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.

My talk starts in half an hour, at 11:45am Pacific time. If you see this in time, you can watch the webcast live right here!

BIL is a new kind of science and technology conference, set up as a more egalitarian cousin to TED. My close friend Lexi Bright, who writes over at Sophisticated Relationships persuaded me to join her in delivering a presentation on the topic of person-to-person networking to the attendees of BIL. (I love speaking in front of groups — she didn’t have to try very hard.)

Anyone who knows me personally is nodding, because they know how enthusiastic I am about meeting someone new and learning all about him or her. When I was a sophomore at MIT, my friend Brian joked, “Jonathan, you’re the one that makes that whole ’six degrees of separation’ thing work.” Later, Malcolm Gladwell would identify me as a ‘connector’. Who knew.

I’m still trying to figure out what parts to emphasize in the talk. Last night, I showed up at Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne for Ignite Portland, but it was already over capacity. So I walked down the street and ended up having a bite at My Thai, discussing the topic of my talk with my waitress, Emily, as I dug into my massamun curry. Emily graduated from Skidmore last year and drove out to Portland from New York this summer with her old housemates. Now she teaches grade school in Gresham by day and waits tables by night.

Emily and I talked about the nature of networking for a while — she says we shouldn’t use the word, because it gives her the willies. And I know what she means. When we think “networking,” we think of dryly exchanging cards, with the “lower status” person trying to get time on the calendar of the other in order to pitch his product, company, or employability. She suggested that we make sure to divorce the word from its usual meaning and reunite it with the idea of being open, honest and sincere with others. This sounded spot-on with my own interpretation of networking, and I’ll be sure to emphasize it in our talk.

Lexi and I are still writing the talk as we speak, and suggestions are welcome. So tell me what you think. Keeping in mind that the audience will be primarily technically-oriented, what should Lexi and I emphasize in our talk? What should geeks know about talking to strangers?