The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast

Transcript of Episode 58: Scott Fahrenkrug

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain some errors.

[Grant Belgard]: Welcome to The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast. I’m your host Grant Belgard and joining me today is Scott Fahrenkrug. Scott, welcome.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Thank you, Grant.

[Grant Belgard]: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Yeah, I was retired. I had a career doing research in biology, spanning from algae to zebrafish to humans to livestock, generally focused on genetics and how we can use genetics to be more productive and to understand biology better. So, I retired to Brazil after some success in both academia. I was a tenured professor at the University of Minnesota. I left that to start some biotech companies. And Recombinetics is maybe the best known, and Acceligen, these are companies that we’re focused on using gene editing to develop animals with superior traits. So, climate resistance, animal welfare traits, like hornless cattle, you don’t have to brutalize. And so, anyhow, I retired to Brazil after I sold my stake in my companies and got pretty bored pretty quick.

[Grant Belgard]: As often happens with scientists.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Yeah, you know, I just, and I had an epiphany, frankly. It was during COVID, and I managed to get out on a boat in Rio de Janeiro and ran across a seaweed farm. Which I didn’t even know existed, that you could have a farm creating seaweed. And that has led me on a very exciting journey around the world to the major seaweed producers in the world, which is in the Coral Triangle, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, but now quite a bit in India as well. Well, what’s interesting about this industry here in Brazil is it’s nascent. It’s brand new. And brand new, except for the fact that there was importation of a tropical seaweed species from the Philippines 30 years ago.

The intervening time has been spent trying to prove that this wasn’t going to be an invasive species, to prove that you could actually run a farm. And Brazil’s come a long way towards that. As it turns out, there’s a match between what seaweed can bring and what industry needs. So, the number one product for seaweed in Brazil is biostimulants for crops. So, this is a giant market. Essentially, simply by extracting the juice of the seaweed and spraying that on crops results in better resilience, better survival under harsh conditions. It induces a stress response. It’s been characterized in a couple of recipient species that have gotten the biostimulant. And they express genes that reflect immune response to the environment. And therefore, they’re protected.

So, that’s an exciting product here in Brazil in particular. You know, Brazil’s the number one producer of soybeans now and sugarcane and cocoa. So, it really is, there’s an opportunity here to make use of this species that, frankly, comes from Asia, but has brought with it opportunity. And would the unit economics of that work out using the species as is, or would modification be required? So, that really is the ultimate focus of my work is to, first, to make this a species. Kappaphycus alvarezii is the name. Bring this species to our current genetic understanding. Okay? So, all the major crops in the world have genetics programs for genetic improvement. And to understand how those various species respond to production. Okay? And so, that was really my first focus.

But my career has really also aimed at trying to accelerate the genetic progress that we can make. And so, indeed, I have some targets for this species. Some of them are more global impact. Some are more focused on specialty products. But they all rely on the same thing, which is selection and direction. And so, selecting for those versions of seaweed that produce more, faster, better, but then also using our comparative biology and our understanding about how genetic systems work to identify targets for improved production. So, really, it’s been a journey because there really weren’t any genetic resources available for Kappaphycus alvarezii. There was an unpublished article that did some genome sequencing. None of the annotation was shared with the public.

And so, I made it a mission to solve that and have, to a great degree, built a bioinformatics system, the Kappaphycus alvarezii Genome Explorer, which has got all the kinds of bells and whistles I always wished for from any of those public informatics sources. And has really revealed itself now to be a great exploratory tool. So, we’re looking now at specific targets that we think would change the production efficiency of seaweed. So, the Green Revolution, most people don’t. Maybe we’re too old because I don’t know if people even know what the Green Revolution is or was. It happened in the 70s. And the naysayers and the pessimists thought the end of the world was upon us, that we had too many people and we were going to all starve. Okay. It was really doom and gloom in the 70s.

As it turns out, there were good genetic scientists, including Norman Borlaug, who got a Nobel Prize, who focused on trying to develop strains that perform better in production systems around the world. And so, lo and behold, they actually came upon a mutation in phytohormone pathway that resulted in producing wheat strains that were shorter, thicker, and produced more grain. And that, along with the development of better fertilizers and pesticides at the time, really led to a dramatic increase in productivity around the world. And really, it changed agriculture forever. We think those same targets, that same biology, also exists in seaweed.

And so, we’re using now our genomic information and comparative biology to develop strains, either select for them or use gene editing tools that rely on this genomic information to develop strains that will grow faster. So, we have a goal. We want to increase the productivity of Kappaphycus alvarezii five-fold in five years. Even if that’s just on our farms, that’s the objective. Okay. We know the world of seaweed production is hungry for other things, too, not just productivity. And by the way, the biggest market for this seaweed, Kappaphycus alvarezii, has historically been carrageenan, which is a hydrocolloid product, and it’s a thickener. You’ll find it in ice cream and toothpaste and various other things.

And actually, carrageenan is great for sort of milk desserts, puddings, and things like that. We like it. And that’s about a billion-dollar-a-year industry in Asia to isolate that. So, there’s real business there. But because we live in a changing world, the productivity of these crops has taken a real dive. We think, although the data is not there yet to make this conclusion, we think the hypothesis is those productivity is going down because this is a crop that has been clonally propagated for almost 50 years. So, there’s no genetic cleanup, right? And so, there seems to be a loss of resilience. There are some diseases that attack the crop. Ice-ice disease. You know, there are people that are working on this disease to understand that disease. And eventually, they will.

But then what do you do with that information, right? And so, our perspective would be, well, we look at how we can grant resilience back to the plant. So, either by finding natural alleles that can improve performance or novel ones, changes we can make to make the species resilient or resistant to that agent. So, what else? The species also has, I see it as a chassis. So, we’ve characterized the metabolic pathways in the species for phytohormones, as I was mentioning, but actually other pathways that are quite interesting to us because this genome of the seaweed is about 370 megabases.

So, it’s not as small and facile as a bacteria, but it’s a heck of a better size to work with than my prior career that was looking at humans and zebrafish, you know, things on the order of 3 times 10 to the 9th base pairs. So, this is much more amenable. It’s a red algae. It’s one of the earliest kingdoms or species, right? Red algae is ancient. There was some sort of symbiotic relationship established between an algae and a green algae. And so, this species photosynthesizes and that’s, I guess, part of the, really the value of the species is it can take carbon out of the air using sunlight with no fertilizer, no pesticides. It turns that into biomass and that biomass has value. So, as carrageenan, as biostimulant, and some other specialty chemicals.

So, there are some quite valuable pigments in the species. There are mycosporins, which can be antibacterial, have various biological activities, including acting as a really good UV protectant. So, we’re looking at this species as a potential factory for those kinds of specialty products, which is really a change in the approach to seaweed farming because it’s been seen and has had success as a commodity. And the farmers don’t get paid much, and it is really instrumental to the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, but they hardly get paid anything because it’s a commodity. It’s just a food thickener, right? That’s that market.

But imagine if, actually, you could, on the same size farm, be producing a specialty chemical, a compound with biological activity, a drug or fertilizer, and that starts to get much more interesting because we can tailor the species to our objectives. One of the wonderful things about the fact that the species is not propagated sexually, it does it itself in the ocean, and indeed, we’re sequencing some of those wild populations to understand the genetics that are there. But for production purposes, people go out to the ocean, they take a sample, and they bring it back to the lab, and they grow it up, and they sell that to farms. And now, going forward, every 30 days, there’s a harvest, and they leave behind a little piece, and so it’s vegetative propagation clones for 50 years, okay?

So, I pointed out the bad side of that before, which is they’re not as resilient against external stress and get infections. But the good side is that indeed in Brazil, all this time that was spent on characterizing the safety of culturing the seaweed has shown that this, at least what’s in Brazil, is not reproductive. So, the risk when you develop new strains, so think about new strains with specialty products, then the risk of loss, the risk of release is dramatically reduced because it doesn’t sexually reproduce. And so, it’s environment where it can potentially spread to is local. So, that, to me, is also interesting. And indeed, you know, using the very same technologies, we can ensure that it will never be reproductive, simply by looking at genes that are involved in reproduction.

So, that has massive implications, and it sounds like there are many, many moving parts.

[Grant Belgard]: Where do you see Forjazul playing a role within that, and, you know, what does that roadmap look like?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Well, so, I think, as I’ve come to understand that we’ve got to play in two spaces. The one space is to understand and anticipate that it’s a commodity crop, and that if we, A, need to be not just in Brazil, we need to be in Asia, we need to be in the Coral Triangle. We need to be providing solutions from that industry that already exists, okay? But indeed, as a startup company, you know, we also have to have bread and butter. We have to have some things we can bite off. And so, that’s why there’s an emphasis on specialty products. And indeed, for us, I think in Brazil, it’s very much focused on biostimulants.

Understanding what biostimulants are there, understanding how to make better biostimulant, how to improve the stability of the biostimulant, and really to go participate in that market, which is something I’ve never done. But the results are pretty compelling, I would say, from researchers around the world, particularly in India, about the efficacy of this extract. Really, you just throw it in a blender and push it across a filter, and then you spray that liquid on the crops, okay? So, really, that’s a pretty, that’s straight from the ocean. So, you talk about farm-to-table, right? So, this is ocean-to-farm, and directly. So, pretty fascinating space to be in. So, both those, we have to, and indeed, we have recently secured some funding in association with a biotech company here in Brazil.

They’ve decided to sponsor a, I should say, an oil company from Malaysia that has oil deposits in Brazil, is supporting a project. Focused on increasing and optimizing carbon fixation by seaweed. And it’s part of, and it’s part of, it’s part of, it’s actually law here in Brazil that people that are extracting energy, whether it be oil or hydroelectric, they have to dedicate money to helping the environment, dealing with those issues that result from extraction. Okay? And so, indeed, they like the idea of developing strains of seaweed that fix more carbon faster. And so, that’s an exciting area, and I think those are big objectives, right? Because it’s not just about developing the strain that grows faster. It’s, then you have to think about how do you get that around the world?

How do you do that? I guess that’s a whole other issue, because it was actually not great that somebody illegally brought the seaweed into Brazil 30 years ago. That is a problem. And it’s a problem going forward, too, because the seaweed industry will grow. But the idea that you would take seaweed from one location to another risks contamination, right, risks disease transmission. So, this is the other side of the genetics, is that now the tools are so efficient for us to make genetic improvements that we don’t need to move a strain around the world. We’re targeting strains around the world. So, we deliver that product. So, we have a Brazilian product and a Brazilian project, okay? The objectives and the needs of producers in the Philippines is different.

We don’t, in Brazil, have ice-ice disease. Whatever it is, it’s not really clear yet. It seems to be, someone told me it’s a Vibrio. I don’t know yet. That’ll be coming out sometime in the next year. But they have that problem. We don’t. So, people in Brazil won’t want that product. They’ll want more and better biostimulant so they can use it on their massive production. It is something rather exciting about Brazil. You know, it’s when they decide to do something, they do it in a big way. And so, my first exposure to this was coming to the understanding that the number one beef producer in the world is Brazil. But 50 years ago, they had no industry in beef production. They decided to solve that, and they did. So, that’s kind of impressive. They did the same for soybeans.

I want to see them do the same for seaweed. There’s 8,000 kilometers of coastline in Brazil. And, you know, that’s a real opportunity for productivity.

[Grant Belgard]: So, what challenges have you run into running such an international company, right? I mean, I think you’re set up as a Delaware C Corp and have, obviously, primary operations in Brazil. It sounds like you’re doing, or at least have a number of collaborators in the Philippines, etc.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Look, I think we don’t have a lot of money, but we have a lot of knowledge and passion. And what I’ve found is I can decide to go and create a collaboration and find receptive people because everyone likes good science. And if you’re passionate about the same thing as somebody else, that builds a relationship. So, that’s number one. That’s a scientific thing. But I’ve had the good fortune to receive respect from folks who I’ve reached out to and created that relationship. The biggest challenge, of course, is it’s expensive. You know, the meetings are okay. It’s like the morning for me and the evening for them or the other way around. And that’s fine. But actually getting together and sitting down face to face, it’s expensive. It’s an expensive flight to the Philippines.

And so, that’s a challenge. But that is the, those relationships and those efforts in the Philippines and Indonesia are, and Malaysia also now, anticipate success. But those are the long haul, because I’m not there. I’m focused on creating the opportunity right now, which is to really change the philosophy of how to develop this crop, how to produce this crop, and what to do with it. So, that is more proximal and more interesting. So, we’ve got our eyes on an antiviral protein that’s produced by the species, which we have a great interest in developing along with another feature of the species, which it produces cellulose in large quantities. And that cellulose can be turned into fibers and fabrics and masks.

So, the whole thing was born out of a period when the world was under this COVID cloud. And we all came to understand the difference between an N50 and something that’s not an N50 mask. Okay? So, we’ve discovered a protein that inhibits HIV, influenza, and COVID transmission. How? Because it binds to the sugar moieties on the surface of those viruses. So, I’m very interested in us making masks out of seaweed that have this protein, effectively increasing the, or decreasing the permeability of the mask.

[Grant Belgard]: So, Scott, I know you’ve always been a very early adopter of AI. Can you tell us about how you’ve used that in your company?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Yeah, everything. It’s kind of changed everything. Right? So, we’re already, one of the early objectives we had was with the Genome Explorer was to permit us to look at gene expression data and make sense of it. Which is super important for somebody who worked on vertebrates his whole life. Right? Suddenly, I have to make sense of gene expression data in an algae. It’s not really a plant, but it’s closer to that universe. Okay? And so, we have, early on, have implemented the use of ChatGPT to help analyze the data and write the paper. Right? So, you have to analyze the data, make sense of it, and publish. And I have to say that I’m much more efficient in writing now than I ever was on the basis of using artificial intelligence.

I think the future use is going to be even more interesting when the models are smart enough to answer complicated questions about, tell me what product to develop today. I think it’s eminently possible that, with an artificial intelligence understanding the corpus of the species and the economic markets and projecting economic markets, I think this will end up being a driving force for our creativity, if nothing else. And if the economics makes sense, the products.

[Grant Belgard]: Well, it certainly seems to improve capital efficiency dramatically, right? If you’re not having to pay people to do all these things, not to mention, I mean, you can investigate a greater number of ideas in less time, right? So, there’s a cost element, I think, of time.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: By its very nature, the AI is interactive. That was designed to be that way. And it’s amazing because when I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I was participating in a group that was developing these large language models, and particularly trying to bring it to the biotechnology corpus. And, you know, they were, the group I remember, they were interested in cancer, breast cancer. I was interested in milk production, same organ, okay, different species, different objectives. But the corpus is the same, right? The terminology around that biology is the same. So, that was, I have to say, 1998, 99. So, people, it’s kind of impressive. It’s impressive, these large language models. I kept wondering, when were they going to bust through?

And, wow, it’s revolutionary right now.

[Grant Belgard]: Yeah. So, speaking of your time at the University of Minnesota, I was wondering if we could kind of go to the beginning. You know, what sparked your interest in genetics originally, and how did your early career shape your path?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: I liked genetics from the first Punnett Square I did in high school. I guess it’s that I’ve always appreciated the information content. So, in a sense, I’m a biologist, but really, computers have always been part of what I do also. And, really, it’s the same thing. It’s information content. You can realize, you can create biology. I understood that even as a high school student. As soon as I saw that you could follow genetics and a trait, it was clear to me that’s the next programmable opportunity. And so, it was computers that led the way first, but I think there’s going to be this sort of biological revolution that is yet to come.

Now that we can read it all, and we can change a single letter in the genome, provided there’s research funding for the world, there’s all kinds of promising opportunities. And we’ll get out of our hole again and again using biology, just like we did during the Green Revolution. And, like, it’s such a huge feat for humanity, the Green Revolution, because it also was addressing humanitarian needs, right? Like, there’s really people hungry in the world. There’s really people suffering. And that’s a satisfying thing. That’s why Norman Borlaug is my hero, right? Because his solution was do good science. It will help other people, and that’s indeed what happened. So, you know, Norman Borlaug is from the University of Minnesota, I’ll just say. I never met him, but.

So, look, I think there’s a difference between this sort of idea that we want to use science to save the world, but we also want to use science to make money. And money from, you know, our investors. And so far, you know, we haven’t taken the show on the road, so to speak. We’ve been in stealth mode using my retirement money. And some investors from my other companies have come on board. We’re at the point now that my focus has been on trying to make the opportunity heavy, to put as much into the opportunity as possible. And I think we’ve done that now. It’s just so obvious. It’s so obvious when we actually present the results, present the opportunity, and people can taste it. So now is the time for us to break out.

And so now one of the challenges, again, it’s about funding, right, and finding investment. And on the one hand, I told you that the 99% of the seaweed industry is in Asia, okay? So how do I participate in that economy when I’m so far away? But the fact that the industry is so small in Brazil with such a high potential makes it more interesting, okay? And as I say, there’s no place to go but up as it stands now for that industry. And it seems to me like the timing is now. People are willing to pay for carbon credits, so maybe the timing is now. So we just also want them to pay for other forms of carbon, including therapeutics.

[Grant]: So are you targeting Brazilian investors or primarily U.S.-based investors or really everyone who?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Well, so our focus was first to build a research capacity in Brazil, right? And so on my limited resources, and I know this is indeed the same reason we ended up engaging with BioInfo CRO, is that for a startup company, really shoveling the ground startup, paying for salaries and health insurance and taking on the responsibility of working with people who have families and having that responsibility to take care of them. And, you know, that’s not the right environment for a brand new company. That’s not the way to do it. So I understood that and have instead been focused on building relationships with Brazilian companies that already exist. And I sought out a company called BioBureau. They’ve been in business for about 10 years.

They reproducibly win top or third most successful biotech company in Brazil for various competitions. And so I’ve built a relationship with that company where I’m paying them to perform services, right? Paying them, it’s their business. That’s how they get paid is by doing the research projects that we envision or other companies envision. So that’s important. And that infrastructure, you know, it was actually quite recently we signed a contract that, again, identified the investment by a Malaysian oil company in growing seaweed. So their employees get paid and we get the results, right? The IP is ours. And so now I have that contract. I feel like I can go raise money. Okay. That’s pretty juicy. Now I can talk to investors and say this is, it’s real, right?

There really is money here for this and there’s real opportunity. And so back on the road again. And so that’ll be the next challenge is I have to look and see how many frequent flyer miles I have for the states. And indeed, it is a major objective for us now to, it’s time for us to, we’ve got a mailbox in the states, but we need to create the laboratory now. Right. So because now we have a machine, now there’s pull, right? Now there’s products that we need to be developing. And so now I can justify to investors that it’s time for us to build a lab again. And, you know, my labs have been quite successful over the years.

[Grant Belgard]: Yeah. So speaking of which, I mean, it’s not your first rodeo, right? Can you tell us about Recombinetics?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Actually, you know, there were four companies we ended up creating because the markets were so different for the different approaches. So there’s an agricultural part, which is the company Acceligen, which is, you know, we focused on animal welfare traits. We focused on heat resistance, heat resilience in cattle. Actually, it’s pretty tough for a cow in Brazil, really hot and really rough. And so that’s the main reason that the beef industry here is based on a species from India called Nalori, which is okay. It’s not Angus. But so that was one of our objectives was develop Angus that could survive and excel in Brazil. And so discovered a mutation from actually the my CSO for Acceligen discovered the mutation that made some breeds of cattle more resilient against heat. Okay.

So, again, it was about animal welfare, animal comfort, but also productivity, which are intimately linked together. Better animal welfare is better, right? Better animal welfare is better productivity. And so that’s something that people in the agricultural industry understand. So there were other parts to the company. So our first successes were focused on developing pigs that had human diseases, genetic diseases. So we were early gene editors. We were able to replicate specific disease alleles in people, in pigs, and demonstrate the corresponding physiology, the corresponding illnesses. So pigs are a much better model for human disease than mice. We developed, and by the way, along the way, we discovered some things and people just didn’t know.

Like there’s a dilated cardiomyopathy that it turns out it involves a crystallization of a protein. It’s similar to Alzheimer’s, right? So similar to that protein misfolding granules. Nobody expected that would be the reason for a dilated cardiomyopathy, okay? And so that’s fun when the path you take leads to new discoveries. So those companies, you know, I was, you know, when I started, I was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, tenured. And, you know, once I realized what we could do with genomes, I decided I wanted to do it, not talk about it. And so I left the university. I think overall we ended up raising about $60 million for that company before I handed it off. So not bad. Not bad for my first try is the way I’m looking at it.

And so the second try is probably harder, but I knew how to get here. And so now I think we’re on the right path. It’s all about the contract, right? So, and I think you guys know, you helped me so much in the beginning, putting together the genetics program and the infrastructure that I needed. And it’s really tailored, right? So this is, I think altogether we accomplished something pretty amazing. It doesn’t just involve Kappaphycus alvarezii. You know, we’re simultaneously analyzing about 15 other seaweed species and are taking the large view on that because evolution has lots to tell us.

[Grant Belgard]: What are the biggest differences you found working across all these different industries, but also fields, right? What are some of the common themes? What are some of the big, maybe unexpected differences?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Well, I have to say that there are unique challenges for each of them, but more, I think more interesting is it’s all just the same. Okay. It’s just the same thing in another species. I am not a speciest. I’ve never been a speciest, you know, zebrafish, algae, people, cattle. Well, it doesn’t matter, right? And so there is the, you need to have a reproductive strategy, okay? This is important I found for my pigs, for example, right? So we cloned and we set up breeding programs. You’ve got to have that infrastructure to do that. It’s the same thing with seaweed. It’s the same thing with everything. If you want to do it with yeast, it’s the same thing. You’ve got to have that production capacity, that reproduction capacity, okay?

And that reproduction capacity gives you access to the genome, of course. So what reproductive strategy you use influences the tools that you can bring to bear. I used to say, you know, in the end, you can file hundreds of patents, but it’s all about the animal. Right? It really is all about the animal. How big a herd do you have? Right? So for livestock, penetrating that genetics industry was very difficult. Right? So there’s a few global companies that own the genetics of cattle and pigs, and these are big guys, right? And so, but we were able to make huge progress and compete because our technology was better and faster. Okay. Now the same thing is going on with seaweed, right? So it’s why I have a focus on trying to develop high value products.

Indeed, we want to increase biomass production fivefold in five years. That’s a global objective. Okay. Okay. But, you know, I think there’s, you might be familiar with the sort of value pyramid where at the top, it’s biomedical, and at the bottom, it’s commodity stuff, right? And so we’re driving towards the top, right? Because we’re a startup company. We need to drive towards the top because that means fewer farms to develop and create the value. Right? And so I’d rather, and indeed, we’ve encountered some compounds that the world apparently wants that are worth a million dollars a gram. So can we produce that in seaweed? I don’t know. Is it better to do in seaweed or is it better to do it in yeast? We have photosynthesis on our side, and it’s a simpler genome.

So that’s where we’re headed. That’s the future, I think, for us. And the nice thing about it is that that is amenable to spinouts, right, that are focused on a specific product, right? You’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. You’re equipping a company to produce something, and hopefully that brings money to your shareholders, right? But, you know, I remember encountering early on in my life, I think I was interviewing for my faculty position at the University of Minnesota, and the department chair asked me, So do you work with cattle or pigs? You can’t do both. What? Right? That’s, you know, maybe there’s some truth in it in the, you know, I couldn’t really understand either industry, but I was already an outsider.

And to me, it’s information, it’s genetics, and I didn’t see a line. Like I said, I got my PhD working on zebrafish, right, on embryogenesis, and so it seemed absurd. But so that’s, you know, I think a challenge from an investor perspective, though, right, that they’re going to say you have too many ideas, you’re not focused on any one thing. You know, I think that’s a legitimate criticism in an era where you don’t have artificial intelligence and single nucleotide modification capability, right? So the fact that we can create things so fast now, the key is to spin them out fast. And so we’re figuring that out. We’re figuring that out.

[Grant Belgard]: I think the world is changing faster than ever before right now.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Yeah. Change is happening faster than change has ever happened. Yes. In fact, it just changed again.

[Grant Belgard]: So knowing what you know today, what advice would you give your younger self?

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Well, so one of the lessons I learned was from the very beginning of the companies I started, people would ask me what my exit plan was. I’m like, exit plan? This is my life. Exit plan? Seriously? It was naive. Naive. Because as an entrepreneur, without being greedy, of course, you need to be planning for your future. And, you know, you got to have a diverse portfolio, right? You need bread and butter. And the rest is gambling. And so I was bold when I left my tenured faculty position at the University of Minnesota. I’ve wondered how wise that was.

But seeing what’s going on now with research support, you know, I think it was my nature to be more focused on creating and creating opportunity and creating money. I’m more a doer than a talker, although this has gone on a long time.

[Grant Belgard]: Well, we could go for a lot longer if we had more time blocked off, but maybe we can have a second session later. Thank you so much for joining. It’s been really fun.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Thanks, Grant. Thanks for the opportunity. And I look forward to working with you guys again.

[Grant Belgard]: Same on this end.

[Scott Fahrenkrug]: Cheers.