We need people building companies all over the country to innovate in aviation, consumer products, education, health, cybersecurity, biotech, manufacturing, and everything in between.
I'm an investor in a number of biotech companies, partly because of my incredible enthusiasm for the great innovations they will bring.
America is home to a vast, dynamic life-science industry.
The really basic stuff that fuels 30-year job booms almost always comes from government research, stuff like biotech, the transistor, the Internet. The idea that private capital can handle the early spade work is a joke.
What we are saying is, we've got three aluminum factories, let's work with that, we cannot change that. Why not have the Icelandic people who are educated in high-tech and work already in those factories in the higher paid jobs, why not let them build little companies who are totally Icelandic with the knowledge they have? Then they get the money and it stays in the country. Then we can support the biotech companies and the food companies and all these clusters. I think that if you want to be an environmentalist in Iceland, these are the things you've got to be putting your energy into.
When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.
I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I was all set to take up a brewing job in Scotland when a chance encounter with an Irish entrepreneur led me to set up a biotech business in India instead.
Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.
Bio-Technology is expected to play a major role in improving productivity.
The success stories in biotechnology are mainly due to the straightforward application of design thinking in both the business and science aspects of our lean startups.
Industries with rapid change are the enemy of the investor. Tech businesses, particularly biotech, is a problem from that point of view. All industries work with change, but you should ideally be investing in businesses with a low rate of change, not a high rate of change.
I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there's an element of gambling to that.
The development of exponential technologies like new biotech and AI hint at a larger trend - one in which humanity can shift from a world of constraints to one in which we think with a long-term purpose where sustainable food production, housing, and fresh water is available for all.
The biotechnology wave is similar to the information technology wave of the 1980s and 1990s.
I work in the tech industry and my husband works in biotech. He's head of IP for a company listed on the NASDAQ. And we have a lot of discussions in tech and biotech about the role of unionization in our industries.
Biology - DNA - is technology. It is coding. It is physical coding, but still code.
