Palm oil is a cheap and remarkably versatile vegetable oil. It’s in a ton of products, from food to cosmetics, detergent, and chewing gum. But producing so much palm oil is really bad for the planet. Shara Ticku is the co-founder and CEO of C16 Biosciences. Shara's problem is this: Can you get yeast to make an oil that is just as useful as palm oil – without clearing land to grow palm trees?
Pushkin. Palm Oil is vegetable oil made from palm trees, and it's hiding in a ton of the stuff we use every single day. Palm Oil is in chips, it's in crackers, cookies, peanut butter. It's also in soap, it's in shampoo, it's in detergent. Palm oil is in lotion, it's in lipstick. And you can't even tell by looking at the list of ingredients whether a thing you're holding in your hand has palm oil in it, because it might be listed as vegetable oil, or as spheric acid, or as sodium laurel sulfate, or as lots of other things. Palm Oil is in so many things because it is very, very useful, but also growing all the palm trees to make all this palm oil turns out to be really, really bad for the planet. So it would be great if somebody could come up with a cheap, scalable way to get palm oil without palm trees. I'm Jacob Oldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Shaa Tku. She's the co founder of C sixteen Biosciences. Shaa's problem is this, can you get yeast to make a molecule that does basically all the good stuff that palm oil does, so that you can get what is basically palm oil without palm trees. Why is palm oil so great.
It's really good at what it does, and it does a lot of things. So palm oil is a is an oil, is a vegetable oil, and oils and fats show up in a lot of products. They show up in food, they show up in cleaning products, they show up even in biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel and lubricants, and palm oil is the most popular among them because it can do the most things, so it really drives performance. In things like soap. It is the molecule responsible for foaming and cleansing, which is exactly what you want a soap to do. And in things like peanut butter, the profile of palm oil is the reason that your peanut butter stays together with a really smooth, spoonable emulsion, and if you take it out, you have that layer of oil separation. So it's really it's about function and performance across a very wide range of consumer goods, and no other vegetable oil has the same profile that can drive those performance properties. And so even if a company wanted to replace palm oil in their products, they really haven't been able to because they end up having to sacrifice performance, and nobody wants to sacrifice performance.
Why is palm oil bad.
The only problem with palm oil is the way that it's produced, and the way that is produced primarily today is by converting land. The tree it really thrives in about a five to ten degree range around the equator. That land right around the equator is typically primary forest tropical rainforest, which is some of the most biodiverse precious land on Earth. Their carbon sinks. Thousands of animal species call these home, and palm growers over the past few decades have really been moving to clear that land. They slash and burn it, which emits tons of carbon dioxide into the air. They clear the land and they convert it to these single crop palm oil plantations, and so the main impacts are carbon dioxide emissions. The palm oil industry is responsible for about two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the entire global aviation sector just this one crop. It has an impact on land use, which is converting this sort of precious biodiverse rainforest into monoculture where other things can't grow, the impact on wildlife, and then I would say, last, but not least, or sort of the impact on the humans that live there, which is it pollutes the air and the water streams. But it also puts lots of people out of their home and forced into lowage, very hard labor conditions.
So okay, so that's the broader context. You personally, as I understand it, got into the palm oil or alternative palm oil business more or less when you were in business school, right, you met your co founders in this class the title of which I love, class called revolutionary Ventures. Great class name. What what exactly happened there?
We just start asking, Okay, palm oils and fifty percent of products on supermarket shelves. It's really it's one of the worst emitters from a greenhouse gas perspective, and every major consumer packaged goods company knows it and has admitted it and has a palm oil policy to switch from what they call conflict palm oil.
But they've all failed, sort of like the net zero of consumer packaged goods.
Definitely, definitely why and why has it failed. Why has agriculture failed to solve this problem? And could microbiology create a new way to solve this problem? And what would have to be true? And we just got started with that really simple question and one thousand dollars from MIT, and we started thinking from first principles about how what would have to be true, and then we started playing around in the lab. And that's how we got started.
I mean, you have this very abstract idea, let's find something that can do what palm oil does without palm trees. How do you get from there to a product?
Yeah, So the basic idea was, today we make oils and fats from petroleum or animals or plants, what if we looked at the fungal kingdom microorganisms instead? And so the very first step was defining what would have to be true at scale for this to succeed. So we knew we needed to make I mentioned earlier palm oil is so good at what it does because it has this really unique profile of fats and not drives performance.
So it can do lots of different things. It's like remarkably useful in many.
Ways exactly, So we knew if we were going to solve this problem we had to nail that profile because you had to be able to do all of those things remarkably.
Well, it's not obvious to me that that's the case. I mean, I feel like you could just bite off some of it, right, if you could do the foaming part so that you could get palm oil out of shampoo, like that would be a big deal, right, I.
Think that's true. But at this point we had a big idea and this really was this really was a big problem we were trying to solve, and so that was how we thought about it. And so the first step is can you find a micro organism which can make oil, which can make this profile, this profile that looks and functions like pome And just.
To be clear, why is a micro organism better than a plant?
One of the I think big promises of this field, and when we started thinking about it is plants have big footprints, and right now they require specific conditions of growth on arable land, and microorganisms don't need arable land. They don't need to convert rainforest and clear them and convert them into plantations and kill all the life that lives there. Microorganisms can be produced in factories anywhere in the world.
They just need a big metal tankt rate heat, and some sugar.
Technricity, some basic, some basic things. I think that was the primary sort of concept. The hard question was can microorganisms actually make the products? And can they make them scalably and can they make them cost effectively? So can you make the right product at scale and cost competitively? That was the sort of unknown part and that was what we had to figure out first. And we basically started by screening thousands of microorganisms against that criteria to say, could we find an organism that makes the right oil profile. It is, in theory robust enough to scale to super large volumes, because there's tens of millions of metric tons of palm oil produced a year, and again we're thinking revolutionary. We've got to go really really big and can compete on cost and so it's got to be a really efficient production system. And so that was the first set of questions that we asked.
And when you're trying to find the right micro organism, are you you're looking at the literature? Is there some point where you start like growing yeast in a tank? I mean, what is it? How do you find how do you look?
Yes? And yes, so you start with the literature, and you start with history, and so you look back and see what have people made successfully in the past and why, And you know, a lot of work had actually been done for things like biofuels in the past, which is similar to the profile that we were making. There were reasons we thought biofuels didn't work as well, but there were technical proofs of concept there. So we got to learn a lot from history, and then we looked at the literature for sure, and one of the things we learned is that again, getting this specific profile of palm is really different than how most industrial microbiology works today. Most companies are making fairly simple molecules. They're making alcohol, they're making a single molecule protein artificial. You know, vanilla is almost one hundred percent made from fermentation today, single molecule. This was a complex molecule, and so we quickly learned we needed a different type of microorganism, not one that was necessarily the best factory with the best set of tools, but instead a strain which was just really good at getting fat. And so these are referred to as oleagenous. Oleaginous means oil, and so there's a whole set of oleagenous organisms that naturally produce that, And so that was the first unlock. They had not really been used in industrial scale production historically, so we were going to have to build a lot of the tools and the know how to be able to grow it. But it was really promising. And so then the next step was you start to grow it. You get a strain, you do really small scale experiments in the lab, and you just try to get something which vaguely looks and functions like palm oil. And that was that was sort of the first big breakthrough for us.
Did you consider surely you considered synthetic biology? Right like, right there in Boston there's a giant at least one giant company that you know, their whole business is taking yeast and genetically engineering the yeast to produce things other than the yeast usually produces. Did you consider that?
So that was I think maybe our first hypothesis. What we learned was it actually doesn't have to be that hard like nature. Nature actually does a lot of really cool stuff, uh huh, And if we can just work with what she nature has already done, that's really promising for actually getting this thing to scale and be cheap, and I think like, when we look at synthetic biology, that was the field that we were sort of enamored with at the time and that we thought was very promising. But it's a hard field to scale.
Commercially, notoriously. Right, It's been like on the cusp of being huge for twenty years, right, And.
So looking around the cusp of synthetic biology, but saying, like, how do we just like really focus on solving the problem. It doesn't have to be the shiniest toolkit it needs to solve the problem. Maybe if we take it a little bit simpler. And so instead of taking one of these sort of industrial microorganisms with a standard toolkit and implying all applying all the tools of engineering and trying to really force a yeast to do something that it doesn't do naturally, what if we've found a yeast that actually has evolved for centuries to do exactly what we want it to do, and we can force it through faster cycles of evolution, and we can use rapid experimentation in data to understand better than ever how it grows and optimize its performance of growth. That sounds a lot more promising to actually building a commercially viable solution to this problem, and that's where we landed.
So it seems like the like the fact that there are oleagenous micro organisms that you know, oily micro organisms. Basically it suggests that the production of oil is like profoundly conserved, right, Like we get oil from plants and animals. But this fact that it's that there's oily yeast too is encouraging in your quest. It's like, oh, there's everything that lives makes oil, and some things that live make a ton of oil. Let's look at the things that live that already make a ton of oil.
Yea. Yeah, And it also I think, just says something about the value of oils and fats, right, Like, there's there's clearly a need for these molecules across across lots of appleties.
The reason they're in everything at the store. So, so is there some moment where you're like, we found it, We've got the magic yeast. You're still waiting for them.
No, it's a good question, I mean, I think, and look like science is never a street line. And so in the early days, you know, we had we our first approach to this was slightly less simple, right, It was a little more innovative and clever, but much harder to scale. And so I think we thought we had that moment and then we had another.
Wait, wait, tell me, tell me about the one that didn't work. Uh, what was the one that ended up being too clever?
Yeah, so it was. Actually so most of most of industrial biology today is a single micro organism, engineering, you know, the hell out of it, and then scaling it. And we sort of said, okay, but actually, in nature again, I think we've we've always been very inspired by what happens in nature. In nature, you see microorganisms coexist in our microbiome, for example, or in lichens on rocks. And so what if we took a micro organism like a yeast that was really good at making oil, and then we took one but the yeast needs sugar, and so then what if we combined it with an algae that was photosynthetic, and so then you don't need sugar, you just need the sun.
That is indeed clever, so you're lowering your input costs.
Exactly, I need to grow them in the same pot, which really nobody had done before. And so this is actually our first patent filing. This coculture of yeast and algae. And it's actually our first logo for the company, which is hideous but made in Microsoft PowerPoint.
And turned out to be based on an assumption that didn't work. It sounds like, but I think it just would.
Have been very hard to scale it.
So you have this very elegant idea, which I love because it's so satisfying and efficient. What happens, So.
That's working, and what happens is actually I was at a trade show. I was at a food tech trade show, just walking the floor. This is really early days. It's just me and my co founders. We've like soft committed to this concept. And I'm just walking the floor to trade show trying to see who cares about palm oil and is anybody you know interested? And I run into someone who's got a bunch of clever ideas on basically waste stream feedstocks so cheaper than sugar, available in millions of gallons per year, really scalable, cheap, up cycled.
And just to contextualize that, I mean, growing yeast is very simple, and people say all you need to do is feed them sugar, but you're pointing out here, like sugar is not free.
Sugar's not free.
Palm oil is like very efficiently produced and very cheap, and so even the input cost of the sugar is important, is an important cost that you need to drive down if you're going.
To be for rich. It's all math. And I think when like to sort of to anchor this around the key problem at this point, the scientific solution we had was elegant and clever, but we're also trying to build a business, and I think, you know, oftentimes science based businesses, it's easy to forget that, you know, And I think we were really trying to anchor and say, yes, this is elegant and clever, However, how do we build this into a sustainable, profitable, scalable business over time? And we were really early, but I think we were always anchored towards that in the early days. And sugar and where we got our sugar and what we paid for our sugar was sort of the critical question we unlocked as an insight that we needed to solve from the early days.
This is the fundamental sort of techno economic problem. And so it seems I don't want to attach too much to the photosynthesis solution, but just to be very clear. I love that solution. It seems like you're solving the problem. Why why didn't you go that way?
To two reasons. One was sort of biology and one was manufacturing from a biology perspective. Clever, but you know, actually still really hard to get two micro organisms to grow in sync efficiently together, which again all goes back to the math or the technoeconomics of making this scalable. And the second was a manufacturing problem, which is, because it was so novel, we would actually need to build totally new bioreactors to support this, and then you're not only a technology company, you're now manufacturing all the parts. It just would have become too much and too expensive.
Okay, too clever, too too too far, too far out beyond the technological frontier at some level.
And so back in sugar being the core problem that we needed to solve to make this work, we started trying a bunch of you know, waste, things that would be totally not obvious an organism could grow on them, things that didn't have tons of residual carbon, things that had inhibitors, things that were known to actually inhibit growth, not enable growth. And we started growing. And this is again very early.
Days, you're looking for all those things because they're cheap, because you're looking for a thing that's cheaper than just buying granulated sugar or whatever you buy for regular yeast. Yeah, cheap and abundant.
Cheap and abundant. And this is this is early days, So it's scrappy science. It's just me and my co founders. We don't have any sophisticated lab tools. But we get some of those samples and we start growing our yeast and it turns out the yeast grows on anything.
Oh that's great.
This was one of our This was maybe back to your question, one of our biggest insights and breakthroughs. Yeah, and it was a really important one.
Say like what if we just give it garbage?
Totally it works.
It's eating garbage.
And we later literally did that, like we we food waste to something people talk about a lot, which is an unsolved problem on many fronts. But we worked with you know, food waste collection here in New York, and we just basically fetied garbage and it was growing. There are other reasons I think that's hard to scale, but yeah, basically we found not only can our yeast make this hard to replicate profile of palm oil that nothing else has produced naturally before. Aside from palm oil, it can also grow on anything. It can eat anything, and that was a key unlock for So we'd solved the product side of it, and now we were well on our way to solving the cost side of it and the scalability side of it.
The particular strain of yeast, when do you find that, like, what is that moment?
Pretty early, actually, pretty early, we had identified, based on our criteria of the right profile and from literature, a believable ability to scale, So things like can it grow on a wide range of temperatures without breaking? Or is it really fragile? And if the temperature changes. All of these things model into cost at scale manufacturing. So we screened for those things pretty early, and we pretty early on had identified the yeast strain that we work with today as the best version.
So tell me about tell me about the strain of yeast.
So it is oleagenous, so it naturally produces oil and it's really good. So basically it can produce up to ninety percent of its body weight in lipids in facts. When we started working with it, which was seven years ago, the genome had been sequenced, so there was enough data about it, and there were a couple of universities that had started to do work on it. So we weren't, you know, the first people to discover it, but it wasn't something that was really ubiquitous like a baker's yeast or a brewer's yeast, and so we had enough data to believe that it was compelling and we started working with it.
What's what's it called?
It's we don't really say the name of it.
Isn't it in a patent? You didn't patent the name of.
It it is, but they haven't been published yet.
Okay, well, I'll keep my eye out. So you've got your yeast, you can feed at garbage. And this is like what kind of scale are you doing this set like? Is it like like a like a lab bench? Is it like a pot?
It's both. In the early days when we were sort of looking to get our first round of funding, we were going, you know, on stage at y Combinator for something called Demo Day.
So why Commeter is the famous startup incubator.
Correct, So they'd taken a bet on our revolutionary venture and we were so early, I mean We basically had some some shape flask, so millileater. But at the end of demo day, you know, we're still We're a science project at this point with a really big market. And so we had this i'd say pressure to want to make it real. One of you know the things about science based businesses. It's great, the concept is great, but to get funding, you need to make it real as soon as possible. As soon as it's real, people get it. And so we felt we needed pressure to be able to make something not in tiny, little milli leader quantities, but something that I could hold up on stage in a room full of hundreds or thousands of people could see as material. And so we had one lab bench that we were rent and we were just having problems in the lab. The standards were not working, we were not making enough oil, the experiments weren't working, and so we went over to a friend's house who was a homebrewer, actually a beer brewer, and we used his big pot for making what he uses to make beer at home out on his porch. So normally you think about science as being very precious in a controlled environment, etc. We just did the opposite. We were like, we just got to go for it. So we went out onto his porch, used his home beer brewing material and we call it sort of porch yeast, and we brewed a batch of oil from there.
And then what do you get? What is the output?
A sludge?
I don't like so it looks like muddy water? What's it look like?
It does? But it's pretty. So our yeast actually produces karateids. Caratenoids are also found in carrots. Beta carotene is what makes carrots orange, and it's why carrots are good for eye health. And so our sledge is orangish basically cool. So it's actually quite pretty. It's like a it's like a it's like a creamsicle almost.
I love that. Yeah, okay, so you got your creamsicle sludge. It's demo day. What like you put it in like a plastic jug or something.
Just like basically what happens. We had to fly to California with it and we put it in a plastic jug basically, and we carried it around in our rental car all week. And then we got on stage and you know, we had a sort of line where we're talking about palm oil, and we kind of held the jug with a little bit of oil, and we said, and this is palm oil, but it's made from yeast and not trees.
Still to come on the show. Getting from that homebrewed jug of creamsicle sludge to hundreds of tons of creamsicle sledge. We're not yet to scale and cost, which clearly are hard, but at least in terms of the thing, you've got the thing.
We've got this, okay, And I think we got the thing pretty early. Yeah, And that was important because, as you allude to, we have a whole bunch of other problems to solve, and so you know, as you're building a business like this, I think we try to think about what's the most important thing to solve, what's the most important problem to solve right now? And at that point, it was still the stuff around. The technology basically works, so further it prove that it can scale, prove that you can get to competitive economics, and then figure out actually scale, figure out mark, go to market, figure out all of that later. But that was really the first big problem.
I mean, it always seems with things in a lab. And this is like Pad Brown from Impossible Foods says this too. It's like it's hard to grow plants and animals. They're big, they take up a lot of space. If you could do a thing in a va, it should be cheaper. Like, clearly it's hard. There's a lot embedded in that should right, but at a just first principles level, it seems totally plausible'.
That's the promise of what we're all working on the place where the rubber hits the road is like you have to be making the right molecule and the right market.
And scale is really hard, right that, Like agriculture is so highly it's so vast, there's so much economy of scale. It's very efficient. I mean, obviously there's like externalities that they're not paying for, but like, even so agriculture is super efficient, say that for it, they're very good at making a lot of what they make cheap.
Laying it is, they've also had a really long time to make it efficient. And so one of the just challenges of I would say, like any novel technology competing against a big incumbent like that and specifically ours, is they've had a century plus advantage on us for getting it to scale, for getting those costs, and so of course it takes us more time and money to get there. Of course we're disadvantage. Can we get there? Yes, but you've got to have ambitious people building the technology. You've got to have funding support deploying it, you've got to have customers adopting it. And so you know, we've I believe we can get there, but it takes time and money.
You've got your palm oil substitute, You've got some money. What are a couple of the key things you have figured out since then to get from where you were then to where you are now.
Yeah. So at that point, again, the technology was basically working, and so a couple of key things were getting enough data to be able to build a cost model that was believable. So in the early days you don't really have credible data. You can guess and you can directionally say I think in theory it's possible, it's possible.
Sure, I mean it's very hard to build a credible model based on using your friend's home brew kit exactly.
Yeah, And so in the early days it was all based on theoretical possibility. So one of the important pieces was getting enough data repeatedly and showing improvements that indicated we're actually on track. To hit those theoretical limits. So a really important step. And by the way, this is ever evolving. We update our model basically daily with new up dates. But getting something that indicated we could hit you know, single digits dollars per kilogram, and.
So you need to prove that. I mean, obviously it needs to be true or your company is not going to work, but you need to prove it. What to get funding, you need to prove it to get advanced commitments from from buyers.
Both of those both we also needed to prove it to ourselves.
Yeah, I mean, seriously, why are we doing this?
Seriously? You know, like we started this, it was possible, but we didn't really know. And so I think it was important for us to say and again we know that this field is hard, and so we had to really be able to say we believe credibly that we can get this to a cost structure that will work. And that was just a really important milestone for us to hit. So the data to support a cost that could be competitive was really important, and that came on the back of years of experiments and improvements to the bioprocess.
What cost are you at now? What cost per kilogram?
So at scale, we're below ten dollars at kilogram, okay, which is really close to where we need to be. We've still got ability to improve that and we will. But we're pretty happy with where we are today for being pretty early into the commercial life cycle of the company.
I mean, is that price? Does that price mean there are companies that will buy from you at that price and sell at something of a premium sort of analogous to like organic food or something some people are willing to pay more? Is it like that? Is that where you are now?
Yeah? So that's where the technology is.
Yeah.
In terms of commercial, we launched commercially for the first time a little over a year ago.
That's your own, your own product.
We did launch with our own product. The business model is B to B ingredients, but we did launch with our own products. So am I allowed to curse on here? Or should I? Yes?
Yes, you are.
So. We launched the Palmless platform for sustainable ingredients last March. It was introducing our platform really to the world for the first time, and with it, we launched a direct to consumer product which was a nourishing oil and we called it Save the Fucking Rainforest.
Under Palmless nourishing its skin. It's skincare right, to be clear, it's not nourishing in the sense in hair.
Body, So you can use it in any of those, but just don't eat it. And so we launched that the product sold out in two hours. We had over a billion media impressions with zero dollars marketing spend, and most excitingly, we had inbounds from about one hundred and forty seven manufacturers of consumer goods.
Are customers right, and that I mean that product is basically marketing right, Like you're not selling that to make money or it's not. It's like marketing swag that people pay for it.
It goes back, it goes back to the idea of making it real.
Yeah right.
I can go and try to sell to these companies and we can spend you know a long time in conversation, but by making it real by putting a product out there by the way, like you know, getting every meach major media publication wanting to write about it. So since then we've started selling the product to customers. So we have closed multiple purchase orders. We've sold you know, metric tons of our oil too. Manufacturers. We've started in beauty and personal care, and so one of those companies launched a soap bar. Last year, we've had companies launch We've got one that's launching a sun care product soon, so we've had a dozen or so customers place purchase orders. The third thing that's happened really in the past year is the EU has passed landmark legislation, the EU Deforestation Regulation, where they are monitoring seven crops, including palm oil and swabean oil. And for companies that importing use these crops, they have to have a totally new way of validating that they did not come from deforestation, and if they are unable to do that, they can be fined up to five percent of their annual revenue, which is a material stick.
Sure sure, and so it's going to basically drive up the cost of palm oil to companies selling in your own.
It will also dry up supply because most of the palm oil today you just can't prove if it came from deforestation.
So that regulation is what you were waiting for as a company, is what you're telling me.
I couldn't have told you that. We thought this would have happened, but it's a great tailwind, so I would say, we're in conversations with men of the largest food manufacturers, and we are very close to converting to a multi year agreement with a large consumer goods manufacturer in Europe as well.
Why might you fail?
We're taking on I mean nothing about this is easy. Going from an idea to a technology that works in scales that's using biology, nonetheless, is not easy. Tackling a large, mostly commodity market with lots of momentum is not easy. And getting large multinationals to change their buying behavior is not easy. And in order to win, we have to get really big, really.
Fast, because if you don't get really big, the oil won't be cheap enough, as.
Simple as that, That's right, It won't be cheap enough. And we can't solve the needs of these large companies. Ah right, the company I was just talking about. You know, these companies may buy hundreds of thousands to millions of metric tons of palm oil per year.
And how much can you make Now.
We're on track to make hundreds of metric tons this year, which is great, by the way.
Like right, but you need to go up a thousand x now basically, but.
We need to go bigger faster, and like, that's the number one thing that keeps me up at night is we have we have brought this thing to market so fast and faster than most people thought was possible for a biotech. But we're not just competing with biotechs, right, Like, we're competing in this big world, and from a company perspective, also from a climate perspective, we have to go bigger, faster, and so you know, if we fail, it's because we can't get big enough, fast enough. And I don't you know, perhaps there's a technical reason for that. That seems unlikely. The technology works, so it's probably something else.
So it's execution risk. It's execution risk, I think.
So you know, it's we're making real widgets. We're making real physical.
Things, physical things that soon people will be eating, right, which is non trivial. What does your company look like in I don't know. I often say like five years at this point, but I feel like for your company, I want to say a year or eighteen months or something, right, like, if things go well, where are you're going to be in a year or two?
Yeah, I mean, we're at a really exciting point. We just crossed the bridge a year ago we were just an R and D company. Now we're commercial. It's a really exciting point in the company's life. And again, you know, we've made some small sales. We know people want the thing, but now it's like gas. We need to put the gas on right, go time, go time. And so in a year or two we want to be making money, you know, like I want that. And the thing is is that our we didn't really talk about this, but our go to market has started, you know, instead of tackling the really big, really cheap market first, which is by the way, what biofuels companies did and what a lot of companies have done by chasing food first, we've taken more of the sort of Tesla approach. Start in a market where you can make a better performing product and people are willing to pay premiums, and then take all the money that you make and funnel it back into the business, drive scale, drive down cost, and then take on the big market.
And your Tesla roadster is like sixty dollars skin oil.
Yes, basically, so it's in the beauty and personal care industry. And our customers will sell products anywhere. Sometimes they're they're you know, thirty dollars, but sometimes they're two hundred and thirty dollars. Yeah, but in that market, there's a willingness to pay, there's fast adoption, and they care about both innovation and sustainability, which is what we care about, and so we're really driving forward there. But we do have ambitions to move into food I would say within about two years as well. And so we're chasing a lot of things in the next two years, which is go become the hottest ingredient in beauty and personal care, make, you know, get revenue material in support of that, and get the business to a position where we can start to really scale it from a profitability perspective and move into more markets geographically, larger scale and new markets like food.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Now it's time for the lightning round. What's your favorite product that contains palm oil?
I love chocolate and all almost all the chocolate, and I like the I love like gas station chocolate.
Uh huh, cheap, crappy, garbage chocolate.
I know, sorry, mom, but they they've almost all got palm oil. Unfortunately.
What do you wish more people knew about yeast?
I think yeast, and like microbes and micro organisms, they have a negative connotation, but like they're really amazing, They're really this workhorse, they're natural, and so I just wish that they had a positive connotation instead of a negative connotation.
Yeah, if one didn't think infection, it would help. Yeah, yeah, that's what I think.
It's better than bacteria.
Yeah, yeah, fair. But yeah, before you went to grad school, you worked at Goldman Sachs. What is one thing that you learned at Goldman that's been useful to you running a company.
I really learned how to work at Goldman as a twenty two year old who knew like nothing. I think it was a really incredible training ground, and I think it just felt a great foundation for how to work, how to communicate, And I'm very grateful for my time there.
What's the most underrated LCD sound system song?
Someone great?
What's one thing I should not do if I go to Austin, Texas?
Uh? Hot, take don't eat tex Mex because it's better in San Antonio.
Okay, San Antonio is your hometown. Yeah, Okay, Well, if I'm in San Antonio, where should I eat tex Mex tech?
Amalina?
What was one surprising thing about meeting Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Gosh, so many. I mean I was not intimidated at first. You know, their staff was really training us on how to approach them. I did not think I was intimidated. I you know, when I met them, and as soon as they walked in the room, it's like my heart hit the ceiling. It was just they have this royal presence, and they have this really strong presence. They're also both lovely and they knew they knew so much about palm oil, so they were really well well prepped and informed and it was lovely.
Yeah. So you were inspired by this class you took at MIT called Revolutionary Ventures, And I'm curious, what is one thing that you learned in that class that has stayed with you.
Technology is necessary, but not sufficient. Revolutionary ventures always require a breakthrough in technology, but that's just a fraction what it takes to actually get things successful. There's the adoption piece, there's the funding piece, there's the scaling piece. So technology is critical, but insufficient.
Sheratku is the co founder and CEO of C sixteen Biosciences. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. Tell us how we can make the show better, who we should interview. We're going to take a couple weeks off, but we'll be back before too long. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thanks for listening.