The Soul of Biotech

I’m writing this post live at BIL! Prof. Daniel Frank from Stanford University has just concluded his talk called, “Stem Cells: Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.” Brilliant guy, and an aircraft pilot as well! I’m skipping out on some lunch to give my thoughts from this weekend.

BIL has been a tremendous experience for me. Lexi and I have already received lots of positive feedback from BILders who saw our talk on Saturday morning — and even from a few TEDsters who only heard about it. One TEDster, after I explained the entire talk to her after dinner at Montrio, said that our talk was as important as any technological venture. (Wow.) But more gratifying were the people that approached Lexi and I to say that our talk was highly memorable and helped them reexamine their own approaches to social interaction. Which was our goal all along.

Some bits of yesterday’s talk:
* A very rough video of the Social Bonding talk can be seen here, courtesy of Robert Scoble. We’ll get a better version onto the web soon.
* The deck for our talk can be seen here, but it won’t mean much without the two of us standing in front of it.
* A great shot of me delivering the fourth point.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to connect with leaders of several small new companies that I admire, including Allied Strategy, Replicus, Business Genome Project, Naviscribe, and Halcyon Molecular. Hearing about new business ideas is always fun, and for all of these companies (especially Replicus and Halcyon), if their execution is successful, I predict you’ll be reading about them for a long long time.