Looking back at the last, say, 12 months and he could be like maybe one or two projects
or startups that really stood out for you, that really made a difference, that really
just got it, it really robbed your world basically.
You know, I mean, things stand out for different reasons and I should also say that I'm probably
fonder of pre-commercial stuff than I am at commercial stuff, so like one of the coolest
things that rocked my world was Katie London's Botanicals project, which is not a company,
but it tells us something about where the world is going towards the sensor world.
In terms of cool companies, I'm really, I'm quite fond of 23andMe, the company that started
by Sergei's wife and what's really interesting to me about it is it's really a hack and the
way it's a hack is they're basically using rich people who can afford to have, you know,
do personal gene sequencing for, you know, $1,000 about, actually, an extra $400 to build
a database that will be really useful for clinical research.
So they figured out something smart, rather than going and saying, oh yeah, we're going
to go do this non-profit to build, you know, genetic databases, they said, we'll get people
to pay us, you know, and now I like that kind of, and you know, if you talk to them, that's
really what they're doing.
They really are trying to build a very big database of people's genetic information,
which can then be used to bootstrap the field of personal genomics, and that kind of, you
know, that kind of hack is really impressive.
You know, kind of going back to really cool projects, again, this is all the way from
Web 2.0, and stuff that Drew Endie is doing with synthetic biology, and you know, you
see with BioBricks.org, where they're trying to build, you know, reusable, you know, biological
parts, what's happening with the International Genetic Managerial Machines Competition.
Amazing, you know, high school students doing gene sequencing.
This is a future we should be paying attention to.
You know, I think that there's, you know, a lot of really interesting stuff happening
in financial markets.
You know, that's why we launched our money tech conference, and obviously we were on
track, I mean, bad stuff happening, as well as good stuff, and we really need to think
about what we learned from what went wrong in financial markets, and how we're going
to apply that to other kinds of applications, which are increasingly becoming automated.
You know what I mean?
You know, in some ways, you could look at the whole sort of, you know, financial derivatives
market as, you know, a warning of what could happen, you know, to the future of some of
the other kind of Web-like intelligence applications.
Okay.
And, you know...
Thank you.
