Decoding the World

Sharing my learnings from the book, Decoding the World by Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta

Decoding the World by Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta

Decoding the World is a buddy adventure about the quest to live meaningfully in a world with such uncertainty. It starts with Po Bronson coming to IndieBio. 
Arvind Gupta created IndieBio as a laboratory for early biotech startups trying to solve major world problems. Glaciers melting. Dying bees. Infertility. Cancer. Ocean plastic. Pandemics.
Arvind is the fearless one, a radical experimentalist. Po is the studious detective, patiently synthesizing clues others have missed. Their styles mix and create a quadratic speedup of creativity. Yin and Yang crystallized. 
As they travel around the world, finding scientists to join their cause, the authors bring their first-hand experience to the great mysteries that haunt our future. Natural resource depletion. Job-taking robots. China’s global influence.
Arvind feels he needs to leave IndieBio to help startups do more than just get started. But as his departure draws near, he struggles to leave the sanctum he created. While Po has to prove he can keep the “indie” in IndieBio, after Arvind is gone. 
After looking through their lens, you’ll never see the world the same.

• Arvinf Gupta & Po Bronson, the 2 friends at the helm of the biotech capital firm IndieBio, devoted themselves to making positive change.
• since before the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieBio has been trying to save the world.
• IndieBio starts rapidly approving all sorts of new ventures that stand a slim chance of helping the world through the pandemic. Arvind sighs. His sense of purpose is leading him away from IndieBio. He’s leaving it in the safe hands of Po. Maybe he can do more food at a bigger venture capital firm.
• Arvind founded IndieBio as a way to influence the world for the better. But how much influence can one relatively small venture capital fund have, compared to a global powerhouse like China?
• IndieBio-funded company Beeflow found a solution to the bee colony collapse by making a cocktail of plant hormones & amino acids and adding it to the bees’ honey. Unfortunately, beekeepers were uninterested and unwilling to change approach. Po and Arvind described this as inertia.
• genetics in nature are constantly evolving on their own – with the potential to do humans enormous amounts of harm. Genome editing can help us fight the dangers of nature.
• IndieBio has funded many cancer-fighting companies. They haven’t solved the problem yet but with the strides that modern science is making, they’re getting there
• Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen & oxygen make up 97% of human bodies. The full hundred percent consists of just 25 elements in total. Our environments have a similar makeup; all bacteria are doing, really, is shifting elements around into different configurations
• Science and society have always moved forward hand in hand. Scientific change is gradual & sometimes predictable. Societal change much harder to foresee. Scientific innovation can help us build a better society.
• we all have choices to make that will impact our planet – and our bodies. Thanks to science, we’re learning more about what we are, and what we’re capable of. But what we do with that information is entirely up to us.