jan '23 - the seed

BUILD is a monthly update of how i’m building myself: 1) what i get done, 2) miscellaneous thoughts, and 3) what i look forward to in the next month.

by Midjourney

what did you get done this month, sofi?

in my last update i talked about the vision of growing a tree in 2023¹, which symbolizes the mark i want leave in this world long after i’m gone. january, then, was the seed. these are some of the results i’ll share for now:

1. getting into a research lab - next week, i’ll be moving to monterrey to join a agriculture/metabolomics/tissue culture research lab.

2. writing a review on cell ag with johns hopkins students - well, this certainly took longer than expected but i’ll be sending the final details of my collaboration this week. though the cell ag section is short, i’ve learned a lot from reading lots of reports and papers, specially from gfi haha.

3. doing college admin stuff vs compbio - honestly, i was supposed to spend 50%+ of this month learning bioinformatics. it turns out that college admin stuff took a while longer. i’ll share more on that soon…

on other notes: i unintentionally decreased my use of twitter yet had the pleasure of e-meeting wonderful people who dmed me after publishing this article, i started a “30 papers challenge” with some friends (and have done terribly with only 4/30 papers so far), i’ve been walking a lot, feel tired but will be finishing most commitments tomorrow to celebrate my 19th birthday on sunday :O

the value of university in the age of the sovereign individual

sometimes, after attending events like the future forum in sf or the villars symposium in switzerland and returning to mexico, i get a strange feeling of living in between the top 1% and the bottom billion of the world. i’m reminded that the future is somehow, already here indeed, and it’s definitely not evenly distributed.

i’m not here to say that this is either right or wrong but rather want to analyze how this will change in the next 10 years. i believe that the rise of hacker houses and digital nomads, the world’s knowledge being freely available online, and the support of organizations like 1517 are all clues of the decentralization of what we call university today: 1) like-minded people, 2) experts who share knowledge, and 3) funding for research.

people

most people these days say that the real value of college is in the connections. i actually think that this is proving to be one of the most replaceable pieces of the puzzle. sure, chatting with someone on zoom—even dozens of times throughout the span of 3 years—will never equal the thrill of the physical world. however, i’ve experienced first-hand how you don’t need to be enrolled at stanford or johns hopkins to meet and collaborate with people there.

Alexey Guzey @alexeyguzey

ppl always get upset at me for saying this but unless you have a very good thesis for not being in the bay area, your probability of being left behind by history is way higher than you appreciate. this used to be the case historically, it's going to be more the case onwards

this is not my thesis for not being in sf/cambridge yet. alexis’ tweet made me think that: if startups and research in these places are parties for cool young people, the already-existing companies and research facilities are the hosts of these parties.

from my limited point of view, at the root of this is the fact that universities have funding to do research, which attracts already experienced people + young and inexperienced people, creating a supply of smart people in that place, turned into a positive feedback loop.

research

research (and the training to do great research), from my pov, is the most important piece of value universities can offer in our era.

i’m not talking about the web3 buddies here. i’m talking to you, wet lab bio nerds growing vaccines for cancer, self-healing concrete, and cultivated oyster meat. those of you who are ambitious, focused, and lucky enough to have already had 1 year of wet lab experience before even entering college—you guys are the top 1% but that doesn’t take away the fact that the ratio of wetlab:hardware builders is still ridiculous.

whether that’s best for our world’s biosafety is another story. i do think it’s clear though, that the trillion-dollar tech market owes its value to the democratization of tech itself. and for now, it’s enough to say that the the open insulin project is the only ambitious example of biohacking i’ve heard of—please do enlighten me though, if you know of other folks building new biotech outside of academia and ²indiebio.

my bet is that if daos do significantly change the way science gets funded, some might as well change where science gets done.

→ if wetlab training or biofoundries were as widely available as python courses are today, would it be childish to imagine a future in which innovation is evenly distributed?

how to proceed

i have come to believe that our quality of life in the 21st century will be largely determined by our ability to learn, build, and sell: learn and build, sell and lead.

the freedom of the sovereign individual isn’t at all for free. it’s paid through an equal discipline of self-improvement: create or die. the question is not whether you can do this once, but whether you can keep showing up better each time.

certainly, genz will not come out as sovereign individuals if we just follow the curriculum. in fact, that will have put us in the complete opposite to freedom. authenticity, creativity, and uniqueness are what our new cyber world will optimize (not to say ‘select’) for. the unconventional path is the only way to go.

those brave who already took the road not taken will rejoice in the infinite unpaved roads still left to walk. those who remain only observers now will soon question the ³indulgencies they were paying for and one day, a sovereign new generation will adventure into the hell they prayed they’d never go.

so here’s my question to you, sofi: when will you stop paying indulgencies?

last note: those who say there’s absolutely no value in school are most likely only checking boxes blindly; being a product of the education system instead of a client of it. i will study bioengineering in college, and i think it’s possible to take a somewhat unconventional path meanwhile, by playing the ⁴great online game.

up next

i’ll share that when it’s done in my next update hehe. for now, i have 2 questions for you:

1. how do you normally take notes after reading research papers? any recommended apps/format/sections?

2. how do you make the most out of your weekends? to me that means having a balance between resting and being productive on the things i can’t do throughout the week.

1. you can read it here

2. listening to arvind gupta’s interview in the bios podcast made me think of the potential of this model for future biotech startups. to me it looks like the risk is not being able to assess the feasibility of the science + engineering. to those non-technical folks, it will certainly be risky as hell to fund potential startups this way. how about others though? can an extraordinary team start an insanely great company from a place like indiebio?

3. grabbing this concept from the 1517 fund. i liked it.

4. it’s a great concept. check it out here.