Summary of ValleyDAO Twitter Space with Homeworld
In case you missed it... here's a breakdown of the recent Twitter Space with Daniel Goodwin and Paul Reginato, founders of Homeworld.
Some background on Homeworld:
Homeworld Collective is a non-profit organization that is focused on advancing the field of climate biotech, which involves the application of biotechnology principles to the challenge of deep decarbonization. The organization has recognized a barrier in the field, where many talented biotech professionals want to work on projects with climate impact, but lack experience in the specific field of climate biotech. As a result, they struggle to connect with clear problems, collaborators, and funding to get their ideas off the ground. Homeworld Collective seeks to provide support and resources to individuals who are talented but new to working in the field of climate biotech, and aims to help these individuals navigate the large challenge areas and identify high-impact, actionable projects that align with their skills and interests.
The humans behind Homeworld:
Dan Goodwin is a tech entrepreneur with a background in computer science and neuroscience. He dropped out of his PhD at Stanford to become an entrepreneur in residence at IDEO, eventually building a company that was bought by Microsoft. He returned to neuroscience to pursue a PhD in 2015 and witnessed the rise of medical biotech, leading him to explore synthetic biology and eventually climate. Paul was introduced to carbon capture by a friend and sees climate as a series of technological challenges. He has been exploring ideas with a colleague, Paul, since 2019.
Paul Rejinato has a background in biology and math, and he pursued biotechnology to better understand and build tools for the study of biology. Towards the end of his PhD, he realized his passion for protecting and caring for life on the planet and wanted to use his biotechnology tools to address emerging problems in climate and sustainability. However, he found it challenging to find promising ideas in the climate space compared to the well-mapped out problem space in medical applications. This realization led him and his colleague, Dan, to start a journey to build community, map out problems, and establish Homeworld, a biotechnology company focused on developing solutions for climate and sustainability challenges. He also spent almost a year mapping out possibilities for biotechnology to reduce carbon dioxide removal, which will be presented in a forthcoming report in the next few months.
Why Homeworld?
Dan discusses how his company, Homeworld, came to be. Dan and Paul started Homeworld to work towards a large frontier goal. They wanted to solve the problem of gigaton carbon capture and explored ideas to achieve this. They focused on finding something that makes sense that they can articulate a first experiment towards. They also wanted to find existing patterns that they could follow to scale up their experiment if it works. They met many practitioners around the world who are working on the same problems as they are. After three years, they did not find the individual project that they wanted to work on full time, so they decided to focus on community-level needs. They want to create a "three-legged stool" consisting of money, knowledge infrastructure, and networks to make grants successful.
Paul adds that climate biotech needs social infrastructure. Many talented individuals are interested in working on climate-related problems, but they lack a community and familiarity with the problems. Homeworld provides a community and knowledge infrastructure that enables people to become familiar with the problems and come up with productive ideas. The social and knowledge infrastructure is the foundation that allows people to be productive thinkers and doers.
Morgan agrees with the need for social infrastructure and community building as the foundation for productive thinking and action. He believes that Homeworld's approach aligns with this philosophy, creating a sense of belonging around the issue of climate change, which many people around the world are emotionally impacted by and want to address but don't know how. Morgan notes that there is a niche community that is frustrated and wants direction on how to apply their energy constructively towards climate action. He believes that Homeworld can provide that direction and show people where to apply their energy.
How do we build a community?
The conversation then moves to tips to build community. Dan suggests that it's impossible to please everyone and focusing on a specific group of people, like biotech practitioners, is better. Trust and authenticity are crucial, and it's important to broaden out more publicly while focusing on building trust and helping people develop their authenticity. Tangibility and action are also essential, particularly in creating tangible experiences to address complex problems like ecosystem level deployment and cleaner mining. Finally, ideas and funding are both essential, and the idea of having a transaction built into community discourse, particularly for funding wild projects, is a powerful one.
What is Homeworld working on?
Morgan then asks about what projects homeworld is focusing on. Dan indicates that Homeworld is working on two major projects this year: putting out big reports and doing grants for climate biotech practitioners. However, they are actively thinking about the legality of radically open grants as there is a big balance between confidentiality and the ability to patent. They want to support biotech practitioners without compromising their ability to downstream create a company. They are also actively working on active knowledge creation, specifically protein engineering for climate engineering. They are trying to come up with actionable proteins that have relevance to climate sustainability goals and are deeply studying the different sectors from carbon capture to soils to metals to create a living white paper. They are currently recruiting for fellows to help lead this project. Homeworld wants to work on meaningful frontiers in biotech and cdr, and not just the biggest and most obvious problems such as optimizing rubisco and cell-based meats. Paul explains his work on knowledge creation in biotech and cdr further.
Paul mentions that he's been working on a report to identify opportunities for biotech in CDR and that it will be published in the coming months. However, he is more excited about ramping up community-driven knowledge creation, particularly for an emerging field like biotech in CDR, which is broad and has many emerging problems that require contributions from multiple people. Paul believes that drawing the knowledge of many people together, who each understand components of a problem, and getting them to produce a knowledge resource that can be used by everyone, is a great way to advance the field.
Finally, while discussing new opportunities that they are excited about, Dan discusses how Homeworld was created to explore new ideas and have the freedom to operate. He then shares his personal idea on treating pollution as an actionable problem, which is underappreciated but is responsible for around 10% of all deaths worldwide. He believes that pollution should be a Pharma problem and map medical biotech to the environmental challenge of pollution. Dan also mentions three other exciting spaces, namely, artificial enzymes, drugging plants, and radiosynthesis. He believes that we will learn atomically precise tools from nature, and we will continue to discover them.
Paul is enthusiastic about the concept of a circular carbon economy, where materials, chemicals, fuels, and food are produced using carbon dioxide and cheap energy. He sees this as a way to save limited resources such as land and water, which are currently used to produce biomass for consumption or energy generation. Paul believes that this circular economy approach could help mitigate the effects of climate change and extreme weather patterns, while also allowing for land to be used for more productive purposes.
Check out the full recording here:
Written by Shreya Sachdev
Shreya is a bioengineering undergraduate student at the University of Illinois with a passion for learning, teaching and meeting people. A founder, with prior internships in Web3 community management and skills in AI, and robotics. She is looking to craft an internship this summer.
“Some areas I want to learn about: DeSci, bioinformatics, biomanufacturing, synthetic biology - DM’s open :)”
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyasachdev
Twitter - @web3chick