YouSaid · the spoken record

Aryé Elfenbein

lines on the record: 47
first: 2022-06-02
most recent: 2022-06-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Not at all. I think that people who are stewards of the ocean, who care about the numbers of fish that we pull out of the water every year should be rewarded for the sustainable ways in which they're fishing. I think that just as we have more humans on the planet, If we can have not just increasing choice, meaning if people want wild fish, it's there, if people want farmed fish, it's there. And if they want cultivated fish like wild-type salmon, that's an option as well. Not just in terms of that increasing choice, but that there's just more traceability and transparency in the entire seafood system. I think that is a future that is the brightest we can imagine.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are and you know, we'll start just because we'll be volume constrained, not unlike Impossible in the early days when they were first launching in places like Dave Chang's Momof So we'll be probably a small handful of restaurants around the country once we get that green light. But we actually have started conversations with some of these big grocery chains. And what's been interesting is that there was a lot of interest in actually having new things that would show up that people aren't used to seeing at their local grocery stores. And I think that creates a lot of space for innovation and partnership with these big conventional food producers who have surprised us, I would say, with just how innovative and forward-leaning they are on new forms of food production and technologies like ours.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And we've actually already started on some of the things that hopefully will be announced soon. And we've been taking a lot of cues from some of our early commercial partners who have expressed a lot of interest in launching with us. As soon as we get that green light from FDA. And you're right, a lot of the energy and interest is on things like bluefin tuna, for example, that are really difficult to farm and are actually on the brink of extinction. And I think we're really excited to listen to more of this feedback and help meet the market where the demand is.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we can have tastings. And that's been one way in which we've been able to get just invaluable feedback about how people perceive this product, what it tastes like, what it means to them, and just how we can improve generally. But it's not something we're able to sell at this point.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And today, hearing him talk about this, it's a trickle. I mean, literally a trickle. And that's over the span of someone relatively Young's lifespan. And if you play that tape forward, it doesn't take us to a good place. And I think that's why we are so urgently working to build this third source of seafood that can supplement wild catch and farmed fish.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally, you know, I was at an event hosted by some First Nations folks up in just outside of Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and somebody there who grew up in the countryside would talk about the salmon runs when he was a boy. And he's probably about my age, so maybe mid-40s. And he would describe it as a writhing snake. And he said it was almost so dense you could walk on them.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, every day. I don't think there's a day that goes by when we're not thinking about. Moving from an RD company into a food production one. And it's been a longer journey than many other companies have to take. And part of it is filling a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation to our investors and wanting to return that money to them with a nice return. But part of it is driven by the perils that our oceans are facing, right? To the biodiversity that exists in our oceans today. And we don't even understand what impact that's going to have. And so on one hand, the pressure of returning money in a venture-funded business might lead to some unintended consequences. But on the other hand, for. A mission as profoundly urgent as ours. It might actually be a fairly positive one.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business, but in the lab too, there are at least 10 failures. And I think one of the big things that Ari and I have had to do is just deal ourselves to that and then help our team kind of cope with overcoming these routine failures that are just a big part of doing science generally.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give you a recent one. So one of the things that we had to do was design a vessel, a cultivator that can grow cells at a pretty large scale. And one of the things that we wanted to do was to not order an off-the-shelf one that was made for a completely different purpose in the biotherapeutics world, but actually design one more with people who make brewery tanks, for example. And so we did it. We actually prototyped it at a very small scale and then made a medium-sized one and just recently received a pretty large one. Unfortunately, the person who assembled it made a mistake and we had some stability issues. And if you know anything about cell culture, contamination is your enemy. And so, you know, that's just one example. But that, you know, that was a three month setback. And I'd say for every success we have, you know, as not just as a”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we're fortunate that we have, I think, a very complimentary skill set. So I do have at least a little bit of background in financial modeling and consulting and things like that. Yep. So, I guess the best way to think about how we divided it to use a music analogy to a large extent, I was and to a large extent still am today, kind of the backup singer and the percussionist. And Aria and her scientists are the lead singers, the vocalists, right? There's a really interesting lesson here about, you know, that entrepreneurship alone. It's nice when there are two people not just to sort of divide things up as we have, but to really work through and cope with things when they go badly. We haven't talked much about that today, but there have been way more moments when things went sideways and off the rails than when things worked.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's a very subtle flavor. And a very similar thing happened when we started to think about the appearance, where there is also a wide variety of color hues when we think about salmon. And so these were the kinds of conversations that all of a sudden were really interesting from a culinary perspective. And it was these questions that we started to elicit the help of chefs to help us answer what feels most familiar? Is it more of what's called the saku or the sort of blocks that are used in sushi counters? Or should we be creating more of a salmon filet that should be cooked? And as you can imagine, it can often be a very subjective assessment.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what I'd say is that there is a wide range of salmon flavors and aromas and textures that we're used to. And I think some of the freshest salmon that maybe is just pulled out of the river in that moment can have a very mild flavor profile. Yeah, doesn't it?”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a whole process there where the cells will assume different forms and mature and kind of grow together in some cases to create these more complex structures and textures and flavors.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it doesn't look like that at all. That's really just the first step. And that first step is only just a couple of weeks. It's afterwards when we actually Have it grow on the structures, which we call the scaffold”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does look like a brewery. This is something that people always comment on when they come visit our space in San Francisco. It has grown in a similar way with similar principles when people kind of see how it's made. It just kind of clicks. It sort of makes sense. It's like, oh, okay, this is your growing cells in these steel tanks, just like the way that we grow beer or brew beer.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a reporter from Bloomberg there that we'd never met before. And when he wrote about the product, I think it was a very accurate description of where we were at the time. And this was after he tried just the unendorned piece of fish. He said it was certainly reminiscent of fish in the ocean, but faint. And I think that that was exactly right for that moment because the structure and the texture of the product wasn't really there yet. And so it was really just the taste really at that point that we could offer.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, people were, first of all, just very impressed that we managed to do this, that we showed up with a couple pounds of cultivated salmon. And the chefs that were working with the product did really a fantastic job across a number of dishes. I think we had bisque. We had it in sushi rolls, of course. We had it in a tartar. And at the very end, we brought out just a tin, sort of like a tin of sardines of just the product so people can try it, you know, undressed up. And so in the hands of such capable chefs, any product would be really good. But looking back on those pictures today, I mean, I can't help but cringing because it just didn't have the same visual appeal and structure that people would expect from salmon. So I think”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Salmon is a great example of a very versatile fish that can be created in many preparations that we're very used to seeing as for example minced salmon in a salmon roll or locks on a bagel or salmon filet or sashimi. And so having that vision for what this could become as the product got better Think was a big part of slowly improving all of the different characteristics that made the product better.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I could say it was one particular thing. So there are many ways to approach something like this. There could be a way to think through how can we create the highest density of cells, for example. How can we work through the scaling challenges first and then deal with the flavor and textural complexity afterwards? And a lot of our debate in the early days was how do we do this? How do we do this to create a product quickly enough in the beginning so that people can see what the promise is, but still give us the space to iterate upon that and actually perfect what is such a difficult product to create in the end.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a fish's weight gets thrown away or discarded between the time it's caught and the time it shows up on your plate. Things like fins and bones and so on that we don't consume. So out of the gate we had a sort of a 50% advantage over conventional seafood.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, along the way we were learning a lot. And I think what gave us hope in that fairly dark moment was that, you know, at the end of a year, we felt like we really had our arms around how this would scale. And I think that was the biggest thing that the two of us were grappling with, right? Is there these sort of two fundamental questions in the early days? One, can we do this and can we eventually make a product that is really good? And we hadn't answered that question at that point, as already said. And two, could this ever scale and turn into a big business that can even be a drop in the ocean of the colossal amount of seafood that is consumed globally? And I think through that process of that first year, both of us became a lot more convicted that we could do this, that this could actually work. And it was for some pretty obvious reasons in retrospect. So, for example, half of roughly.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it was the better part of a year before we could actually try it. And I'll say that once we had grown enough that we could try it for the first time, it was probably one of the most disappointing things I've ever experienced. I mean, it really tasted like nothing. I mean, truly, I couldn't even describe it. And it's because we realized that cells on their own, they don't know how to spontaneously organize into a piece of sashimi, for example. They need structures and they need to follow cues from their environment to organize in this way, to create all the complexities of texture and flavor. And that moment, we realize that we were still very, very far from having anything resembling a viable product.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been a big movement to kind of get away from this open net farming. And so the confluence of those things means strongly rising demand with pinched supply means some of our healthiest, most nutritious seafoods are only going to become further and further out of reach of many people.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“FDA has these guidelines for young kids. I remember at my kid's first six month appointment, the doctor asked, hey, are you giving your kids seafood? I said, yeah, yeah, why? And she said, well, it's very nutritious for them, omega-3s for their brain, yada, yada, yada. But by the way, don't give them more than two fistfuls of it, right? So you have this paradox where you've got this delicious, nutritious protein that's contaminated by all the stuff that we've dumped into our oceans. And at the same time, we have wild fish populations flat or plummeting with just basically across the board for almost every type of seafood that we eat. And then we have fish farms. You know, there have been issues like in the Puget Sound, for example, where Atlantic salmon was being farmed. You've had some nets break and these invasive species are out competing with the native species, right? So Chinook and Sakai and Koho and so on.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. There are a couple of real challenges with seafood, as you pointed out. It's almost impossible to find uncontaminated seafood anywhere in the world. And you mentioned microplastics. The number that I can't get out of my head is five grams or the equivalent of a credit card where microplastics that go into our bodies every week. And not just that. There's mercury and antibiotics and parasites and the list goes on and on. And with seafood, unlike a lot of the other types of meats that we eat, it's not about eliminating these things. It's about minimizing them, right? Which is why”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was something that Justin and I would do on nights and weekends. We would get these eggs and do these dissections and learn in just the most incredible way what these cells loved in terms of nutrition, how we could get them to thrive, what conditions would be optimal to grow them in. And, you know, when we think about food, it's for the most part muscle and fat. And so we started by just growing cells.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“San Francisco was one of the few places at that time where you could actually rent lab space by the hour. And we applied to be able to be part of one of these areas. And it was in San Francisco. It was actually very close to the university. And for the first time ever, we had our own lab. And I should say that at this time, we still had our day jobs. And in my case, I had two. So I was still working as a researcher. And I would also work overnight in the hospital, in the intensive care unit.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly how it happened. We started to realize that what we didn't want to be creating was a company that just made fine food for fancy people. And instead, we wanted to stay true to what the mission was, which was to use this method of growing seafood and growing meats to actually have a positive environmental impact. And it was around this time that our focus did shift in terms of thinking about what could we do with this method. And it very quickly turned to seafood, as Justin described.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how many people actually consume these products? And I think at that point, we started looking a little bit more broadly and a little bit more globally in thinking about, well, what does our species eat? And so, you know, it was a very quick transition, I think, for us after we made that initial proof of concept”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were able to make some Fogra. People have tried it. I remember the first person that we invited to try it was a friend of ours in San Francisco. And it was a tiny amount, like so small that it was almost difficult to really taste. But we did it. And we did it on relatively short order, probably from start to finish in just a handful of months, really. But even then, I think we started having these conversations about, okay, well, this is really interesting, but are we going to really have an impact on the planet by working on something like Fogra, which most Americans have probably never had?”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't actually seafood at first. We went through a whole exercise, much like the exercise for which companies we'd start about all the different kinds of meats and seafoods that we could make. And a couple of the axes on which we plotted this were cost and controversy. And if you imagine the kinds of meats that would be in the extreme upward right quadrant for that, things like foie gras would be pretty much at the top of the list. And foie gras is a really interesting meat as well. And the reason is because it's relatively homogeneous in terms of its texture. And it's actually also predominantly one cell type. So it's not sort of fat cells and liver cells. It's mostly liver cells that have just been exposed to a lot of fat. And this was the first thing that we wanted to work on.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this isn't for free, and it isn't limitless, right? That's how we do it at our house. But at the same time, I really like to have a hamburger on the 4th of July and on the barbecue once in a while and a steak once in a while and, you know, fish on a fairly regular basis. And so I think there's just a lot of people out there that are in this really difficult place where you're trying to juggle your values and your instincts.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I think for me, I started learning about our food system and really in a great deal of depth going back to some of the time I spent in Afghanistan, which is one of the most food insecure places in the world. And got back to the US and dug pretty deep. And it was clear that at some point. Eating meat and seafood at the rate we are not going to work anymore, right? For all the reasons you mentioned, there's environmental reasons, there's sort of humane reasons, there's economic reasons. But yeah, I think, you know, from. How do you have that conversation”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I moved to San Francisco, I slowly reduced my consumption of meat. I think that it's something that even since I was a child, I never really felt comfortable with the fact that when my parents would feed me chicken, that that was a chicken.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one in particular, doctor Mark Post in the Netherlands, was somebody who actually about 15 years before that, I had worked in the same lab with, also doing cardiac research. And he had gone on to create the world's first hamburger in this way. And he organized the first conference about this. And I was just riveted. I'd never been to the Netherlands. I didn't know why I was so interested in this whole field. But I just went. And it was incredible because nobody knew how many people were going to show up, what it was going to be like. And there was a very special energy in the room there. And it was truly an event that changed everything for me.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had one of these rare vacations that they would give us in residency and went back to my childhood home of Australia and was in the far north parts where there used to be a lot of rainforest, a lot more than there is right now. And today a lot of it is agricultural land. And was just kind of looking around and thinking about everything I had learned about, not just stem cells, but what modern agriculture means, particularly when it comes to beef. And I just kind of asked this question of can we still eat meat and not eat animals? And thought about like, you know, we must be able to do this. And I started to think about, well, what would it mean to create the fat? And what would it mean to create certain cuts of meat? And I didn't really know that other people were already working on this.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we would sometimes on the weekends get modeling clay and come up with all kinds of different designs and ways that this might work and all the things that we could do to make the netty pot so much better than it already is. The thing that was missing, I think, for both of us was a real hook that tugged at our heartstrings, right? That's something that we could a lot about. And yeah, I think that conversation really started back in earnest in 2015 when we first started talking about this particular idea.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you're like hanging your face over the sink and flushing your nasal cavity. And also, what innovations have been brought to the netty pot in the last thousand years? And what could we do to make it extra special?”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is so embarrassing, but why not? I mean, this makes for interesting radio, right? We had a few ideas on there just to give you a sense of the range. One of them was an idea to create a new kind of netty pot that we would call the schnauzzle. And the idea was doing a netty pot is actually very good. If you're feeling congested, but it's kind of gross, right? You're like,”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work that he was doing. And we'd get together on the weekends and talk about things that we were interested in. And this idea started percolating a little bit, this sort of entrepreneurial spark, I guess. I remember very clearly we were having coffee in New York City one morning. We had this friend who came to us and said, like, let's come up with a hundred ideas for businesses. And maybe most of them would be really bad. And, you know, we sat down and sort of started penciling out some ideas, not because we were serious about starting a company, because it sounded like a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning. And through that process, hearing each other think about what really matters to us. You know, the silly ideas that we came up with on that list started to fall away. And I think pair back into something that would later become wild type, something that the two of us are extraordinarily.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to me, this felt like one of those rare opportunities where you can really connect with someone who would be a lifelong friend. And I don't think RA and I were initially thinking about, hey, let's go start a business together. It was more a great deal of mutual respect, really different backgrounds. I had a great deal of curiosity about.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And prior to that, there was a moratorium on research in the United States on stem cells and the future of understanding how these incredible cells grow, develop, and communicate with each other was really in question because of this. And so this incredible discovery really changed everything. It took all of those moral issues off the table. And all of a sudden now we could understand how a cell becomes a neuron or a liver cell or any other part of the body, essentially adopt different careers for themselves.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely So I had finished medical school, I had done a PhD mostly in Japan around the same time in the same place where the discovery was made that we could create stem cells from ordinary skin cells that completely revolutionized the world of science. And I absolutely thought that my career would be one that would stay within academia.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had always had it as a life goal to get a graduate degree, kind of the first person in my family to go on to college and then being able to get a graduate degree seemed like something that I was very passionate about. And so I decided to take some time off from the State Department and do an MBA at Yale because it was this mission driven school. And that really appealed to me that it wasn't just about going on and working in an investment bank, but maybe having a big impact on the world, which is what drove me into the Foreign Service to begin with. And so to be honest with you, I showed up at school and I met these people that had started companies that were making, it was basically like a netting that went over a bassinet and it would help reduce the incidence of child malaria. And so somebody who started a company employed all these people, having this huge impact on the planet and just had a really”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had just finished an assignment in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, which is on the Pakistani border. I was on something called a provincial reconstruction team, which is essentially what it sounds like in terms of the goal.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly And it was for me at that time, somewhere between 80 and 100 hours a week in the hospital. But something about this invitation and something about the possibilities of just what could happen at a dinner where you don't know anybody else at this dinner. Really intrigued me and I went. And that's when I met Justin. I ended up sitting next to him at this dinner.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a funny story about how we met in my first year of internship. So this was after I'd finished medical school and was just starting to train as a doctor. And there was a dinner that both Justin and I were invited to. And the idea of this dinner is that nobody knows anybody else at this dinner except the person who is hosting it. And I had never been to a dinner like this.”
2022-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Wildtype: Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT