BioCoder #10

Chapter 3. IndieBio Demo Day

Glen Martin

The crowd outside the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco earlier this year wouldn’t have struck any casual pedestrian as unusual. It was obvious another tech conference was underway, an occurrence almost as commonplace in this city as pigeons congregating on the sidewalks. There was also a certain familiarity to the Foundry’s interior atmosphere: people packed cheek by jowl, sipping microbrews and nibbling elegant finger foods, a thousand animated conversations creating a white noise that conjoined pleasantly with the pale winter light streaming in from the building’s clerestory windows. It could have been any coming-together of engineers and angels, venture capitalists and journalists; such conferences are the economic and social lifeblood of this city.

There was, however, a palpable difference to this gathering. It had a certain urgency to it, a kind of frontier exuberance that you don’t witness much these days at IT conferences. This was a biotech conference–of sorts.

But this wasn’t about big, comfortable, corporate biotech. This was the second IndieBio Demo Day, a gathering of the bootstrappers, visionaries, tinkerers, and paradigm-smashers of biotech. If biotechnology were viewed as a dialectical process, the attendees were the antithesis to big biotech’s thesis, the white-hot element that will lead to synthesis–and ultimately, a wholly unimagined new thesis. The air almost crackled with a sense of imminence, and a realization ...