Episode 3: Hacking Our Genes — CRISPR Technology, DNA Computing, and Spider Silk Clothing
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Hi, and welcome to the third episode of Imagine Human. In this episode we are joined by Eric Scott, a Partner at SciFi Venture Capital. Inspired at a young age by his family’s steel company, Eric shares his experiences and passion for entrepreneurship. He discusses his current role on the other side of the table, investing in synthetic biology and virtual reality companies as part of SciFi’s investment thesis.
Highlights
0:50 — How Eric Broke Into VC
5:03 — Eric’s Insights as a Startup Founder
11:36 — How SciFi VC is Different
15:25 — Characteristics of Good Leadership: A Bias Towards Doing
17:43 — CRISPR Gene Editing
24:10 — DNA Computing
28:04 — SciFi Biotech Investments, Spider Silk Clothing
33:44 — Investments in VR, Escaping the Real World
Resources
Check out other companies within SciFi’s portfolio.
Short video (3 min) on how Zymergen is using synthetic biology, robotics, and AI to revolutionize the ancient process of fermentation (Source: KPMG Voice/Forbes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBA36SoOivY
Video (7 min) on the origins of CRISPR DNA editing technology as a bacterial immune system, and its implications for humans (Source: Bozeman Science): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnYppmstxIs
For those still interested in cryptocurrency, Eric shares one of his favorite Bitcoin white papers about Tezos: https://www.tezos.com/static/papers/position_paper.pdf
Transcript
Iris: This week we sat down with Eric Scott. Eric is a partner at SciFi VC, a firm founded by Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Affirm. At SciFi VC, Eric has led investments in several emerging companies in FinTech and Biotech such as Zymergen, Unity and ClearTax. He graduated with an economics degree from Claremont McKenna College. Thank you so much for your time today. The first question we have for you is how did you initially get into VC?
Eric: Sure. Thanks for having me first of all. I got into venture on accident. I started a company when I was an undergrad down at Claremont McKenna and moved up to the Bay Area because I got a little bit of funding, and ostensibly I ran that company directly into the ground. I knew I needed to attach myself to somebody who really knew what they were doing. At first, I joined my competitor, which is a company called Wantful. I ended up getting laid off from Wantful.
I still knew I needed to go somewhere where I could really learn a whole lot, and found out through a friend of a friend that this guy named Max Levchin was looking for something called a technical assistant. Technical assistants are young, hungry, technically-oriented people who usually have a PhD and Master’s in Computer Science, and their job is to build things for the principal, look into random technologies for the principal and, eventually, in the case of Max, start a company with the principal.
I knew I was deeply under qualified, but I reached out to Max, kind of guessed his email. He got back to me, and knowing that I wasn’t a great computer scientist, he still decided to hire me. Around six weeks into trying to build stuff for him, it became very obvious that I was not the guy to actually be coding, but I had sort of stumbled into a pitch meeting where these two very talented entrepreneurs had pitched Max, and I gave him three paragraphs of analysis. He read my analysis and basically said how about you start doing this investing thing more.
Around a year into helping him with his Angel Investing, he decided that he wanted to go and run a firm full time, which is the company that he’s currently the CEO of, has been for the past four or five years. That sort of left this opening for me to sort of pick up the investing operation and run with it.
Abi: That’s an awesome story of how you got into investing. When you were going to college you definitely did not want to go into venture capital? What were your ambitions and plans when you were in college?
Eric: The first and maybe second year I was in college, I thought I was going to go into investment banking. I said I’m going to do investment banking. My brother had gone down that route. After a couple of years of that, I’m going to go into equity, and then maybe I’ll retire with $20 million by the time I’m 35, even though I’ve basically spent my productive youth just going bald and stressing out for a long time.
Around a year and a half into college, I realized that I actually really wanted to start a company. I had this really clear memory of sitting in my room back in Chicago talking to my brother about his experience in investment banking, and him basically getting really excited talking about the personalities, not who were in banking, but on the other side of the transaction, the entrepreneurs that he would help basically sell their companies. That sort of started to affected me, wanting to learn how to build things, wanting to learn how to manage, wanting to learn how to operate.
By the time senior year rolled around, and all my friends were applying to investment banks and management consulting jobs, because that’s what Claremont McKenna is really sort of known for, I said, you know what, forget this, I’m going to take my minor in computer science and learn how to build a website. That’s how I got my first job of working for myself.
Abi: What was the company that you started?
Eric: It was an e-commerce platform. It was called GiftGraph, and it let you split the cost of a gift between friends. We would all pitch in 50 bucks and buy somebody a $150 item. We would take care of all of the logistics and make a seamless user experience, things like that. If I had known then what I know now, I would have just tried to start Venmo, because what we really were building, should have been building, was a payment solution, and instead we were trying to build this crazy, beautiful consumer product. It just wasn’t the right approach.
Morgan: What were some of the insights that you learned while working on that company?
Eric: That’s a really good question. I don’t think I learned very much about how to run a successful company. I think what I learned a ton about was what I’m personally good at, what I’m personally not good at. Broadly speaking, in my two to three years of running that company and recruiting people and building product, and then pivoting, and then pivoting again and then resetting, and then pivoting again, raising some money, all of that tactical knowledge of how to succeed at business combined is far less than the amount that I learned in my first six months working for Max, watching him launch Glow, get it off the ground. I joined right after the launch of Affirm, so I didn’t see that, but I did see what it was like operating the first year and a half, when they were still getting their footing, and watching that process of success was far more valuable than three years of …
Iris: Do you have any specific memories or anything that kind of stimulated that thought early on in your childhood?
Eric: Oh, yeah. I don’t think there’s ever been a moment when I didn’t know I was going to go into business. From the time I was very young, conversations around the dinner table were about selling steel, making a customer satisfied, managing employees, hiring, firing, hopefully not firing. I remember years when business was good for my dad, I remember years when business was bad. I’ve always looked up to him for being able to reinvent the business into what it is today, the modern day version of Scott Stainless Steel, and raise a family in a very comfortable lifestyle. Yeah, that played a really big role.
Morgan: Business obviously encompasses all these different industries. Is there a particular set of industries that attracts you in particular, industries that you’re now seeing yourself more interested in as an investor?
Eric: Yes. I think business can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think for my dad, for instance, it meant this is a lifestyle choice, this is going to provide for my family. For me, it’s much more about I think creativity and seeing a cool social impact on the world. There’s a lot of ways to make a lot more money than early-stage venture capital. Some of the industries that I think are going to be most impactful today are virtual reality, synthetic biology, undoubtedly Internet of Things, however you define that, and probably crypto currencies, although I’m not quite sure how.
Morgan: Maybe it will impact all of them.
Eric: It could. I mean, it’s already impacting money. I think it’s hard to argue that it’s not impacting two things right now. The first thing it’s impacting is money. The second thing that it’s impacting is itself. It’s this interesting technology, in that it’s reversed two social rules. First of all, it’s disrupted itself before it’s disrupted most other things. Second of all, it’s basically a Ponzi scheme that, in the size of the Ponzi scheme, makes itself legitimate. To be clear, I’m not the first one to have noted this, I think they’ve all talked about it a lot, but that is this real interesting idea. It’s a fraud, and everyone who’s gotten involved knows it’s a fraud. It being a fraud, it has become non-fraudulent. That is crazy.
Abi: What are the kinds of companies that you think are interesting right now?
Eric: I think the fundamentally most important question to ask is why is the product or the application end of this crypto currency better suited to be decentralized versus done on a centralized database. Trust may or may not have something to do with that answer. I think there’s a lot of things where the crypto community overestimates the harm that trust does in a system, but there are some applications where they are, I think, accurately assessing the amount of harm that trust plays in a system.
Abi: Do you have any examples of situations for each one where the trust is actually as harmful as people think it is?
Eric: Yeah. We can look at Bitcoin as an example. I think if you truly want a store of value that anybody can use, and anybody can use to transfer their wealth from one party to another, that is not best suited for a centralized authority. You can also take a look at Filecoin, which is a very timely company to bring up. I think for the vast majority of situations, it doesn’t really make any sense to not store your data on a trusted centralized party, but you can imagine scenarios where it makes a lot of sense to not have a single authority where you’re storing all of your sensitive data. I don’t really care who has access to most of the photos, probably all of the photos on my iPhone, so I’m fine putting them in Dropbox. I’d prefer if they didn’t get hacked, because I do want to have some level of privacy, but my situation is vastly different to somebody who’s living in, say Venezuela or Bahrain or Qatar, and potentially has information that could disrupt an entire society.
Iris: One question that we have is how is SciFi VC different from other VC firms out there?
Eric: Let’s start with the obvious answer. SciFi VC is the Levchin vehicle for Angel Investing and, to some degree, venture investing. Levchins are Max and Nellie Levchin. Max was one of the founders of PayPal, went on to play important roles in the founding of Yelp. He’s currently the CEO and co-founder of Affirm. Nellie was the chief risk officer of Clarium Capital. She helped manage around $3.5 billion of assets I believe.
SciFi stands for Science and Finance, which is basically the combination of what everyone in here is interested in. It’s science as you think it, hard science, bio, AI, things like that, and finance is primarily Fintech, but also just being able to finance the science that we think is cool.
Being a single LP fund, where the LPs are also the GPs in the room helping make decisions every day, gives you a lot of flexibility to do two things really. First of all, we have a broad mandate when it comes to stage and check size and things like that. We’re primarily investing in seed-stage stuff, but occasionally we’ll do a later stage, Series C and beyond. We invested in Unity last year, that was a multi-billion dollar round. We have another couple of investments that I can’t talk about quite yet, but we’re talking about companies that are close to the billion-dollar valuation watermark, so obviously vastly different profile than a $5 million pre-money Series C, a few people working on the cool technology.
Aside from the brand recognition you get from having Max as an investor, we really like to help our entrepreneurs in a hands-on manner. We will get as deeply involved in making strategic decisions as the CEO wants us to be. There’s some companies where the CEO I basically talk with once a quarter, I get the update, he tells me what I wanted to do, want him or her to do, and often it’s not. He says, nope, I’m good right now, I’m just going to go build my stuff. Talk to you next quarter.
We also see CEOs that we will pop and do at the board level, and be really involved in hiring, be really involved in just crunching the data to help them make smarter decisions, and truly be somewhat side to side with the entrepreneur. I will say the longer I do this for, the more I realize that the most valuable thing I think an investor can do is just provide data from past experiences, and that’s really hard to do when you’ve been in venture for even five years. It takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years before you’ve seen enough success to be able to say, look, I know you’re inventing something new, and therefore this experience cannot perfectly be matched to any experience of my past, but here’s four stories I have for you. Here’s how I think I can help, but ultimately you as the CEO, it’s your decision.
Morgan: What are some things that you’ve learned from working with tenured entrepreneurs and investors that have been ah-hah moments for you, this is what I should be looking for in a company, that looks like an attractive deal, or this is an aspect of a company that I would like to incorporate in a future venture that I start?
Eric: Probably the most generalizable characteristic of a really good founder that I can think of is a bias towards doing. There are entrepreneurs that we work with and pitch us that are extremely smart and extremely well credentialed, and have fantastic networks and are talented, but in my experience the characteristics that are most likely to determine success are that an entrepreneur, when put into a difficult situation, won’t just sit there and think about the best thing is, will do something, whatever it is. That’s number one. Combined with number two is that they’ll keep doing that over and over and over and over again. This is why you hear program talk about investing in cockroaches, because they can’t be killed and they just keep on going.
But it is remarkable to see these people in the face of great adversity, or even not great adversity, just lame, day-to-day grind, just continuing to go and build or sell. I think it was Kevin Hart’s — now at Founder’s Fund — who first gave me the tidbit, the one-liner of look for people that have a bias towards doing, and I thought that really summed up what we look for very nicely.
Abi: Let’s shift our focus a little bit to the portfolio companies that you’ve invested in. What are some exciting ones in bio?
Eric: So, we have a lot of cool stuff going on in bio, from a lot of different perspectives. I would argue that one of the most important technologies to be invested in is CRISPR. CRISPR hasn’t been able to do anything new, but it enables more people to do it than ever before. All of a sudden, cash costs are lower than it’s ever been.
Abi: Can you give us brief overview of what CRISPR is for people who have never heard about it?
Eric: Sure. CRISPR lets you guide RNA to an enzyme, and the enzyme, if you can deliver it to the right cell, will go to the nucleus of the cell, using the guide RNA, it will find a part of the DNA that it either wants to cut out entirely and replace with additional strand of DNA and then it will swap out, or whatever you want to see. Technologies like this have been around for a long time, but they’ve been prohibitively expensive to do, at massive scale, and you needed at least a Master’s in Biology, if not PhD, to be able to pull this stuff off. Even when you did have the skills, sometimes you’d need to do it three or four times to get a successful DNA transfer. CRISPR is far more accurate; CRISPR is easier; CRISPR is cheaper, by orders of magnitude. The result is that people are starting to do things with DNA that have never before been possible.
So there’s two broad sections of the world that I think about, probably more that are in this space. From my perspective, from the investor’s perspectives there is the pharma aspect of things, let’s not call it the pharma aspect, let’s call it the human health aspect of this. This means using CRISPR to edit human embryos, to change people’s genetic predisposition for diseases or eliminating those diseases entirely. This means using CRISPR to modify target viruses so you can create biologics that target specific cancer cells.
That stuff is really interest. We tend to focus less on it because it looks like a pharma investment for the most part and while we’ve made one and a half pharma investments, and they’ve both worked out really well, we fundamentally don’t have enough expertise to make that call.
Then there’s the other side of the world, and I’ll just call this industry. Lots and lots of industry. I think $160B of goods are fermented every year. Fermentation as a process has been around for thousands and thousands of years. The beer you and I drink is made with a bacteria, usually yeast — definitely yeast — and for the first time ever, we are able to systematically change the actual DNA, the actual genetic makeup of the yeast that is responsible for producing the beer. There’s a ton of proteins that are used, these are usually multi-billion-dollar companies that have proprietary strains of bacteria that they use to make materials and chemicals faster, better, more efficient than other people. For the first time, the entire industry is up for grabs — it’s up for optimization. We’re just in the early innings of figuring out what we can make biology do to make our lives better as humansr.
Morgan: How do you see biotechnology playing a role in the future amidst all these other technologies that, from my perspective, are getting more press, like drones, AI, crypto currency? Where do you see biotechnology really integrating with these?
Eric: Again, ignoring human health, because I think that stuff will be a lot of press, as it should. At first, it’s going to be much more subtle, just like any other technology platform, or rather just like any other commercially viable technology platform, the first step is not to invent crazy stuff that no one has ever thought before possible; the first step is to optimize old industry. So that’s why I start with $160 billion of fermented goods every year. That’s where it’s going to start, and nobody’s going to write home about how such and such a company, hopefully Zymergen, helped a huge multinational corporation optimize its fermentation process. Obviously Wall Street analysts will pay attention to it, and that’s great, that’s great for all business, but that’s how it’s going to start.
That’s going to play a huge role in how effectively we can grow crops and eat and things like that but, again, nobody writes home about that. It remains to be seen what will be invented with new synbio capabilities. You’re already starting to see some things on the DNA computing side … that means using DNA fundamentally as a computer or using the cell as a computer. We’re still in early innings, really, really early innings. People have been working on this for decades and not made too much progress. We made a ton of progress on DNA storage, but that’s a different topic. I’m not exactly sure what the crazy application we haven’t thought of yet will be in synbio. Then again, if I was, I’d probably be out there trying to start that company.
Morgan: Can you talk a little about DNA computing?
Eric: Yes. What part of it do you think is most interesting?
Morgan: What do you see the applications for … what are the applications of DNA computing? What are the advantages of DNA computing over other forms of computing?
Eric: I’ll also break this down into two different categories. There’s DNA storage, DNA computing. DNA storage is quite literally saying, hey, we know that DNA is used to store all this really complicated stuff about how to carry traits on from one phenotype to the next generation or one generation to the next. Why can’t we do this for digital information? The stat I read a few months ago is that one kilogram of DNA would be enough to … if you were able to harness the power of DNA as efficiently for digital information as you are biological information, one kilogram of DNA would be enough to store all the world’s digital information, the entire internet worth of information can go on to one kilogram, the problem there being of course that it is prohibitively expensive to write DNA, prohibitively expensive to read DNA.
There are a couple of research groups, and at least one startup that I can think of, that is working on more efficient ways of storing … more efficient schemes of storing digital information in DNA. The other advantage for DNA storage is that unlike tapes or putting on flash memory, not only is it physically much more compact, but you can store potentially forever. If you put a hard drive on shelf and leave it there for 100 years, it probably won’t be good in 100 years. Not the case with DNA. I mean, you can go and sequence DNA from a wooly mammoth that was frozen in a cave 10,000 years ago. You’ll be able to retrieve your Facebook pictures too as well.
Then DNA computing. It’s a much more complicated thing in my opinion to understand, because you need to not just recreate a pattern that you can read later on a different format, you need to actually perform the computing in DNA. It’s more complicated, I know less about it, but it’s equally fascinating. I think the first applications you’ll see with DNA computing won’t be taking digital information and trying to replicate what you can do with a traditional electronic computer with it, it will be computing things in biology. You can think of examples where you’re trying to target a cancer cell, and you want to run the computation binary. Given what I see, is this target cell yes/no? If yes, kill. If not, don’t kill. You can also see that being applied to industry as well as human health I’d say.
That’s where it will start. I’m not sure it will ever get to a point where it makes sense to a run a traditional digital computation in a biological device. The input is just going to be incredibly expensive, as will the output.
Abi: I haven’t even heard about DNA computing, so that’s pretty cool.
Iris: Me neither. Very cool.
Abi: It seems like it’s still basic research rather than something that can be commercialized at this point.
Eric: It’s somewhere between … I’m trying to think of what I can and can’t say. There’s a lot of basic research being done on it. We are now at the point where it’s starting to make sense for some commercial applications, not all of them. Like I said, pretty early days for the commercialization aspect of it.
Iris: Can you speak a little bit about some of the SciFI investments you’re excited about in the biotechnology space?
Eric: Three investments that we have in the synbio space, and they are actually really good companies for this conversation because they give you a sense for the fundamental technology that we need to push things forward, how it will be applied to current industry, and where things should go in the future. Those companies are Synthego, Zymergen and Bolt Threads.
Real quickly, Synthego helps create what’s called CRISPR kits. You go and you order CRISPR that comes preloaded with the guide RNA that you want to target the part of the DNA that you want knocked out. It’s actually done in RNA, but for our purposes we’ll just say DNA. It’s also prepackaged with whatever you want to replace the DNA with. They’re able to do this a couple of orders magnitude cheaper, faster and more accurately, so fewer errors, than anybody else out there. That’s like the base infrastructure that is companies like Synthego, and probably Synthego in particular, that’s enabling this wave of synbio companies to do what they do at the scale they do it.
Zymergen services companies that are multinational corporations that have multi billion dollar fermentation projects, and they help optimize those fermentation processes in whatever way the company wants them to. They, interestingly enough, are actually more of an AI company than most AI companies I see. They are able to take an organism, look at its DNA, figure out what they want to optimize for, and because of the massive amounts of data they have on other environments in which that microbe interacts, they can do this dramatically more predictably and faster and cost effectively than anyone else out there. That’s going to have a big impact on industry today.
The third company is called Bolt Threads. Bolt Threads is making synthetic spider silk. Spider silk is stronger and more flexible than traditional silk. It’s been-
Abi: Does spider silk come from spiders?
Eric: Great question. That is the type of silk I’m talking about, and for many years, for centuries, it has been sought after, and there are a few garments that people have had that are made of spider silk, but harvesting silk from a spider is incredibly expensive. When I say there’s a few garments, I mean literally there might be a garment out there that a queen had, a queen of something or a king of something.
Bolt Threads has figured out how to take various proteins, combine them in such a way that they are chemically the same thing as spider silk, and they’ve also come up with the industrial processes to spin this into silk, into real silk. I mean, they have these giant turbines that are pumping out real material that goes into real clothes. The only reason that this makes any sort of economic sense is because synbio is at a point on DNA synthesis, and DNA reading is at a point where we can actually knock out different parts of a microbe and have it, instead of fermenting beer, we have it ferment a specific protein that you need to create spider silk. This is a new material that humans have never been able to wear, and we think in the future it’s going to play an important part in a whole lot of apparel, and maybe some other stuff too.
Abi: That’s amazing. Are there any fabrics that we can buy right now that have spider silk?
Eric: There is one, but I think it’s sold out. They just launched the first consumer product. It’s a tie. I think they only made 50 of them. I wasn’t able to get one.
Abi: It’s really interesting looking.
Eric: I don’t know what the name of the style is, but I’ve seen other ties-
Abi: A midtie?
Eric: Yeah, it’s a midtie. It’s a midtie, but it’s spider silk, which is pretty cool. They should be launching some other stuff later this year.
Abi: How much did midtie cost? I guess this is not at scale obviously, so in the future you can imagine it being cheaper.
Eric: I think it was a few hundred bucks, but by the time I saw that it was on sale it was done. Hopefully, they’ll have that kind of success in their future product lines.
Morgan: They don’t give you an investor discount?
Eric: They might. I should probably ask for one.
Abi: That would be an awesome tie to wear around.
Eric: Yeah. I don’t know where I would wear it, I guess to weddings. I’m wearing a vest now, that’s about as fancy as it gets.
Abi: It’s still pretty amazing though to come from the price where someone has to be a queen to wear a spider silk tie is something that’s just as expensive as probably your more expensive designer ties. That’s pretty cool.
Eric: There is an art to this as well that is just textiles. You go to school of design, you get a degree in textiles, you don’t necessarily go to Carnegie Mellon and study the science of textiles. I think this gets really interesting when you start to blend it with other fabrics. You’re usually not wearing purely cotton or purely polyester … silk blended with polyester, blended with something else.
I think it’s going to affect a lot of different parts of the apparel industry beyond …
Iris: It sounded like there is a lot of potential applications for this besides apparel and luxury apparel. Besides that, maybe something about the actual make up of the textile itself, is there different strength properties? Can you speak a little bit more about that?
Eric: Well, the cool part about Bolt Thread’s platform is that they can use it to optimize for just about any material property they want. I think what will end up happening in the world of synbio is that the first industry to be disrupted is going to be fermentation, but the second one’s going to be material science. That’s fundamentally what Bolt Threads is when you think about it. They are making this new material that has never before been economically feasible to produce.
The next wave of successful synbio startups are all going to be making materials that were never before possible and optimizing around a set of characteristics for those. The crazy Sci-Fi applications we always talked about, what if there were space suits made of spider silk? I don’t know if space suits is where it makes the most sense, but it’s not hard to imagine a whole lot of places where it would.
Abi: We know you’re also really interested in VR. I don’t know if you have any investments in VR, but could you describe why you’re fascinated with that space.
Eric: Yeah. I’m fascinated with VR for a couple of reasons. The closest investment we have to being a pure VR investment is Unity, Unity 3, but they’re not fundamentally a VR platform. They are a gaming platform who just so happens to be in the best position to dominate VR. They’re the best graphics engine in the world.
I am interested in VR for two reasons. The first, and probably most important, is that I see the rest of the venture industry becoming less excited about VR. I think we were at the first spike in the hype, or maybe the second spike in the hype bubble, probably 6 or 12 months ago. It’s died off, and now everyone’s saying we’re seeing the same stuff over and over again, how many different cures for arachnophobia can possibly come into our office and pitch us, so we’re just going to stop looking at the space all together. My investor spidey sense says now is the time to start getting really smart about it, because even if cure for phobias aren’t your cup of tea, which, by the way, that’s a great application of VR. Probably not what I’d invest in, but a good one for somebody to build and make money off of nonetheless.
The next big thing that has network effects and has an application with a real ostensible story will probably come in the next 18 months or so. The pace at which things are improving in VR is remarkable. That’s the second reason why I think VR is a really interesting place to look. I remember putting on my first VR headset when I first started working at HVF. It was this demo called Blue Marble. All you could really do was put on the headset and then look around, and you were in this space capsule above earth. It was pretty cool, but not that cool. It worked, and that was about it. It worked, and it looked kind of cool, and the earth looks crazy when you’re in outer space.
Eric: Yeah. Again, the impressive part is this is real, this could be a thing. Then maybe 18 months later a friend invited me to a VIVE demo. I had to go to some basement at some startup in SOMA, and the first thing you do is you walk into this room, the full VIVE setup, two sensors, put on the headset, and then you’re on a wooden ship below the water and this giant whale comes from behind you and swims around you. I remember just feeling in the pit of my stomach this is crazy, this is absolutely insane. It feels like I was actually able to reach out and touch this whale, and part of that was because the graphics were a little better, and part of that was because they had actually figured out what to do with your hands. You could see the controllers in space as they were in front of you.
That was in a period of 18 months. In 18 months, we had gone from grainy demo hooked up to my friend’s giant tower of a computer to I am beneath the ocean swimming with a whale … still hard to see the exact applications of that. Fast forward another 18 months, and you got things like Robo Recall and such super intense experiences, and people are finally figuring out how to actually apply this to enterprise and to actually “fix the entry problem”.
I’ll add a third reason that I’m excited about VR, which is that I think people are underestimating the power of blocking out the real world. Everybody’s looking at VR saying when’s it going to get as good as being there, when’s going to get as good as having a real in-person meeting where you feel like you’re connecting with this human being, and they’re underestimating the value of isolating yourself from everything around you. I go into work and I put on headphones because I don’t want to hear what’s going on around me. I want to focus into my inbox or Excel spreadsheet or the report I’m reading or whatever it is. This is the same thing, but for your visual field, and I think it’s more powerful.
Again, I don’t have a crystal ball, I’m not an entrepreneur … at least right now … so I can’t tell you what the ideal application is for sort of boring enterprise, but I think people are underestimating the power of this for really basically mundane test jobs. That’s what gets me excited.
Morgan: Do you mean your investment banking spreadsheet in a beautiful fantasy world or something?
Eric: Yeah, or even not a beautiful fantasy. What if you’re doing your Excel spreadsheet in the same office that you were, but when you look to your left it wasn’t your buddy-
Abi: Who’s annoying you, trying to disturb you.
Eric: Trying to convince you to go the Hamptons. I don’t know, whatever investment bankers do nowadays. A lot of people will talk about there’s this problem when you put on headsets, you feel very isolated. Ignoring the societal implications of that, I’m not convinced that, a priori, that is a bug of VR. I think that is something that happens with it. Just like the internet, just like any other broad sweeping technology, there’s a cost and a benefit to every part of it. Do we spend too much time on social media? Probably. Is social media an incredibly powerful tool to stay connected with your friends and have fun and blow some steam? Yes, both of those things are probably true.
The same things can make sense for VR. I don’t know, maybe you put on your VR headset and the place you work most productively is a dungeon. That could be true. You probably shouldn’t spend too much time in that dungeon, but you also probably shouldn’t spend too much time in the office, at least past a certain age when you have family and other things to take care of.
Iris: What is your long-term vision for yourself, maybe in the next two years, three years, five years? What does that look like? What’s the ideal goal for you?
Morgan: And will it incorporate any of these technologies that you seem really interested in?
Eric: I hope it will incorporate at least one, if not all of the technologies that we’ve talked about today. I think that a future in which I’m really happy is one in which I’m helping these companies and these products that help the world in a really big way, really impactful way, get there more efficiently, less painfully … actually maybe not less painfully, that’s overrated … but certainly get there more quickly. If that means that I’m doing that on this side of the table and investing, that’s great.
I made the choice three or four years ago to commit to this side of the table because I saw entrepreneurs working on things in synbio and AI and in Fintech that I knew I wouldn’t be able to start as effectively myself. I’m more than happy to keep doing this for as long as it takes to help them launch these things and get them into the world.
Abi: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time today.
Eric: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Iris: Thank you so much everyone for tuning in this week with us. If you enjoyed that episode as we did with Eric, please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud or both. We really appreciate your support. You can also find a number of links and resources on our show notes about this week’s episode. Thanks again, and be sure to tune in with us for next week on Imagine Human.
