds challenging, since you have to educate so many people on why this actually is a problem, and it’s a problem with infrastructure that people don’t often think about.
Yeah, and it takes a little while. I’m not selling a new energy drink.
It’s not hard to explain, but when I say I’m optimizing street lighting so it falls on the street and not in front yards, I don’t think it really clicks for most people. They don’t know what’s possible. They assume all lights are the same—like there are three kinds or something. But no, there are hundreds of different types. You can change their color, their distribution, you can dim them, and many are connected to control systems.
And when I talk to people who are already in the industry, they’re often pretty entrenched in the way things have always been done.
That’s why I think my best angle is to reach Public Works directors. They’re not as locked into traditional processes, and they actually have a broad understanding of how street lighting fits into the bigger picture. They know what maintenance costs look like, they know how much it costs to buy a new fixture, they understand the impact on crime, and how lighting affects transportation safety.
So that’s really who I want to work with. They have the right perspective and the authority to think holistically about lighting and how it can be done better.
What does the future of street lighting look like to you? The future of city design?
They should all work together! In our hyper-connected world, it’s completely unacceptable that government is still slow to adapt and build systems that function as seamlessly as, say, an iPhone.
An autonomous car should have everything it needs to get a person to their destination safely—whether that means streetlights illuminating properly or pedestrian systems ensuring people can cross the street safely. We must do a better job. In my mind, this really comes down to government. Government moves slowly, and utilities that manage streetlights also move slowly. But they have to work together much better. Private industry would never tolerate the kind of inefficiencies that are just accepted in government.
I’ll give you an example. At one point, I was talking to someone about street paving. He was in charge of digging up asbestos pipes, and I suggest coordination so that street paving happens after the asbestos pipe work is done—not two months before, only to dig it all up again.” And his response was, believe it or not, “You’re going to make my job harder.”
That’s exactly the problem. He was in a different department, working on his own timeline, with no regard for the bigger picture. And that kind of disjointed thinking is everywhere in government. We have to do better.
The future will belong to cities that make innovation a priority—those that move away from entrenched interests and start working with smaller, more agile innovators. Cities need partners who can orchestrate and facilitate activities in public spaces more effectively.
In terms of lighting, it should change based on when and where it’s needed. We need the right light in the right place at the right time. Halloween is one example, but what about during a major car crash? Could a 911 call trigger a change in street lighting? If emergency responders receive a dispatch code with a crash location, could the lighting automatically adjust to help them? Light could be critical when performing CPR or assisting an injured person, and while emergency vehicles have their own lighting, there’s no reason streetlights couldn’t dynamically adapt to provide additional support.
We’ve already transitioned from legacy technology to LEDs, and many of those LEDs are now on control systems. The next step is to evolve. We need to innovate and align street lighting with how we actually use it in the modern world.
What’s next for you? How could someone reading this blog potentially help you?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. You can reach out to me directly, but you can also contact your Public Works director or send a comment to your city or utility—whoever manages your streetlights—and say, “I think this guy is onto something.”
Maybe you’d really like it if the light didn’t shine in your window, and you think this approach could make sure that doesn’t happen across the entire city. Plus, you’ll save energy because right now, you’re spending money and energy to put light in someone’s window. So, can we not do that? Can we just not? He doesn’t want it.
So yeah, recommend that they reach out. I’d love to talk with anyone across the U.S. or even globally. We’re already having conversations with folks in Europe about this idea.
As for what I do every day…I read a blog post the other day that said, “If you’re a founder, you’re either building or selling. There’s nothing else.” And that really resonated with me.
I switch between those two things. I make sure our MVP is up and running, I create videos for LinkedIn to share what we’re doing, I reach out to Public Works directors I’ve worked with before, and I build partnerships with private companies that can help us get into multiple cities. That’s what I do all day, and I like it. It’s great.
I’m on my own right now. I don’t have a whole team, but it’s exciting. And hopefully, it works. I’m going to do my best.
What’s the best way for someone to contact you to learn more or follow up?
You can email me at ari@evarilabs.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there.
Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we go?
I just think that, in many ways, the government gets a bad rap. There are good people who show up every day, working in government, doing their best for the citizens. But they should embrace technology.
The GovTech space is notoriously difficult. There are VCs who won’t even talk to people trying to do business with the government. And the reality is, the government is never going to release an RFP for the product I’m selling, because I’m the only one selling it—it’s not a known entity. I understand the point of an RFP. At Evari GIS Consulting, I spend my life chasing those kinds of opportunities. But in many ways, the government needs to figure out how to cut through bureaucracy and try new things.
It should be completely acceptable for a city to say, “Hey, Ari, why don’t you test this out on a neighborhood or 20 lights in a quiet residential area? Let’s see if it works.” And if it doesn’t work, so what? What’s the worst-case scenario? The streetlights turn on 10 minutes early or turn off too soon? We already deal with streetlights that don’t work all the time! Government should be way more open to experimentation and failure—the same way private industry is.
With that said, this fear of failure is also one of the government’s biggest weaknesses. There’s this mentality of “nobody gets fired for buying Apple products.” So in many cases, governments default to hiring the biggest, most well-known firms for consulting contracts. But in reality, it’s often their subcontractors doing the actual work. The assumption is that hiring a familiar name ensures a better product, but I don’t think that’s really the case. And I actually think it’s time that the government moves away from that mindset.
It’s time to look for innovative, younger, smaller teams that are building new things.
I recently sat down with Bill Simon, former managing partner of San Diego Law Firm, and current Founder and Chief Counsel at Sollertis, a law firm that specializes in personal and business asset protection. Bill has been a fixture in the San Diego business law scene for over 30 years, and has a wealth of experience in both business and life that made him a fascinating interview.
Bill and I covered a number of topics that went a different, but much more profound, direction than what I originally anticipated. We talked about the importance of planning to be disrupted, Bill’s thoughts on risk, the questions that he asks himself every morning, the importance and beauty of work-life balance, and much more. I firmly believe that Bill’s philosophies of emphasizing health, helping others, and building strong personal relationships are crucial and beneficial for anyone pursuing a successful and meaningful life.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
That’s a great question!
I went out to lunch one time with Fred Port, the former Vice President at Callaway Golf, who is both a client and a mentor of mine. He asked me if I knew the one thing that every single person on this planet was going to have to deal with in the coming years. I was trying so hard to figure out the answer, and I went down the routes of health problems and financial issues and whatnot. I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out, so finally Fred gave it to me – the answer is disruption.
He told me, and I think he’s spot on, “Everyone is going to have to deal with disruption. There are no exceptions – everyone deals with it. Your ability to deal with disruption is going to determine how you do in life.” And I always thought that was super smart of him to come up with that. He told me this probably 20 years ago, and I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
It’s something that I try to teach my kids. Most people like to think that everything will go according to plan. But when you reshape your mind around disruption, you realize that relatively little goes according to plan. And your ability to deal with all the changes that life throws at you determines how successful you are – however you define success. So yeah, when I think about resilience, I think it is the ability to continuously overcome disruption, things ranging from having to get knee surgery, a client who isn’t happy, a great employee leaving, finding out a loved one has cancer – resilience is just overcoming the disruptions to life, big and small, that keep coming day after day after day.
You mentioned that overcoming disruption is something you try and teach your kids. What are some ways you try and instill that?
Well, I don’t consider myself a qualified teacher, but I can talk about how I try to deal with it! For me, it’s all about anticipation. Don’t go through your day expecting everything is going to work out according to plan. Expect disruption. Look for it. Anticipate it. And sometimes the anticipation is easy – if you need to be somewhere at 3:00 pm and it takes 30 minutes to get there, don’t leave at 2:30!
I remember I had to go to court one day and I was with my partner Tom. We were driving different cars, and Tom actually got in a car accident on the way there. He had to stop, exchange information, do all that, and was still only two minutes late! Meanwhile, the opposing counsel was 15 minutes late and he didn’t even have a car accident! That just goes to show you how good Tom was at anticipating and dealing with disruption.
You can turn this anticipation of disruption into a positive, too. Something I always try to do is help at least one person a day. One of these times I was with my wife and kids driving somewhere when a car accident happened in front of us. We pulled over and I got out, and the girl who was in the accident was a young driver and didn’t know what to do. She needed someone to help her right there and be with her through it, and I was able to help her through that process and help her realize that things would be okay. You can’t do that for somebody if you don’t have time set aside to deal with disruptions. So perhaps another facet of this is not trying to cram so much stuff in your life, instead building in some time for those little disruptions that will always occur.
Your dad actually has a great line around this. He always says, “Plan the work, work the plan.” I say that myself all the time now. Because when you plan, you don’t want to just plan for work you know about. You want to plan the work that you don’t know about that invariably will come up.
That makes sense. So this sense of anticipation, of working through disruption, seems like a great quality for a lawyer to have. Is this something that you see often in law?
Well, I think they’re good qualities for anyone to have. But you’re right, they come up a lot in law, especially on the litigation side, since you can’t control what the other side is going to do – you just know that they’re going to do something!
So it comes up a lot in law, but I think it really just comes more in life. I actually think I can plan around that kind of stuff in the law firm better than I can in life. I mean, I don’t have a whole lot of surprises at the law firm anymore. And I have people who work for me and deal with those surprises more than me.
But I still have to not pack my schedule and plan time every day. I know there will be certain clients who have things that come up and they’re going to need to talk to me or my attorneys. They’re going to need help getting through a situation. So if I have an eight hour day, I can’t plan back to back meetings for eight hours. I have to have windows where I can slide things in. If nothing comes up, then that’s great! I can do other things. But you have to reasonably anticipate disruption.
Your ability to deal with disruption is going to determine how you do in life.
So let’s talk about that law firm. You’re the founder and Chief Counsel of Sollertis, a law firm focused on maximizing and protecting assets. Could you give me a little bit of background on your career journey? What motivated you to open your own firm?
Well, I think this actually opens up a discussion on risk. To me, working for someone else was more risky because they have layoffs. You don’t have as much control over what kind of work you do. Typically, you start working and you want responsibility. You don’t want to just sit there and do the same thing over and over, you want to grow. You just got out of school, you’re excited, and you want to bring it on, right!
So I felt that if I started my own practice out of law school that I would be able to get that growth. That was less risky to me. I barely had any bills. I was single, I had no kids, no wife. I thought it seemed like the perfect time to do my own thing and go solo from the very beginning. And so that’s what I did.
I did it with my best friend from law school, Tom Parashos. We were partners for over 25 years. When we started, we realized that my last name, Simon, was easier to spell, so we put my name first – our firm was Simon and Parashos. Then, when the internet came out, I went out and grabbed www.sandiegolawfirm.com, and we decided to change our name to that – so that if we ever sold the firm, we wouldn’t have to change the name! With lawyers, with business cards and brochures and all their stationary, every time someone added a new partner they had to throw away all the old materials and print new ones. And so we were just being proactive – everything could change and get disrupted, but we could keep the brand the same.
Tom and I had a lot of fun. When we started, we were both just a couple of guys out of law school. We both got married, had kids, bought homes. It really took us a long way. Tom ended up moving and starting a residential real estate brokerage with his wife, and they’re doing really well at that. So when he was phasing out, I started heating up. And that’s when I started Sollertis.
I decided to focus more on asset protection this time around. We did some of that at the San Diego Law Firm, but I really wanted to focus on that side with Sollertis.
So you’ve actually started two law firms then! What would you consider to be one of your major successes?
Most of my success stories are not through my law firm. They’re more on the personal side. And most of that gratification comes from the last 20 years when I’ve been married and had kids. That’s sort of a theme to my life, I really try to keep a balance. I wasn’t able to do this when I first started and worked longer hours like a typical attorney, but I saw other, older attorneys who were many years older than me and what their health was like and what their relationships were like, and I didn’t want that. So the law firm was part of my life, but the main part was the family. Family and health.
I have a couple of questions that I ask myself when I wake up every morning. The first thing I say is, “Am I healthy?” Because the opposite of health is death. And what good am I if I’m dead? So I always have to be healthy. I owe it to my wife and kids to be as healthy as I can so I can be around as long as possible to help them out. So, I ask myself if I’m healthy, and figure out what I need to do that day to stay that way – whether it’s workout, eating right, or seeing a doctor about something.
The next thing I think is “How’s my wife doing?” She takes care of my kids, after all. She’s a mother who looks after them nonstop, even though they’re all in their twenties now. She lets me know what I need to do or need to know. So she needs to be doing well too.
After that, it’s “How are my kids doing?” I think about each one. My son Max is getting ready for a trip while studying abroad, so I check in with him. My other son, William, is going through a job transition in New York, so I check in with him. My daughter Lauren just had a little dinner party last night. I check in with her. It’s short – sometimes a call, sometimes a text. After that, I ask about how my friends are doing. One friend is transitioning to a new company this year. Another friend has moved to a different state. I like to keep tabs on my friends and be there for them too.
Then, finally, I think about work.
The main part of life is the family.
What’s a major obstacle you have overcome?
I really worked hard on work-life balance. The biggest occupational hazard I think, and not just for lawyers but professionals in general, is stress. And I learned that early when I was a young lawyer. There were so many lawyers in their 40s who were divorced, who were unhealthy, who were alcoholics, and they all worked 10-hour days and worked on the weekends and whatnot. And I didn’t think that looked sustainable.
I didn’t want that. I didn’t feel like I could be a good husband or father or friend or any of that stuff if I was spending my time for what, chasing money? I figured that maybe it would be okay if I drove a Honda to the gym instead of a BMW.
So that was a big thing for me – and the big success was being able to overcome that trap. I’m 58 right now. I work three days a week – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I work 5 hours each day. And believe it or not, in those 15 hours, I get more done than I used to get in 40 hours.
And it’s so hard to imagine how you could do that! But you start working smart, and to me, it’s all about kingpins. In bowling, when you knock the kingpin down, it knocks all the other pins down. So if you start thinking, what am I trying to accomplish, how can I accomplish that in the least amount of time, and in the most efficient way? What do I need to do this? What pin do I need to knock over to get the most amount done? So you can stop trying to be thorough and comprehensive, and focus your time on being precise and exact. You start to figure out the little things where you can bring about a result, or increase the probability of a result, by just doing one or two little things instead of a huge thing.
Being precise and exact to get more things done. I like that!
So you’ve structured your life in such a way that it allows you to have this work-life balance. Is that something that you talk to your clients about?
Well, I don’t really like telling other people how to do things! It’s like when you’re golfing and you see someone who doesn’t play that much pull the wrong club out…if they’re not asking, I’m not telling. You know what I mean?
I feel like, what I do works for me. And if someone along the way sees or hears about what I’m doing, and it influences them somehow, then great, so be it. But I’m not going to proactively tell people about things like that.
However, I do sometimes get a little pushy when I talk to my clients about how they manage their personal wealth. And I don’t mean by how they have it invested and whatnot, but typically my clients are entrepreneurs. They have someone at their business managing the financial matters and moving it around and collecting the receivables and things like that. And it runs really well.
But then on the personal side, they do all their own stuff. So when we set up our asset protection structures, I emphasize that, in addition to incorporating this asset protection structure into their situation, they really should have somebody handling all the bookkeeping, financials, loans, tax returns, that sort of thing. There’s a better use of their time, and that’s really what I push.
The benefits of being precise and exact.
I’d like to talk about risk again. You mentioned earlier that you saw not starting your own business as a risk! And, as far as I understand it, asset protection works towards minimizing risk. What are your own personal philosophies around managing risk in your own life?
Well, again, this is just for me. I don’t know if this applies to everyone else, but there is no better bet than betting on yourself! That’s my philosophy.
So if I had my own business, I can control it. I can make sure it’s financially sound. I can make it run smoothly. I don’t have to rely on a bunch of other people to make sure I still have a job.
I just felt like, if you focus on work-life balance and some of the things we’ve talked about, working for yourself is a better situation. It carries less risk than all of those changes. I can set my own schedule. I could work as hard or as little as I wanted to. I always like consistency. I like steadiness. Like I talked about earlier, I want to minimize disruption, and it’s easier for me to plan for it when I work for myself.
I love the philosophy of betting on yourself. In that same vein, what’s next for Bill Simon?
Well, one of the challenges at the firm was that we deal with a lot of trustees, and the turnaround time when you deal with them can be long and difficult. It takes a lot of time to get things turned around, and it was slowing down our project. We solved that problem domestically by gaining control of trusteeship for our clients, and now we’re working on solving that at an international level when we deal with international trustees. Things were taking two or three months that we could normally turn around in two or three days. So that’s the new thing on the business front – we’re setting up an international trust company.
On the personal front, I have my son William in New York and my daughter Lauren in Dallas. We split our time between the two cities so we can spend time with each kid. My youngest son Max, we’re still figuring out where he’s going to be, but I think he’ll end up in Dallas. We’re just following the kids around and spending as much time as we can with them – but in a good way! Not in a, “Oh man, dad’s here again,” way, you know what I mean?
At this point, I really just want to keep things going! I’m golfing a lot. I’ve played Augusta National recently, what a treat that was. And I’m going to Scotland in July to golf with your dad.
What a year!
At this point, I’m just trying to stay as healthy as I can. What’s next? I just want to enjoy the time. I’ve done the work, I had the discipline to invest and not blow money on material things, and I want to just keep doing what I’m doing.
One of the many benefits of staying healthy!
What’s the best way to get in contact if someone would like to learn more or follow up with you?
We have a good newsletter, and everything from our newsletter is on our blog, and my daughter Lauren turns the blog posts into video animations too, which you can find on our YouTube. Or you can follow Sollertis or me on LinkedIn. But that’s pretty much it.
All of our business comes from relationships. Probably 95% of our clients are from relationships, only 5% found us on their own. Our clients are generally high net worth people who don’t really go online to look for us – they find us through their relationships. So for us, the social media and all that isn’t really to drive business, it’s to have a little street cred when someone checks us out.
Is there anything you’d like to talk about or highlight before we go?
I have been so fortunate to have some of the greatest mentors that you could ever imagine.
Something I’ve noticed is that people who are successful, if you ask them, generally want to impart that knowledge and that wisdom on you.
So even though, like we talked about earlier, I won’t tell someone what to do unprompted, if they ask for my advice, I’m very eager to share it with them. I’ve learned some good stuff. I want to pass on what I’ve learned.
I would just say that to anyone out there reading this, never be shy about going out and talking to the most important person in the room, who’s accomplished the most. You might think, “Oh, he’s so busy,” or “He wouldn’t talk to me.” No, you go ask that guy, “Hey, how did you end up playing NFL football?” Or, “How did you become the CEO of that company?” And it’s unbelievable how much those people welcome that, and love to tell you the story, and how much you can learn just from listening to what they say.
So I guess that’s my approach. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just talk to people who have already done it, and they’ll give you the secret sauce.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Khai Minh Pham, a visionary at the intersection of life science and artificial intelligence. While AI has only recently entered the public conscious, Khai has been a trailblazer in the AI space, starting with growing and exiting a groundbreaking AI company, DataMind/RightPoint, in the early 2000s.
His latest company, ThinkingNode Life Science, is both truly innovative and terribly interesting – he’s working on revolutionizing the way we approach healthcare and drug development by running both through the lens of AI-generated digital cell clones.
We went in-depth on a number of subjects ranging from Philosophy to biology, covering topics like the types of knowledge, reasoning vs pattern recognition (and what that means for AI), how Khai started his first company without even a computer or money in France, and, in the end, how technology has the capacity to allow us to truly become more human.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
In the business world, people often say that entrepreneurs take more risks. I don’t see it that way – or, I guess I don’t see risk the same way as most people. If I did, I don’t think I would do anything! I’m not even sure that you have to do anything specific to be resilient – you just do things, and let other people qualify you as resilient. It’s more about the end result, and the process of getting to that end result, than anything specific that you’re doing.
I find that business, and entrepreneurship, is like a long journey. You take it one step at a time. You just have to be motivated to get to the very next step. And then, at the end, you look back and realize, wow, I’ve done all that?
Perhaps continuously finding that motivation to just get to that next step over and over is what you would call resilience.
Dr. Khai Minh Pham giving a talk about AI as part of the CTO Talks series.
You’ve had an interesting career journey – while a buzzword as of late, you’ve actually been at the forefront of AI for 30 years. In the 90s, you founded the company DataMind, which was an AI platform for the Fintech/CRM industry, and guided it to a $630 million exit. Can you talk about your journey as an entrepreneur?
My mom is Vietnamese, so I always say I didn’t have a choice on what I would be when I grew up – I had to be a physician!
I entered medical school in France, but in my second year of the program, I realized that there was no way that I could remember all of this information. I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t forget anything when I diagnose or treat a patient – but I wondered if AI could do it. But when I talked to the AI people, their explanations of what AI was actually capable of was not very satisfying – so I decided to work out for myself the way AI could solve my problem.
Most people in AI would design a formal system, and then try and fit the way we think into that system. I did the opposite. I had a problem, which was how to handle the different types of thinking that you find in medicine, and I worked to design a system that could reason. So, in the mornings, I would head to the hospital, but in the afternoons, I would go do computer science, and in the evening I would catch up on my medical studies. I was a real nerd already teaching AI and working for the company.
Once I did my PhD in AI, I started to publish in main peer-review systems, such as IEEE. It was frustrating since I realized that once I got my grants, that was it – there weren’t enough resources to develop the type of AI I actually wanted to develop. I decided then to start my first company in order to have get enough resources to do what I wanted to do. I didn’t have money, I didn’t have a computer. But I decided just to go for it since I had such a desire to do this research. It started simply because I wasn’t satisfied with what existed.
Wait a minute, so you started your first company without a computer?
Well, I didn’t have a computer and I didn’t have any money either! Actually, it was the other way around – I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t afford a computer!
So my first goal was to get a computer. At that time, Sony was providing workstations if you had an interesting project. I went in there, gave my pitch, and they gave me two! But then I had a different problem, because now I had two workstations but I didn’t have a desk. So I went to a meeting in France for entrepreneurs and I met a few of them. I told them that AI was going to be important one day – and if you give me a desk to work out of, I can explain to you what I’m doing and maybe it will be interesting and helpful for your business down the road. One of them eventually accepted, and I had a desk! So now I have a computer and a desk, but I don’t have people working with me – so I had to head to the bank!
Imagine walking into a French bank at the time to explain AI. Nobody knew what it was. But I believed in my passion so strongly and had such a great technology that eventually I walked out with a credit line, and I was able to hire an engineer and an assistant. I then took my savings and went to a big conference in Silicon Valley. There, I ended up meeting the President of Microsoft Europe. I told him that he had nothing left to prove at Microsoft and asked him to come join me! Again, I don’t think I’d have done things like that today!
Something I learned very quickly was that people at the top level of business have more freedom to do what they want, while the intermediate level has to produce – because a few months later that Microsoft exec was in my office and we were talking about the technology!
Then, one day, I was out to lunch and when I came back, my assistant said that I had missed a call from a “Mr. Gatess.” (with two s, since she is Portuguese and had not been in the computer business). I didn’t know who that was – but then I realized that it was actually “Mr. Gates!” She didn’t take his phone number down, so I was really hoping that he would call back – luckily, he did! So I had a meeting with Bill and we talked about AI and the tech.
The main thing that you realize when you work with a big corporation is that their time is not the same as your time. They have all the time in the world, and they want to use it to understand everything they can. After the meeting with Gates, he set up a meeting with the CTO of Microsoft at the time, Nathan Myhrvold. But I realized that I didn’t have the resources to do what they wanted yet, so I had to decline. They even offered me to join Microsoft and work on the research I wanted and wouldn’t need to think about the budget.
Then, somehow, IBM learned about my company and they wanted to invest. But they were too big for me. Then the VCs found out about my company, and that’s how I ended up really starting my own company in Silicon Valley. After that, everything went very quickly!
I learned too, just how important culture is. When I arrived, I didn’t speak English well at all. I had to translate everything that was said in every meeting into French in my mind. It was exhausting! The way people worked over here was different too – so I had to learn that as well.
So I don’t necessarily think that I’m resilient, but I just kept going and hanging in there. I was just so motivated by this project that it kept the engine going.
That’s an incredible story!
Well, now that I look back on it, I would never do it that way today! For example, when I started, I had never even heard of the term business plan! But I just never stopped. It was really based on an inner motivation. I don’t really feel resilient internally, but from an external viewpoint…maybe I am.
You’ve been at the forefront of AI for decades, at a time when most people are just becoming aware of AI and its capabilities. Can you talk about your own philosophy of AI learning and how that might differ from some of the major players, like ChatGPT?
We could spend hours and days talking about this!
The first thing you have to understand is the difference between data and knowledge. Humans don’t process data. We’re actually extremely bad at it! We process knowledge instead. Data is an isolated fact, but if you relate that fact to other facts, that becomes knowledge. And there are actually two steps for knowledge – information and knowledge. Things move from information to knowledge once it becomes an internal asset for your brain. For example, books are full of information. But that information becomes knowledge once you read, digest, and understand them. This is actually a very important distinction, because as soon as something becomes knowledge, then you can apply reasoning to it.
Most of the time when people talk about knowledge, they actually talk more about information that’s available – and there’s a lot of it. But that’s totally useless until someone acquires it and can reason with it. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that correlation is not causation. Correlation allows us to narrow down what’s going on, but causation is what we’re looking for. It’s what science is about, understanding cause and effect, right? For example, I can tell you that there’s a big correlation between people who see a doctor and people who die, but what does that mean?
In most of the AI that people focus on today, it’s about correlation. It’s based on statistical analysis that extracts patterns from large amounts of data.
Why we process data is to generate that knowledge, like I said earlier. Knowledge is the most powerful way to compress data because it lets us do reasoning afterwards.
So when people think about this, you have pattern recognition, which is data driven, and we have reasoning, which is knowledge driven. In AI, most of the AI today is Machine Learning (ML) – detecting and recognizing patterns. And it’s amazing what pattern recognition can do. It’s surprised a lot of people, including me, but it still doesn’t reason the way that humans reason. It’s missing an internal representation of the world that allows it to reason. It’s missing a mental model. ChatGPT makes associations of words, and the result is impressive when you read the results, but can present hallucinations because it doesn’t reason at all.
This last point is crucial. We don’t have access to the real world – we only see the world through our different mental models, and we have different types. The most powerful model, though, is our reasoning model. People studying science are essentially working to build reasoning models for their specific domains. So today, when we use machine learning for science applications, it’s fantastic because it can crunch so much data to narrow down and recognize patterns. But your ultimate goal should be to have a reasoning model at scale because no one can have all the available knowledge – except AI.
This brings us to what we do at ThinkingNode Life Science. We use distributed reasoning AI to generate reasoning models that we call reasoning networks. So we don’t generate text, or images, or videos like ChatGPT – we generate reasoning models for life science. We generate digital cell clones. Another important term is that we use “distributed reasoning,” meaning that we have more than one reasoning engine. For example, our AI reasons by analogy, by constraint, by case, by probability, and so on. If you only have one reasoning engine, if you’re centralized reasoning, it’s not possible to represent all these different types of reasoning. And this distributed reasoning AI is what I’ve been working on for decades now.
So we take our distributed reasoning AI and we use generative AI to generate these digital cell clones. We generate about 50 million additional data points for each digital clone using reason and not pattern recognition. Why do we do that? Well, most AI drug companies and pharma companies are focused on developing and designing new drugs. We don’t do anything related to that. We design and generate the digital cell clone of the patient or the disease to understand the impact of the drug on the cell. We are focused on cell response. I think that’s what matters most at the end of the day – the interaction between a drug and a cell. So we’re not in competition with any AI drug discovery company. We focus on biology, which is the cell – and how cells respond to drugs. We have a patent for digital cell differentiation that allows these cells to scale, and we use the gene expression data of the cell. We inject that into our human cell reasoning foundation model, and it differentiates the stem cells and things for us. So today, in about two hours, we can generate any type of human cell digitally.
Wow. So, just to restate this in a sentence, ThinkingNodeLife creates digital clones of human cells. You then use those clones, and artificial intelligence, to test and to explore drug interactions on the human body without using a live person. Is that correct?
Yes! It takes about 10 years and $2.6 billion to test a drug, and you still only have about a 4% chance of putting it on the market. There are lots of reasons why, but one of the main reasons is that there is no testing simulation.
In other industries, say the car or airplane industry, you don’t build the car or plane right away. You build a digital model and do simulations. We don’t have that in pharma.
The term clone is important here too – it’s not a digital twin. Digital twins, you have to build one by one. With our clones, it’s totally scalable since we digitally mimic the cell differentiation process. We have a foundation model, and differentiate based on that.
So it seems that ThinkingNodeLife has resilience baked into it – helping the healthcare and biotech spheres shorten drug times, understanding the interactions between cells, and allow companies to help people much faster than before. Can you talk more about how you help these companies build resilience in their workflows?
So we work with different types of companies. At a recent event at JP Morgan, we announced a strategic partnership with Debiopharm. It’s a Swiss pharma company, well established and well respected. They’re going to use our digital cell clone for cancer drug development. So this is one type of customer and partner – the biotech pharma that develops the drug.
With those companies, we can help them at the very beginning – finding new targets for the drug. Usually, this is done by the academics since it takes lots of time. Then, if you already have the drug, even before preclinical testing, we can simulate the drug’s impact on the human cell that you’re interested in. Then, if you’re already in phase 1 or phase 2 testing, we can use a patient’s data to generate their own clones to help companies select the next patient for their clinical trial.
And we can use all that to do different things. We can do drug comparison – comparing your drug to a competitor’s drug – which is normally pretty difficult, because you normally don’t have your competitor’s patient data. We can do drug repurposing and drug response prediction. Once you have all that, you can really help a company become first class, since we provide targets and can simulate all the phases for testing.
Then, we have a different type of company partner – AI drug companies. We don’t develop anything related to the drug, but we do know the cells that drug will impact – so there’s a complementarity there. We’re currently in discussions with a number of them.
We also work with CRO companies outsourcing the research for pharma biotech companies. We bring them Digital Cell Labs, so they can provide research services in preclinical or after clinical, so they can give more insight to their customers about the drug when it’s in development.
I think any company that develops a drug should do a simulation. And we help them do that.
That makes sense. So, you cut your teeth with your first company in Silicon Valley, but you recently moved to San Diego to be closer to our strong life sciences community. Can you talk about the differences between Silicon Valley and San Diego, especially for startups like yours?
Maybe it’s different today, but when I moved here about 10 years ago, Silicon Valley was much more focused on technology and San Diego was much more focused on science. I was lucky to work with the J. Craig Venter Institute down here, and this helped me really test my idea and work on different concepts. So this is a major pro, I think – the scientific community is extremely strong.
The other thing I found is that people are very collaborative in San Diego. I don’t know what it’s like today, but when I was up in Silicon Valley, it was very competitive. Here, we don’t hesitate to work together.
The last thing is that there are over 100 microbreweries! That’s a great part of San Diego.
Can you talk a little bit about the emerging field of digital biology? What is it? How do you see it contributing to building resilience in the fields of life sciences and healthcare?
Digital biology is a difficult definition, in the sense that as soon as you use a computer to understand biology, it can be considered to be digital biology. But what I have in mind is more about getting to a simulation of biology. There are different ways to do simulations, from mathematical models and so on. The one I’m focusing on is AI simulation, and, in particular, reasoning AI simulation.
This is an important concept but isn’t always easy to explain. It starts from realizing that we interact with the world only through our own mental models – only through our own reasoning model that we acquired at school, through our experiences, whatever. Our reasoning model is how we make sense of the world. Scientific education is essentially about building different reasoning models for different disciplines.
The approach that I have is not a pure mathematical simulation, for example, because humans don’t think through mathematical equations. We think through concepts. We think through conceptual mental models. And the way I approach digital biology is to generate the reasoning models for biology. One of the most important entities in biology is the cell – and that’s why we are focusing on providing and generating a reasoning foundation model of the cell.
What does this mean in terms of application? Well, today there are about 800 AI drug discovery companies, and designing drugs is very important. But what may be even more important at the end is the cell’s response to that drug.
In designing a drug, you try to see how the molecule you’ve designed binds to a target, which is usually a protein in or on the surface of the cell. This binding is very important. You see how well it binds, how specifically it binds.
Then, what’s important to us, is seeing the impact from this drug’s binding – you see the cell’s response. Typically digital biology is about simulating the binding itself in order to understand and design the drug. What we are focusing on is not about the drug – it’s about the cell’s response to the drug.
Interesting.
It’s a multidisciplinary team field, and it’s pretty involved – there are different aspects from computer biology, system biology, AI, and so on. The field is working on things like natural biological phenomena or synthesizing new artificial biological entities. In fact, ultimately, the far vision for our company is to simulate evolution.
Digital biology, the way I see it, gives us the technology to accelerate and even be active in the evolutionary process.
Let’s continue talking about how you see the future. While AI has been around for a while, it’s recently come to the forefront of public consciousness with the emergence of ChatGPT – and it’s changed a lot of people’s relationships with technology. What do you see for the field of AI going forward?
Well, first of all, we have to understand what the term “intelligence” means, since it’s artificial intelligence. I used to mention [Swiss psychologist] Jean Piaget’s definition – intelligence is not what you know, it’s what you do when you don’t know. And I’d add to that – getting to a rational outcome when you don’t know. Since, for example, ChatGPT will provide you an answer, but it cannot explain the why behind the answer. It has answers based on the association of words and not on the rational reasoning process that usually is based on causality and not correlation. It can give a very convincing explanation but ultimately can go wrong with hallucination. It’s not rational.
When we talk about AI, we have two understand two different aspects of it. Daniel Kahneman talks about these aspects in his famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The first aspect is System 1 thinking, or pattern recognition. It’s what you do when you recognize a face or a piece of music. It’s very fast. There’s no reasoning.
The second aspect is System 2 thinking. That’s slower. It’s when you have to think rationally, have some hypotheses, deduce things, and so on.
The AI that is known today by the public is pattern recognition, based on Big Data, and it’s amazing what can be done at scale. The other AI that you don’t hear much about is reasoning AI, and that’s because most of existing reasoning AI is based on just one reasoning engine. But there are different types of reasoning. It’s why I worked for decades on that topic, called distributed reasoning AI, where each piece of knowledge is a mini-reasoning engine in itself, and you throw those mini-engines into any logic you want.
The future of AI is the combination of the two types, as we are, right? We do pattern recognition and we do reasoning – but it’s very important that people realize that AI is not just machine learning. It’s not just pattern recognition. It’s not just ChatGPT. It’s much more than that. When we see what we can do with pattern recognition at scale, well, imagine what we can do with reasoning at scale.
Reasoning is important, too. It’s the way that humans make decisions. We don’t process data, we process knowledge. When you think about how AI can potentially interact with humans, yeah, it can be easy to interact with based on pattern recognition and lots of text, that’s certainly one way. But if we want to interact with AI and have it be close to how we think and reason, that’s reasoning AI.
While AI based on pattern recognition can generate cool images like the above, it is unable to reason.
What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs and professionals on developing a resilient mindset and making a meaningful impact in the world of AI and life sciences?
As I mentioned at the very beginning of the interview, I don’t know if it’s worth focusing on becoming resilient. What I mean is, resilience is a consequence – it’s a consequence of passion and a consequence of your actions. When you have a passion, you will be resilient. Your goal isn’t to become resilient, your goal was to achieve your passion – but resilience was found on the way.
So I don’t have any tips for resilience, but I have tips about being passionate. It’s about looking backward in your childhood, looking for what is meaningful, and focusing on that. Find your life’s purpose. Applying it to life science now, well, what can be more interesting than life itself? And when combined with AI, what’s more interesting than working on how we reason and understand? When you combine the two, it’s incredible. That’s why I’m so passionate about both. It’s how to understand reasoning, and applying that to improve life.
What’s next for ThinkingNodeLife, and how could somebody who’s reading this blog potentially help you?
We’re currently in the middle of Series A fundraising, and we’re looking for people who are passionate. It’s nice to be smart, but it’s not enough. I want people who are interested and are going to enjoy the journey, because, if you enjoy the journey, you can go very far. We’re looking for people who are open-minded, not people who only want to prove that they’re really smart. We want people who both really understand the mission and are on mission.
So, the next concrete step we’re taking is finding funding, but we’re also focused on finding customers. We have some events coming up, like at the BIO International Conference in June. We’re looking at partnerships too – we just partnered up with Debiopharm, a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland.
And finally, if you’re passionate about AI and life sciences, I’d be happy to meet.
What’s the best way for somebody to contact you, or your company, if they’d like to learn more?
People talk a lot about technology, and sometimes people focus too much on the technology side of things. I think what we need to focus on instead is how technology can allow us to be human. I almost don’t consider us to be human yet. When I see what’s going on in the world, we’re pre-human. How can we use our technology to allow us to have more time, to be less greedy, to create abundance?
And what do you think it means to be a human?
Well, that’s a huge question of course. People talk about consciousness and so on, but I think being human is thinking of others, not about yourself. Being human is the ability to contemplate, the ability to appreciate things. Being able to sit and contemplate the beauty of a tree, for example. Animals don’t have the luxury or capacity to do that – they can only think about survival.
Humans though, by thinking of others, have the ability to appreciate, to protect, to build. And leaning into these gifts is what makes us human.
I recently had the chance to sit down with Jonah Peake to talk about the go-to source he created for all of San Diego’s tech and entrepreneurship events, (and perhaps what could be called his alter ego), The Social Coyote.
More than just a mere event newsletter, The Social Coyote is one man’s mission to get 1000 San Diegans out of their dens and into the tech and entrepreneurship community. Sprinkled throughout the weekly calendar are a healthy doses of coyotes wearing sunglasses and a fur-rocious amount of puns. It’s great fun, sure, but The Social Coyote is also a case study on building community and connection in an increasingly digital age. And honestly, it’s working – it really does get people excited for these events! Who would have thought that such a simple concept, a curated event email newsletter, would be so much fun? Jonah would, that’s who.
We talked about a number of topics, including using change to propel yourself forward, his thoughts on San Diego’s tech culture, how to build and see a community’s web, how to be comfortable at unfamiliar events, and how to finally find your pack.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
I like this question – I’ve actually been thinking about it all week! Resilience, to me, means going through something challenging, coming out different, and then finding a way to use that difference to move forward.
I have a bit of a personal story with this. When I was 27, I went through a health crisis. I went into a coma, was taken into the hospital by my girlfriend (who is now my wife!), and it turned out that I had ketoacidosis, which is what happens when you have Type 1 Diabetes. Basically, your body turns acidic because you can’t get sugar into your cells.
It was crazy because, after a few days in the hospital and many IVs, I was released from the hospital – but I had an entirely new lens to view the world. If I eat a certain way, I have to think about it differently. If I exercise a certain way, I have to think about it differently. Even something like leaving the house is different. And it was a total shift in how I lived my life.
So in a weird way, going through that experience shifted who I was completely, and refocused how I thought about everything – and I do see that as finding a bit of resilience in an extremely challenging situation. I could have easily said “This sucks” and felt sorry for myself, (although you sometimes do), but that’s not the way you want to go through something like that.
I think if we think about it, most of us have had an experience that totally shifted us, but that health crisis was a really strong one that taught me a lot.
So going through something, and coming out on the other side differently as a result – but resilience is found when you use that difference to propel yourself forward.
I mean, you never go back to being the person that you were a year ago – or even the person you were yesterday. Propelling yourself through change with a new context is how I like to think about it.
You are heavily involved in the San Diego startup and entrepreneurship community. Can you briefly give some background on your career/areas of focus so far?
The start of my career in San Diego was teaching surf lessons and handing out Monster Energy drinks. These ended up being dead end jobs and I needed to find something I could grow into. So I went searching for a startup, and what I found was basically on-demand tech. I found my way to a company I found on Craigslist called Handy, which was a home cleaning startup, in the era where people were trying to build the next “Uber for ….” They eventually were purchased by Angie’s List.
Handy shared coworking space with Postmates – so we battled for conference room space with them to onboard our people!Then, I worked on a project that would eventually automate my job entirely at Handy, and, seeing the writing on the wall and having connections at Postmates, I jumped over. Plus, food delivery felt cooler than home cleaning!
What I started to notice, though, is that when a company (like a Postmates) gets massive quickly, they start to dial in certain processes. There’s less “We don’t know how to solve this, go figure it out,” and more “Here’s the playbook, run it and do the same thing every day,” which isn’t necessarily how I tend to think.
I really enjoy trying things and being creative, and that doesn’t always lend itself as well to the big machine that companies eventually grow into. I realized that I wanted to go earlier and see what companies that were far younger were doing. And so I started to seek out the San Diego tech scene, see who was active here, and see who was building things here. That’s how I started to plug into what was happening in the scene.
I started offering to volunteer at organizations that I thought were cool, like Startup San Diego, which was looking for an entrepreneur in residence in 2020. I ended up spending a year with them and putting on the Startup Month conference. It was actually a month, not a week, at that point!
Cool.
And there were a few others as well – the San Diego Angel Conference was going online, and when I talked to some of the people involved, it seemed super interesting. So I volunteered there, and tried to meet people and see who was operating in that space.
What ends up happening with many communities is that the same faces start showing up at different events. You start recognizing people from all over the place, and you start to put these webs together.
I had enough time working in and hopping between these different ecosystems and realized that we have a pretty intimate web in San Diego. Even though it’s large, there’s lots of overlap and crossover. And that got me really excited.
Before we move on to The Social Coyote, let’s keep talking about the idea of a San Diego ecosystem. What do you believe are some unique strengths in the San Diego scene? A common topic of discussion is that the San Diego tech scene is great at starting and growing mid-sized companies, but with a few exceptions, tech companies here seem to have a hard time crossing the chasm to become giant household names.
There’s a lot of debate on what makes San Diego what it is and why it’s the way that it is. Some people say that we’re the little underdog brother to some of the bigger scenes, and others disagree. Other groups don’t count biotech as part of the tech scene, even though I think it’s really a massive part! It could be partly due to the fact that there are so many transplants here. I’m one.
One thing I’ve thought about, and I don’t know if this is the real reason, is that some of the biggest industries and most influential groups in San Diego aren’t necessarily in the news. For example, they provide infrastructure or something to the military and it’s literally top secret so you can’t talk about it.
Biotech is also interesting. They don’t like to share what they do unless it’s already successful. Then, a company like Qualcomm is huge, but their technology powers other technology – and most people are just more familiar with Apple than the technology inside an iPhone.
So I think there’s a feeling that we don’t have as much going on here as we truly do, just due to the nature of some of the biggest tech businesses we have here – but again, this is something that people like to debate.
The other thing though is that we have this culture here that is a touch more relaxed. You might have noticed this if you’ve asked for an intro to someone. It’s somehow easier to acquire than other tech scenes or tech communities.
I also think there’s just something about the way the city is structured. It’s very laid back. It doesn’t have the intensity of New York or San Francisco, and I think that changes how other people view it. But I think that’s a good thing! I really like how we have this energy and how we, for example, like to just take advantage of when it’s nice out!
So, I don’t know. I do think the friendliness and interconnectedness are a bit more vibrant here. We also shouldn’t forget that we’re 1.5 million people with 2 million more just south of the border who are very engaged with what’s going on up here – in effect, we’re nearly 4 million people in a very small area. That counts for something.
The man behind the coyote – Jonah Peake!
Totally. And so that’s where you come in! Your current project, or perhaps your alias, is The Social Coyote, and helping push these connections and the culture. Can you talk about that? Why a coyote?
I guess I was looking for some creative fulfillment. I was feeling disconnected from, let’s say, community in general, for a number of reasons. There was the pandemic, and I had a young child which also limits your schedule. But a few cool tools started to come online right around then – AI started to come out and people are generating amazing images with it, and there’s this new platform, Beehiiv, which allows you to make newsletters in a really effective and efficient way. All of these things kind of came together for me – I know I want to do a project, I want it to be creative, I want it to be helpful, and I want it to have some sort of cool impact on San Diego. And I also know that I have a limited schedule, and there’s lots of cool stuff going on.
Meanwhile, people would shoot me a text and ask me if I was going to something that night that I didn’t even know was happening. I had to decline all the time because I couldn’t get out of the house that quickly, so it started to get a little frustrating. So I first thought that, if I could learn how to code a web scraper, I could pull every event into one big database, and then I could know who is doing what and then I choose what fits in my schedule. I used as many tools as I could and banged my head against a wall, because that turned out to be a really bad plan! I realized that curation is what makes The Coyote special, not aggregation.
I told a friend about this and he told me just to do it manually – just make a list and put it out there. See if anyone cares. That was a good point, because I was really overthinking what I wanted to do, and he pushed me to just go for it.
So at that point, I had to figure out what I really wanted to highlight. I knew some people in the tech community and really respected the events they were putting on, and I could share their events without having to attend each one. So then it all started coming together, but I couldn’t put out a brand that was something like OnlyTechEvents, or something, but that’s a little too basic – or a little too much like OnlyFans. But maybe my SEO would have been great!
Then I thought of some other names, like Songbird Soirees. But songbirds didn’t make sense, and soirees are too fancy. So then I started to think about what we have in San Diego. What’s a San Diego animal? Could be a pelican, but then everyone who reads my list is a pelican too. So then I thought, what do I really want this to be? And I wanted it to be groups, packs of people. I wanted it to be a clever animal. I wanted it to have the feeling of something that is always present, but you might not always see. That’s when I thought about coyotes, which you sometimes see in our canyons or trotting around our neighborhoods, and I’m certain that they know a hell of a lot about us, even if we don’t see them at all!
And all of these things together felt really right. Packs and families, groups coming together. It felt like something I wanted to embody – bringing groups of people together and having them meet each other. My thesis became, the more people got out into the community, then the more opportunity they’d have to meet someone new who can open a door for them. We just needed the initial catalyst to get people out of their dens. And then the puns started showing up, and that’s what I built the brand around. It just felt right.
That sort of hearkens back to your original comment about resilience – using the change from a transformative event to propel you forward. You felt disconnected from a community, then acted on that feeling to build something new. And you acting on that feeling has allowed other people to access that community too.
I think that’s really true. When I started talking to people, I realized that most of the comments I got back were things like, “My events pop up in my feed,” or “Someone told me about it,” or some other way of getting lucky. I didn’t want luck to be the barrier that prevented people from getting out there.
The more interactions we have, the better we get at them, so I wanted to make it easy for someone to grab my list, make it unbelievably simple to find what they’re looking for, and encourage them to go to it. And I wanted to make Mondays something to look forward to!
But really, I see this as a way to bring more eyes and more people into the tech community. If we can get more people in more easily, I’d consider that to be a success.
You mentioned that the genesis for The Social Coyote was that you felt disconnected. It was during COVID, you had a young child at home. Now that you’re connecting with the business community at large, does that fill that personal need for connection? Are you experiencing more community?
I think it does!
I think what ends up happening, and maybe this happens by accident, is you just start to go out more. You start to notice more connections. You start to see more people doing things you appreciate, and you absorb that.
Speaking of resilience, I remember going to a couple of events in the very beginning to test my thesis, and I knew no one. It was so hard to be at one of those events with something so small. The Social Coyote was tiny, and I wasn’t even sure I was allowed to talk about it yet. No one had heard of it. I didn’t even know if I had anything yet. But what I realized was, the more you went, the more you started to see similar people. The same people were now at a different event. And so you started to feel a bit more comfortable, and by being more comfortable, you felt more confident in going out and trying something new.
The other thing I noticed throughout this process is that every event starts out and hasn’t warmed up yet. So a lot of times you show up and get into a room and think, “This is uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable. I shouldn’t be here.” But what I realized is, after a certain amount of time, everyone warms up and loosens up, and so does the event itself. A lot of people associate that with having a drink or whatever, which can be a good strategy, but the event itself takes time to warm up too.
Sometimes just giving it time, being observant, and finding someone that you recognize is all it takes to get to that point. Then, when you get out more, you run into more people. You follow their journeys, and you see them grow as well. That’s kind of how I think about it, anyways.
To continue down the coyote theme, you’ll start to find your pack and this will help you get more comfortable!
Go through something challenging, come out different, and then find a way to use that difference to move forward. – The Coyote
What are some tips that you have for people who want to get involved in a new community, perhaps the San Diego business scene, who don’t have much experience in these types of events and don’t know where to start?
One thing I learned from the early stages, before I was comfortable, was that I didn’t actually have to say anything. I didn’t have to come to the table and start to pitch what I was doing, or tell everyone everything that is really cool about me, or whatever.
This strategy lets me ease into events a little more. After a few times, you start to recognize people, and now it becomes easier to chat with someone or even just show up at an event. Like I said earlier, it takes time to warm up. It will always feel weird at the beginning. And if you do have something you want to chat about, have that prepared a little bit so you don’t hit someone with a really long winded story! Wait for some questions to come in after you give a little elevator pitch.
The other thing is to just ask questions. Care about what other people are doing. That makes the thing a whole hell of a lot more fun if you’re curious and truly want to learn what other people are up to.
I used to do this when I was uncomfortable. I would be in my own mind a little bit and pretend I was hosting a podcast. Just ask some questions and don’t feel like you have to talk about yourself, because sometimes that can be a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes just being curious as to what other people are doing can be super helpful, and can take the spotlight off yourself too.
I like that podcast host tip – that’s unique! A fun little mental trick.
It actually works! Although it sometimes backfires, because I’ve had conversations end and the other person says, “I feel horrible! I didn’t ask you anything about yourself!”
In my mind though, I’m like, “I loved our conversation, I learned so much!”
Can you share some success stories from The Social Coyote? Have there been any connections or communities built that you have been especially proud of?
There are a few examples! I can’t take credit for either of these events, but I love that I can help elevate newer events.
One of my favorites is the North County Tech Meetup. This isn’t my group, but I love helping to promote it. Hussein is the best!
Rick Moy’s product group is another group that I love to promote.
Both groups are under a year old but are gaining steam. Everyone knows about the big San Diego events, but it’s these up start groups by talented people that really get me going.
So it really doesn’t take much to get me excited. Someone gave me a “Howl Yeah!” in Costco the other day and it made my week! I can’t take credit for much of this really, everyone else is working so hard – I just collected a few things that I thought looked awesome and wrapped them in some coyote puns.
The branding of The Social Coyote is so unique – and fun! I especially love the “Howl Yeah” shout out. Despite being a relatively small niche (San Diego tech events), you have such a strong brand voice. Can you talk about the importance of branding? What, in your opinion, goes into making a strong and memorable brand?
I don’t have a background in branding or anything, but I just like things that flow together and sort of fit. The Social Coyote has a lot of elements that are kind of weird, or funny, but together feel like they make sense for some reason. It’s important to listen to what other people are saying too. They like coyotes wearing sunglasses. They say things like “Howl yeah.” And you’re like, “Oh man, that works. You’re right.”
I think maybe the advice is, for something like this, you don’t have to create the entire brand, but set the foundation and put it out there, and you’ll get good feedback. The hard part can be, and part of this is from the tech background that says to always innovate and move forward, is knowing when to keep things simple. I put out a couple questions asking what I can do better and what to do next, and someone replied, “Don’t.” And that made me realize that something cool can be simple.
Totally. What’s next for the Social Coyote?
I’m trying to figure that out right now. There are lots of really interesting ideas! For the brand, it could be events. It could be promoting events. I’d love to help founders make connections if I can, and of course I’d like to be a little more connected myself.
I’ve even been pitched a Coyote Accelerator, a program that helps founders. I like all these ideas, so I think it’s now just finding out how to look through the lens and see what’s next.
I wish I had a grand master plan, but I’m having so much fun meeting people that, just the fact that this is out there and people are noticing it, is considered a win. I think there could be more down the road, but we’ll have to see.
What is the best way for someone to follow you (or get in touch!) if they’d like to learn more or get involved? How can someone reading this blog help out?
I’m mostly on LinkedIn. I have a pretty simple rule for connecting there – if you’re in San Diego, I’ll accept. I just love to meet people in San Diego.
I think the best way to help is to just come out and support event organizers! People put a lot of work into these events, and getting out of our dens makes an even more connected San Diego. Oh, and loop in folks who’ve just moved here with The Social Coyote so we can bring them out too.
That’s kind of the origin of all of this anyways. How can we build a bigger network, a bigger group, a bigger pack of people who care about San Diego Tech and Entrepreneurship?
The other thing too is, there’s always room for more awesome events. If you’re eager to get a pack of people together and start something, go for it. Nothing should slow you down. Even just getting people together for coffee is valuable, and I like promoting that stuff too.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ravi Chawla, a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Research, who is currently in the very early stages of forming ChakraTech (formerly known as WheelBio). This company is dedicated to using microbes to make completely and naturally degradable bioplastics from greenhouse gases, potentially solving the problem of plastic pollution! He recently took third place in a pitch competition through Aquillius, and will be utilizing their lab space as he forms his company.
Over the course of our wide-ranging conversation, we covered topics like the risks associated with forming a startup, pushing through difficulties with commercializing this product, and building a resilient industrial biotech scene in San Diego.
It was a fascinating conversation, and a great opportunity to talk to someone at the forefront of both science and business, working to get a brand-new, innovative company off the ground.
I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?
That’s an interesting question!
The word resilience to me refers to the spirit of persevering in the presence of difficulty. To be resilient, therefore, means to prevail or succeed despite all the odds!
Resilience is a profound concept in philosophy and psychology, embodying a character marked by persistence in responding to challenges or hardships. Often, individuals are not immediately aware of their own resilience; it becomes apparent through their actions and reactions over time. I am deeply inspired by individuals who exhibit perseverance and courage. Their stories of overcoming adversity not only resonate with me, but also fuel my own aspirations and strengthen my own commitment to face challenges with similar bravery.
Achieving anything significant, particularly when it involves paradigm-shifting innovations, demands immense determination. And interestingly, resilience extends beyond personal tenacity; it is deeply rooted in the collective strength drawn from one’s support network and community. Therefore, it’s crucial to be in the company of people who offer unwavering support and encouragement during challenging times. This belief forms the cornerstone of my philosophy on resilience.
Overall, resilience is a harmonious interplay between personal commitment and communal support, underpinned by strategic thinking, persistent action, and reliable execution, all directed towards a common goal.
So seeing a vision, and then doing whatever it takes to get there.
Yes, by going full force!
I attended an Anglo-Vedic middle school in India, where I drew much inspiration from ancient Indian texts. I am often reminded of a powerful quote by the late 19th-century Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.”
This quote, which was inspired by a shloka from the Katha Upanishad, continues to resonate with me.
Ravi Chawla pitches ChakraTech’s innovative technology at San Diego Startup Week
Your background is an interesting one. You’re from a small town in India but became a chemical engineer. How has this background influenced your career?
Growing up in a small town was a formative experience for me. Limited opportunities translate into limited expectations and limited aspirations. My dad was just happy that I finished 10th grade.
When I finished 10th grade, my dad brought me a job he saw in the newspaper for a position as a constable. I was like, “do I look like someone who could do that? I’m the biggest nerd that exists!” But I, somehow, have always had a determination to challenge the status quo and defy the norm. Perhaps, I get this trait from my mom, who I’ve always thought to be both fearless and a force of nature, and has always been a tremendous source of inspiration for me! Anyway, this drive led me to successfully persuade my family to relocate to a larger city, Chandigarh, that opened the door to more educational opportunities.
After relocating to Chandigarh, I completed 12th grade and appeared for the engineering school entrance exams. My interests primarily lay in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. However, when someone suggested a career in chemical engineering, I was initially distraught. Even though I was preparing for engineering school, I had no understanding of what any of the engineering fields entailed. Among my peers, the prevailing belief was that chemical engineering involved extensive chemistry and rote memorization, with limited career prospects. This perception made me hesitant to pursue it.
By a fortunate coincidence, Panjab University in Chandigarh had an outstanding chemical engineering program. Financial constraints led me to choose this path over the then-popular computer science or other engineering majors. Thanks to the program’s affordability and the scholarships I received, I could pursue my education. Surprisingly, I fell in love with the chemical engineering curriculum and education. It quickly became apparent that this was my true calling. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it, and it continues to shape my approach to solving scientific and technical problems. In retrospect, my initial concerns were unfounded, as I stumbled upon my passion in a field I had chosen by chance!
In my opinion, “success” is a delicate balance between determination and destiny. One has to attempt to create their own destiny, but then let nature take its own course. It’s actually a philosophy from a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita – you only have the rights to your efforts, and not the rewards or fruits of it. I think that is something that fundamentally governs me. Give it your best attempt, and then everything else is out of your control.
Your biotech startup, ChakraTech, is still currently in stealth mode, but you have recently begun to pitch for fundraising, coming in third place at a recent pitch competition in San Diego. What can you tell me about your company so far?
We are in early stages of our journey, and I can tell you in very broad terms about what we are doing and how we got here.
The biggest thing that came out of the Industrial Revolution in the 20th century was the introduction of plastics. Plastics fundamentally changed the paradigm. It actually totally moved our society to where it is today – without them, we would not be here! Imagine life without milk containers, shoes, everything – everything has plastics.
However, what was a boon for the 20th century is a bane for the 21st century. They’ve served an incredible purpose, but the truth is, these plastics are accumulating in our environment at an incredible pace.
Growing up, my mom was always concerned about plastics entering our food chain through contact with food, and she preferred to use reusable containers made from materials such as steel, glass, and ceramic. It turns out her hunch was spot-on. Recent studies suggest that an average person is ingesting up to a credit card worth of microplastics every week! The full extent of how these micro- and nano-plastics affect our health and environment is still not completely understood, posing a concerning and largely unexplored risk.
What we do at ChakraTech is emulate ancient microbial processes to create biodegradable plastics. Over billions of years, certain microbes have figured out a way to make a degradable plastic, or polyester. It’s actually a fat reserve for them! Similar to how we get fat and have love handles, for bacteria, they’ll end up making their own version of fat reserves – bioplastics. These bioplastics degrade completely in a short time, typically a year or less, and have the power to totally change the 21st century.
Wow, that’s incredible. Is this a new discovery?
No, this polymer is not a new discovery. The earliest reported sighting of this bioplastic polymer was actually from 1890 in a German textbook! Efforts to commercialize it since 1980s have faltered, struggling to compete with the economics of petrochemical plastics. Yet, the potential for scientific and technological advancement is vast — a direction I planned to explore in academica as a tenure-track faculty member. When faculty search committees didn’t embrace this vision, I remained steadfast and decided to pursue this opportunity through my own startup venture.
Anyway, at ChakraTech, we are taking an innovative approach to make this bioplastic. To understand how, you need to understand what plastic is – a polymer is a chain of monomers, basic repeating units. How does a microbe or bacteria turn monomers into the polymers we want? They transform carbon from food source into “fat stores”. Historically, expensive carbon source such as vegetable oils have been used as carbon source, not only elevating expenses but also threatening food security in low-income countries. This approach renders the technology unaffordable and inaccessible to much of the world.
Well, what else could serve as a great source of carbon? Greenhouse gases. That’s where we come in – we’re going to take these microbes in giant vats, feed them greenhouse gases and get them to create bioplastics. What’s interesting about this is that it solves two problems at once. First, we can repurpose the carbon emissions, namely the excess carbon dioxide or methane that is emitted into the atmosphere, for manufacturing various types of materials and chemicals. Second, the bioplastics degrade naturally! This positions us to bridge two historically very different industry segments – biotech and cleantech/climatetech.
The reality is that plastics aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the carbon emissions for the foreseeable future. But perhaps our technology can help to solve two huge environmental challenges at once!
Marrying science and engineering, Ravi hopes to scale bioplastics in a cost-effective way.
And no one else is working on this?
Various companies, some for over a decade, have concentrated on solving different aspects of the technology and challenges. While they have achieved some progress, most of them are yet to realize their full potential. This, I believe, is largely due to an insufficient integration of science and engineering.
In my experience, the distinct training backgrounds of engineers and scientists often lead to communication barriers, which translates into insufficient technological advancement. Bridging this gap between basis sciences and engineering is therefore vital for effective collaboration on complex projects. Particularly in the case of bioplastics, biological systems don’t necessarily conform to engineering constraints in terms of scalability. This underscores the fundamental need for an integrated approach, combining process engineering with biology and chemistry, to develop bioplastics in a cost-effective manner.
Fascinating. I don’t know too much about microbes, but I’ve seen a few companies lately using microbes in incredible ways. One such company is up in Escondido, Aquacycl, and they use microbial fuel cells to treat wastewater. The microbes generate electricity and clean water as part of that process.
Is microbial engineering an emerging field? Or has the science simply progressed enough that companies can begin reaping the rewards from microbes in a cost-effective way at scale?
Microbial engineering and biomanufacturing have been around for some time, but they are far from a mature industry, and have a unique set of challenges – including a capital-intensive research and development budget. While still in its infancy compared to the petrochemical sector, it is the future of next generation of sustainable manufacturing!
If you really want to put a start date on it, things started when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. And if you want to be even looser with it, people have been fermenting things pretty much forever! The biotech industry, however, really took off in its current form in the late 1970s with the advent of molecular biology tools, notably when Genentech produced insulin using recombinant DNA technology.
There are different kinds of microbes. There are fungi, bacteria, archaea…and companies have been using them at scale for a while now. One of the well-established companies in this field, Genomatica, based in San Diego, utilizes E. coli to manufacture the precursors for nylon and various other products. The tools and the technology to scale them have actually been available for a while now!
So the tools exist, and companies are using them.
Yes, but there are still significant challenges.
Microbes are natural – they exist in nature. But how do you engineer them to perform their best? How do we get it to do what we want it to do, not what they want to do? We want them to produce the maximum amounts of our product, whatever that might be, not what the microbes wants to produce. Microbes have billions of years in their favor. It simply boils down to finding a way to get your microbes to do what you want them to do.
Yet another challenge has been to build a robust scale-up framework, so that the microbes behave in the same way at an industrial scale as they do in the lab.
Ravi works to scale the microbes from the lab to an industrial setting.
You mentioned the environmental pushback with plastics, and how a biodegradable plastic can help solve that problem. But there’s another issue with plastics, which is that they’re endocrine disruptors. Does bioplastic solve this problem?
Great question!
Honestly, I think that bioplastic is our best shot at solving this problem. Based on the 2018 EPA statistics, less than 8% of things get recycled. The plastic itself isn’t getting recycled like we think it is! Moreover, recycling itself generates microplastics, which end up in the soil or in the ocean. If you eat a fish that’s has consumed microplastics in the ocean, these microplastics will enter into your body. Same thing when you drink soda out of a plastic bottle. Plastics used in food packaging are a source of microplastic contamination, gradually leaching tiny particles into our food.
Our truly degradable bioplastics breaks down into its simplest, harmless form (technical term is monomers) in a relatively short time span and our bodies are able to tolerate this! It’s not like the plastic in a soda bottle which our bodies don’t make. Our bioplastics are biocompatible, since our bodies already make the base unit that make the bioplastic. Interestingly, there are already implants and sutures made out of this bioplastic since it’s not foreign to our body!
As an extremely early stage startup, you are prone to lots of risk. What are some obstacles you are currently navigating, and what are you doing to create resilience in this fledgling company?
That’s a good question! Transformative endeavors inherently carry risks, yet it is these very ventures that redefine our world.
In the realm of hardtech start-ups, we typically encounter three broad risk categories: scientific/technical, team/execution, and market dynamics.
Firstly, the bioplastics technology we’re focusing on, initially commercialized in the 1980s, has evolved significantly. Earlier, its adoption was limited due to high production costs. Our current objective is to refine this technology scientifically and technically to make it more cost-effective, thereby unlocking new opportunities.
Next, regarding team and execution, we’re consciously assembling an interdisciplinary team with deep expertise in science, engineering, material science, and business development. It’s essential to achieve a harmony between scientific rigor and robust business strategy.
Lastly, market risks can’t be overlooked. Past instances in this industry reveal that premature scaling in absence of market demand or acceptance can lead to failure. Over 40% of start-ups fail due to inadequate product-market fit, a trend even more frequent in our particular field. Hence, we’re prioritizing product development and forging key partnerships to ensure our product meets market needs.
What is next for you, personally, workwise, and otherwise?
I’m looking into transitioning into doing this full time – if you work on ideas part-time, the company will stay part-time.
There is burgeoning start-up scene in India, and I have considered moving back to India to pursue a startup related to bioplastics or other independent ideas. But there are currently other bottlenecks in India which would take longer to resolve. Certain tasks might take five years to accomplish there, tasks that would only require a year or two in the US, especially the research and development (R&D) part. Consequently, I’ve learned to exercise patience in these situations. US has an excellent ecosystem for supporting tech start-ups, so it is a great place to pursue innovation and works out favorably for us.
At this early ideation stage, our focus is on establishing a strong foundation that encompasses both technical and business aspects, as well as assembling an interdisciplinary team. We have an impressive global team of scientists and engineers working on this idea already. Friends and former colleagues in the US, Europe and India who have decades of professional science and engineering experience are helping us too. We are actively working to get advisors on-board with a diverse range of experience, spanning science and technology, government and international policy, business, and finance.
You mentioned deciding on the United States vs India for some of this, and have people all around the globe who want to help. Can you talk about why you’re in San Diego, and any pros or cons that you see in this community?
I think there’s a very big spirit of kindness and generosity in the greater San Diego area, which resonates deeply with me. Furthermore, people are really environment conscious and there is a great ecosystem to support the startups.
San Diego is one of the top three cities in the US to pursue startups, especially in technology and biotech sectors. However, it appears to me that compared to other major hubs such as the Bay Area, NYC, or Boston, we are still lagging in terms of the overall support and funding opportunities for hardtech startups. In addition, there are not many startups in the field of industrial biotech, but I am hoping the success of companies like Genomatica will pave the path for others to follow.
Well Ravi, I hope that you do succeed. What is the best way for someone to contact you if they’d like to learn more?
Thank you. You can find me on LinkedIn! I check it pretty often, so I will be responsive.
Mick Hammock 