Announcing The Grow Everything Podcast
I started my career writing interviews. But as much as I enjoyed that process, I needed more time to interview all the great people I met and wanted to speak with while building Messaginglab.
Enter Erum Azeez Khan.
Erum joined Messaginglab after exiting her venture-backed startup, Soundmind. (True story: We met at Genspace at a computational biology meetup.) She has a background in biotechnology, and the two of us love nerding out on AI, software, hardware, climatech, deeptech, nanotech, just about anything cutting edge, and how those technologies bleed into each other.
Erum and I plotted how we could accelerate Messaginglab's mission to be a force multiplier for the biotech industry. Almost immediately, we hit on the idea of a podcast. Something I'd wanted to do since John Cumbers and I had interviewed the synthetic biology thought leaders for What's Your Bio-Strategy?
Erum and I listened to many episodes of popular podcasts and the other 20+ biotech podcasts. Most of them were good. A few were fantastic.
But almost all of them were aimed at other people in biotechnology - people like us in the biotech echo chamber.
We knew that if we were going to succeed, we'd have to be different. And we'd have to figure out ways to expand the audience and get more people excited about this world-changing technology.
We figured there were four ways to do that:
Make it accessible. Biotechnology is complicated. We're talking about working with life and doing things to living things that are mostly invisible. We're talking about technology that has been demonized and is fighting to gain mindshare. At the same time, it is advancing at a pace that is hard to keep track of and most people are not ready for. If we can find ways to highlight what gets us excited and what is mind-blowing, we believe we can get more people interested. That means talking about growing bricks, self-repairing concrete, mycelium circuit boards, printing meats, and biodesign software. At the same time, we will talk about complicated topics that need to be understood. Our goal is to ensure our non-biotech friends' eyes don't glaze over when we say "biotech," "synbio," or other industry terms.
Expand the people we interview. If you have been working in the biotech industry, paying close attention to Messaginglab, you'll notice that many of our first interviews will be with people you may know. But if we're going to expand the audience for biotech, we need to speak with architects, artists, chefs, designers, farmers, journalists, non-biotech engineers, investors, politicians, and waste management professionals. Biotechnology will touch and transform many of these people's lives, so you'll start to hear from more of these people starting next year.
Start discussions. We aim to give people the lexicon to have intelligent conversations about biotech and inspire ideas on participating in the bioeconomy in some fashion (no pun intended to our biofabrication friends). We have segments in the podcast where we define words, concepts, and organizations. Also, we encourage listeners to submit questions or comments via our email or website in the show notes. We will be experimenting with more ways to engage.
Be ubiquitous. I'm a scientist turned marketing entrepreneur. Erum is a scientist turned startup entrepreneur. We both know the power of consistent marketing. We also know that building an audience requires a lot of work. We do this for our clients. All that said, there are more opportunities than ever to reach potential listeners and expose more people to biotechnology. We're starting with audio and text, but we'll be using video, given how much traction it gained (due to the pandemic and the rise of TikTok). While we test and refine, we hope to share our insights with you. If you are a client, we'll suggest things that are working. We have seen excellent outcomes with our consumer-facing biotech clients on new platforms with new forms of content, and we can ride that wave if we keep paddling.
We finished recording Season 1 and will be releasing the episodes weekly. Our interview with Stanford’s Megan Palmer is available now on our Grow Everything page. You can subscribe and listen on Apple, Google Play or Spotify, or other popular podcast streaming platforms.
Let's Grow Everything,
+Karl
