Reshma Shetty ’08 PhD delivers keynote speech for the 2024 MIT School of Engineering and Schwarzman College of Computing degree ceremony
Shetty: “A startup is the best way to work on problems that matter to me.”
Photo courtesy of Gretchen Ertl
On Wednesday, May 29, Ginkgo Bioworks Chief Operating Officer Reshma Shetty ’08 PhD delivered the keynote speech for the 2024 MIT School of Engineering and Schwarzman College of Computing Advanced Degree Ceremony. Shetty obtained her PhD in Biological Engineering and subsequently founded Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotechnology company based in Boston that uses synthetic biology in various industries, including agriculture and pharmaceuticals.
Inspired by Steve Jobs’ famous commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, Shetty outlined her speech in the form of three stories: the origins of Ginkgo, challenges that Ginkgo faced, and life as a series of choices.
Shetty’s first story began with her fascination with solving biological problems. She credited her interest in biological engineering to her advisor, Professor Tom Knight. He introduced the idea that “biology is fundamentally programmable,” identifying parallels between binary numbers in computers and DNA bases in cells.
During her schooling, Shetty shared that it was difficult for her to write computer programs for biology; many of them did not work. These problems inspired her to make engineering and programming biology easier in order to “solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.”
“A startup is the best way to work on problems that matter to me,” Shetty stated, so she started Ginkgo Bioworks alongside fellow MIT students and Knight.
While it may appear to graduates that the choices people present to them revolve around choosing between different industries and professions, Shetty stated that the most important choice is “picking a problem in the world that matters to you and figuring out the best way to solve it.”
Her second story highlighted the challenges Ginkgo experienced as a new startup.
Starting a company was incredibly difficult because of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. “No one had any interest in funding for students and a professor with no technology, no IP (Intellectual Property), no business model, and no money,” Shetty said. She confessed that her team was “on the verge of giving up.”
Thanks to Saul Griffith ’04 PhD, they didn’t.
Knowing that they had the “most important skill of starting a company” because of their experiences “living cheaply” as graduate students, Griffith further advised Shetty and her team on how to fundraise for Ginkgo, such as through side projects like consulting work and bootstrapping, or fundraising a company using minimal external capital.
In her last story, Shetty spoke about her life choices and how many of them led to outcomes that weren’t “made in the hopes of getting into where I am today.” In Shetty’s case, she conducted research in a biology lab in high school, studied computer science in college, and ultimately did her PhD research in programming cells. What motivated her to make these decisions was based on what interested her at that time. Life, for her, is “a series of choices,” and the future entails making more choices.
Shetty advised graduates to make choices based on “problems that matter to you,” rather than “where you want to be 10 years from now.” She gave examples of people spending time on research or work that they don’t enjoy because they view it as a “stepping stone to an imagined future for themselves.” Shetty closed off her speech by encouraging graduates to “optimize locally, not globally.”
After the ceremony, The Tech spoke to Dean Anantha Chandrakasan about selecting Reshma Shetty as the keynote speaker. Citing an MIT Faculty Newsletter article about women in biotech, Chandrakasan said that there is significant underrepresentation of women as founders of biotech startups, making Shetty’s role as a founder and senior leader an outlier in the industry. He noted Shetty’s invaluable contribution to Ginkgo Bioworks, as she oversaw the company’s growth from a small team of five MIT scientists to a publicly traded billion-dollar company.