Hi Abhishek,

I cofounded a startup early on that was basically a group of friends in university in the same program. We were all engineers and the result was that we valued getting something working. And we did that very effectively, but it ended up not working out. In part I believe that was because while I was confident I understood business we didn't actually know the craft of other things that really were important. In our case it was business and partnership development - our solution was B2B and complex. So I feel like I learned about thinking about cofounders there. And then at Properly we had one of the strongest bench of different perspectives and skills on the leadership team I had been part of, and it so clearly was better that it was striking.

For this startup there are two gaps:

The first is the synthetic biology direct skills - I feel ramped up on the industry and starting to connect to folks. But I don't have the depth to know how to work with something like https://parts.igem.org/Help:An_Introduction_to_BioBricks (think open source package manager equivalent from the software world). The benefit here is to accelerate the deeper competitive advantages and effectiveness of the product.

The second is actually regional connection to the customer base. I expect this to be somewhere other than Canada first for deployments and having someone who can (or has!) worked with producers in the regions that this could be successful in will likely be important to accelerate customer pilots and adoption.

Thats my thinking on early employees, where the gaps are, and what the impact will be of finding the right folks to join.