John Corcoran 10:15
And so How are you selling those tickets? Like, where were you out like on the street? Or how are you getting sales?
Dr. John Cumbers 10:22
The traditional method we got when you volunteer to do the box office, you got given an answering machine, and your phone, your home phone number.
John Corcoran 10:31
Where young people at home, an answering machine is this device that people used to before voicemail?
Dr. John Cumbers 10:38
Exactly, and add a little tape on it. And every evening, you had to rewind the tape to record the next set of messages that would come in. And so it was my home phone number, my mum and dad’s home phone number was printed on these posters that were then put all around the town and then the answering machine we had, and then the phone would would ring and you’d get an A you know, you’d either pick it up if you’re home in the evening, and somebody would say, please reserve me for tickets for Thursday night. And so you’d write it down on a piece of paper, you put it in an envelope, and then that would be mostly we’ll call. So you’d go and people would pay but they could also mail you a check. This was in the days before you could take a credit card over the phone. And before you could before the internet. So there was no way to buy credit cards, and then the envelope came back with cash and you gave them the tickets.
So that was the main way that we sold them. And of course, we had, I don’t know, 60 kids in the theater. And they were all incentivized and told you gotta go sell this many tickets. So it was a great leadership role for me because I got to incentivize a sales team. And I got to hype them up and tell them how exciting it was and tell them about the early bird and tell them that it’s selling out. So that was how I sold tickets. And then we did a bunch of stuff with PR and reaching out to schools and getting them to bring in tons of people. And then also selling sponsorships in the program. And I remember I sold my first sponsorship to a burger chain that was just up the street. And man, it was so difficult to get this guy to depart with his 10 pounds for the program for the advertisement in my program. But when he parted with it, I was like Ching, I think I understand you got to talk in the language of the audience that he wants to connect with.
And so that’s what I did. I told him all about these hungry males that will be leaving the theater walking past his restaurant, wouldn’t you like to get in front of that audience? He gave me 10 pounds for the ad. And even now I’m closing sponsorship deals in the hundreds of 1000s of dollars. It’s the same amount of effort as that first 10 pounds that aren’t sold.
John Corcoran 12:36
Wow. Yeah, I was gonna say I mean, that’s completely applicable to what you do now, because you get sponsorships for the conference. And you also went on to work in student newspapers, student radio. The interesting thing about your background is sure you got a background, you know, you got a PhD in molecular biology and worked at NASA. But now you also have your conference that you do. So it’s like a hybrid media company. And you also worked in media with a student newspaper and radio. So it’s interesting how your career trajectory makes total sense to what you do now.
Dr. John Cumbers 13:08
Yeah, it’s interesting how all three pieces have come together. There’s the networking piece, there’s the science piece, and there’s the media piece. And that’s what we do. We run this amazing conference once a year. We’ve been running it now in the Bay Area. 2000 People will be turning up at the San Jose Convention Center in five weeks. And it’s this confab of everybody around the world who’s involved in reading, writing, editing a DNA or designing or building or testing an organism or cell to make a particular product. So that’s it. That’s what we do. That’s my business.
John Corcoran 13:43
At what point did you decide that you wanted to work at NASA? I think you said you wanted to go to space.
Dr. John Cumbers 13:51
I was lying on the back of a picnic table in Malaysia, where I was doing an exchange program as an undergraduate student. And I joined the astronomy club because I was fascinated by the stars. And I remember looking up at the stars and just thinking, there must be something else out there. Like there are so many stars to look at. And the scale that we’re looking at is so vast, I really want to understand why we’re here. What’s the meaning of life? Are we alone? And so it set me off on this journey of understanding biology, because I looked at the enormity of the universe and I thought, we’re never going to get there in the time that I have available in my brief, you know, 80 to 100 years on this planet. But what if we could live longer?
And so I went back to the UK after the exchange program and I enrolled in a master’s program in bioinformatics, the combination of computer science and biology and then after that, I did a PhD. which started off in the biology of aging and insulin signaling. And again, it was this can-do attitude like, I’m, I’m a smart guy, I can figure this out, and I’m gonna work really hard at it. And that’s what took me and drove me to go to Brown for my PhD. And then when I was at Brown, I thought, well, what if I study Aging and Longevity all my life, and then I die? That would be a pretty big waste of the one life that I have. So how about I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, let’s explore the space angle as well. And that’s when I sent off a cold email to the head of NASA Ames in Silicon Valley and got an internship and, and the rest is history.
John Corcoran 15:45
And what I’m, I’m curious, do you harbor hopes to go to space still, one day.
Dr. John Cumbers 15:52
In 2019, we did an event called beta space. If you go to beta dot space, you will find the event and we had Blue Origin. NASA and SpaceX all come together with a bunch of biologists who are producing food and materials and fuel to discuss how we can use these technologies for space settlement. And we have a whole track at the conference this year on space settlement, we have 18 tracks, we have one on longevity, one on space settlement. So all of my interests are still represented in what I do, even just a little bit. And I’m still very passionate about space. And it’s awesome. We just saw the launch of a starship, just last week, two weeks ago. And so I’m just super excited about where humanity is heading. And I’m also excited about longevity.
And I was chatting with one of my friends just a couple of weeks ago, and he said, I think this is it, John, I think we’re gonna live forever. And, and, and I hope he’s right, that and the reason is because of AI because using AI to be able to understand. And then engineer biology, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Biology is so complex to think about engineering it from the human mind. But now we’ve got these amazing tools of AI that are going to be able to take in the data, spit out results and suggest the next experiment to run, it’s just really going to speed up everything that we do, and everything that we know about biology.
John Corcoran 17:25
I don’t know as much about the longevity space. But on the space side i, i I’ve read a number of books on it, interviewed some people on it. And it’s really interesting how there’s really like a space race going on now. And in many ways, you mentioned Blue Origin, and SpaceX, they’re very competitive with one another. What are your thoughts on the status of the space race right now and how that is, you know, motivating these companies to achieve more faster?
Dr. John Cumbers 17:51
I think it’s great, particularly because it’s happening in private industry and not in government, although a lot of the money for those companies is coming from the government. So I’m very excited about where it’s going. I think it’s going to be interesting what China and India do as well in space. And I think there’s going to be a really interesting period where this new frontier opens. And it’s almost like history, repeating itself of finding new land and new people wanting to stake their claim and, and go settle it’s what we’ve been doing for 4.6 billion years.
John Corcoran 18:32
Yeah, at what point? You were at NASA, I believe, when you decided, you know, there’s not a community and an event for the synthetic biology space. And I’m going to do it, I’m going to put it together. Was there something that inspired that something that motivated you to do that?
Dr. John Cumbers 18:48
There was a community of synthetic biology already. But there wasn’t a community of the synthetic biology industry. The community was mainly academic. And they had conferences, and they had meetings, and the industry people were invited, but then they got to speak. You know, on the last day at lunchtime, they weren’t the center of attention, that and so. Exactly, exactly. And so what I did was to say, hey, this meeting, I don’t want any academic speaking. I just want industry speaking. And I just want the people who are at the edge of the envelope, the startups who are really doing amazing stuff.
And the most interesting thing, I remember sending out the first email to people about the conference, and I was saying, hey, the most interesting thing is that you’re not going to recognize a single name, who’s speaking at my conference, which is completely counterintuitive. Normally, you want the biggest names to be bragging and getting people to come and buy tickets. But my value prop was you don’t know anybody here because this is a brand new community that I’m bringing together. And it was amazing how we had 150 people show up. And we got a free venue on Oregon Marsh road, the law firm. And we hit it out of the park, we had just such an amazing event. So that was the foundation of SynBioBeta.
John Corcoran 20:14
Well, it wasn’t long that you kept on having speakers that no one knew because now you’ve had Steve Jurvetson, who’s an iconic venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, who’s invested in everything that’s been a huge hit. Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Google, Dr. Craig Venter. How did you get some of these names in the early days? I know Steve Jurvetson, for example, was one of the early big hits in only your second conference. I mean, it’s amazing to me that you had 150 People with the first one and you were able to get him for the second one.
Dr. John Cumbers 20:49
Yeah, let me retell the story of getting Steve Jurvetson. So I put together the event. And this was about, you know, maybe a month before the event, so I didn’t have any space left on the agenda. But I met him at the Maker Faire, randomly. And so I told him what I was doing. I told him about the event. He said, well drop me an email. So I dropped him an email. And I said, I’d love for you to, for you to speak and give the keynote at the conference. And he’d see, said his assistant, and and I had, he’d replied and said, thanks. Well, we’ll take a look at it. And he said his assistant. And then about five minutes later, my phone rang. And it was his assistant.
And she said, Well, Steve took a look at the agenda of your conference. And he asked me to tell him that he’d be delighted to speak. And she said, but this might throw you for a low. I remember her specific language, because that’s not a term that we would use in the UK. And I didn’t really know what it meant. She said, But he asked me to clear his agenda for the whole two days, because he wants to actually come to the conference. Wow. So I knew that I’d made it. And actually, just yesterday, I sent him a complimentary pass to the event coming up in May. Every year I keep, you know, and he and he comes back. He hasn’t been in the last couple of years, but he’s definitely still tuned in and excited about it.
John Corcoran 22:38
They must have given you some legitimate legitimacy to have someone that is well respected in the valley.
Dr. John Cumbers 22:44
Speaking, it did. And he’s very well respected in our industry. He’s invested in a company called genomatica, which makes bio based nylon, he invested in a DNA synthesis company called Gen nine invested in Craig Venter’s company. So he was putting his money where his mouth was, as well. So he was just a big deal.
John Corcoran 23:01
Now, you mentioned the vendor. You know, he sequenced the genome, it’s kind of famous for that. I kind of don’t remember I ever talked with him. But when I was working in the Clinton White House, I was covering NASA as a topic when I was working on presidential letters and messages. And I remember writing about it. And I remember being really excited at the time. You became, I guess, got to know him when you were at NASA. And the huge name by that point, how did you strategically get to know him?
Dr. John Cumbers 23:29
It’s a good question. And it’s another interesting story, because this is how I’ve got to know all of the VIP speakers, which is there’s a trail of breadcrumbs from getting to these unobtainable. VIPs that you don’t know. But you’ve got to go through a ton of people that you do know that get you closer to that VIP. And, and it takes years, like George Church is a very big name in the field of genomics and biotechnology. He’s a professor at Harvard. He’s founded many, many companies and I invited him for years in a row before he finally accepted on the fifth. And it’s really important just to keep at it and come back with a different angle: a different request from a different person that you’re going to pair them with for the fireside chat.
And, and just, you know, be persistent because people are like, You know what, this poor guy has been asking me to speak at its conference for years now. Maybe I’ll, maybe I will give it a yes. Because he’s asked me five times. Exactly. Exactly. So, how it worked with Craig Venter was somebody told me that his brother worked at NASA. And so I knocked on his door and I went and introduced myself to Craig Venter’s brother who’s the polar opposite of Craig Venter. Venter. Craig is very big and bold and out there and Keith Venter, his brother, is very, very quiet and reserved, a super great guy and doing some really interesting things at NASA. And so I worked my way to get to know Keith Venter. And I got to know what Craig was excited about. I knew that he was excited about flying, I knew that he was excited about wine. And so then when I kind of teed up this workshop for him to speak out, which was a very exciting workshop, and the video is online, you can look at it.
If you Google Craig Venter NASA talk, you can find it, it was all about using synthetic biology as a using DNA as a digital code for sending into space and then settling the solar system. So really, really cool stuff. But when they invited them out, it was, you know, Hi, Craig. I’ve been speaking with them. I’m a graduate student at NASA. And I’m organizing a workshop on terraforming and using DNA as a digital signal for space exploration. And I’ve been speaking with your brother, Keith, about how passionate you are about these topics. And I wanted to see if we could invite you to be the guest of honor at our workshop on November 23, or whenever it was. And then I added in, I couldn’t do anything about wine, because we were the government, but I could do and we will, I’ve checked with the with the flight controller, and we’re and if you want to fly your plane in, we will be able to let you come into the airport at Moffett Field.
John Corcoran 26:24
Some of the sealed is for those who don’t know, it’s a, I believe still a NASA facility. Right. It’s an airstrip in the Bay Area, but most private pilots can’t get into it. Right?
Dr. John Cumbers 26:36
Exactly. Yeah, you know, I can’t remember the details of who owns it now, whether it’s the Air Force, or whether it’s Google or whether its assets. It’s kind of a shared runway. But I said, you know, we’ll roll out the red carpet, and you can fly right in and it’ll be super efficient on your time. You know, and he replied back, you know, very short.
John Corcoran 26:55
Sweet yes and hold work.
Dr. John Cumbers 26:57
I’m in exactly. That’s, but that’s the thing, everybody who you want to invite to speak at a conference, it’s all about status, you’ve got to just lay down how important they are, why you want them to speak who the audiences that they’re going to be able to connect with, you know, just treat them like the royalty that they are. That’s why you want them to come to your event.
John Corcoran 27:16
And what was it like having Steve Wozniak, of course the iconic Co-founder of Apple.
Dr. John Cumbers 27:21
Steve was great as well. He was very engaged in the SynBioBeta conference. He said, you know, he wants to come back. If I was doing it all again, I’d pick biology instead of technology. And he was talking about the Homebrew Computer Club that he founded with, which I think he was a Founder of with Steve Jobs. And he was just very, very passionate. I mean, Wozniak is just a geek. And this happened at the 2019 event. And then really interestingly, then COVID happened in 2020. And he thought that he was one of the first patients to get COVID.
And so we worked on a project to get his blood sequenced, and see whether we could trace back kidding when he got COVID. And then he came on, He zoomed, bombed one of my zooms during the pandemic, and just said, he was thanking all of the people who are developing antibodies for COVID. So Steve Wozniak is just a really great guy. And also his wife, Janet is fantastic as well.
John Corcoran 28:23
How funny that must have been, you’re doing a zoom with everyone and you like to see you in the waiting room, Steve Wozniak, or was or whatever. That’s funny.
Dr. John Cumbers 28:31
It was awesome. That one’s on YouTube as well. If you Google, Steve Wozniak, zoom, zoom bombing, you’ll find it. That’s funny. It’s funny.
John Corcoran 28:40
And it’s also you mentioned that the pandemic happens. And, you know, every conference out there, depending on the timing, it was chaotic. I mean, there were conference companies that folded after 2020 after they had to refund massive amounts of money. What was that experience like for you?
Dr. John Cumbers 28:59
We dodged a bullet, because COVID was in January, or February, March, and our conference wasn’t until October. And so we do one big event a year, it’s responsible for 90% of our revenue. And so we really dodged a bullet with the timing. Everybody, you know, got settled, we did a digital event, only one of our sponsors, maybe two of our sponsors, pulled out, everybody else kept their sponsorship, we delivered an amazing digital event, lots of leads, lots of connections, lots of content. And we had the most profitable year ever because we didn’t have any travel. We didn’t have any food bill. We didn’t have any AV bill. And, and we got to, we’ve got to keep going. Now, interestingly, our conference, as I said, is coming up in about 45 days, and I just reviewed a pandemic plan because I’m like right now the risky part.
If a pandemic comes right now, we’re screwed, we will go bankrupt. And so it’s interesting reviewing that Agency plan right now and just realizing Yeah, we will, we will not survive if we had another pandemic, because we’ve outlaid hundreds of 1000s millions of dollars to the conference center to the AV company to the food company. And, you know, flights have already been bought by hotels, all of that stuff. It’s not coming back if there’s a pandemic, so that was definitely the low point, the most stressful time you know, waking up in the middle of the night and being like, what the hell? I mean, many people went through this right with their businesses. I’m sure you did as well. Everybody was like, What on earth am I gonna do?
John Corcoran 30:33
Yeah, yeah. So many companies. So that’s interesting, though, that you think that your industry just has a nature that there isn’t any way around it? And there’s nothing you can do? Like make the tickets non refundable, make the, you know, make the sponsorships non refundable, even in the case of, you know, some natural disaster or pandemic?
Dr. John Cumbers 30:57
You know, that’s, that’s, that’s true. Yeah, we don’t have that in our contracts. Right now. We were part of this review this week looking at our contracts. But I think there’s Yeah, I think the main thing that we’re gonna look at now is event insurance, because everybody’s going through the same thing. And that’s actually a really good business to be in right now. Because the chances of us having a pandemic in the next 12 months are probably quite low. But everybody will want to buy pandemic insurance. So, it’s probably a good business to be in.
John Corcoran 31:33
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And then were there any deliberate choices you made, like some conference companies have shifted their model, or they went away from one event made smaller events or created an online membership model or something like that any changes that you made after after 2020,
Dr. John Cumbers 31:51
The online membership model didn’t quite work very well. We did a bunch of online events, they were okay. But it kind of sucked. We did some really good town halls, we were getting like five or 600 people to join in for these town halls. And we, I called up all the big names in the industry and said, Hey, do you want to just come on chat with me, do a town hall, bring our community together, everybody needs support, and they were really some of the most memorable events that we did. However, I don’t know about you. But digital events suck. Like nobody wants to go to them. And the platform’s still suck, like even the best, I think, was hoping that that kind of folded and was bought by RingCentral.
And interestingly, somebody sent an email to us just this week and said, Hey, is there going to be an online option for the conference? And it’s the only person who asked, and we just replied, now sorry, it’s in-person. We’re not even bothering with this jewel, like, you know, online offline thing. Because again, it’s like, that’s not the business I’m in. And that’s not the business I want to be in. I want to be in the business of connecting real people and face to face credibility and amazing experiences. It’s not to say we won’t do more in digital. And it’s not to say we won’t do digital events in the future. But isn’t it just great to forget about the pandemic and just go out and hang out with people and hug them and eat food together? It’s what makes us human.
John Corcoran 33:13
For sure, for sure. Well, this has been great. John, I want to wrap up with my last question, which is my gratitude, gratitude question. I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude, especially to those who have helped you along the way. And, you know, the bunch of names that come up Dr. Ventnor, Eric Schmidt’s, he wasn’t Steve Jurvetson. Maybe Keith, vendor? Who would you want to recognize and thank for helping you in your journey?
Dr. John Cumbers 33:38
Sure. I’ve got a few people. The first is Lee Farman at the pumphouse, children and youth theater who said to me, you know, when we were talking about careers, he said, I think you’re going to be a manager, John, and I was offended. I was like a manager, like, what on earth does a manager do? But he saw in me, you know, a lot of opportunities. The second was my high school teacher, Mrs. Vojtech. She was from Poland. And she wrote in my book that we were given a little pocket dictionary when we graduated elementary school. And it said, she wrote in the back of it, I think I still have it. It said, keep asking those questions. And it’s something that I still say to my kids every day, which is just keep asking those questions. Just stay, stay curious.
And I’d also like to thank Rob Reed, who wrote the book after on he’s a musician. He has a podcast himself, and he came to SynBioBeta. And I asked him many years ago, 10 years ago, and I asked him for some advice and he said, Well, throw the best parties that you can do. ask everybody to announce their big announcements at your event. So it becomes this point in time when everybody wants to come and announce things. And he said, and then if people, if you’ve got competitors, and people try to go to their other conferences, make them realize that they’ve gone to the wrong party and make them feel really bad about it. So those are, those are three things that we do. And the last person is Wendy Lawton, who was the head of PR at Brown University. And I remember trying to get publicity for our genetic engineering competition team at the University and trying to get the press interested in what we do. And she gave me this piece of advice she said, she said, Well, John, it’s like a peanut butter and chocolate sandwich.
Peanut butter on its own is delicious. And chocolate on its own is delicious. But if you put peanut butter and chocolate together, you get something amazing that nobody else can dream of. And so I’ve lived and breathed that for everything that I do in terms of PR and publicity and content at the conference. This year, we have Steve Wolfram, who’s doing a fireside chat with Steve quake. Steve quakes, the head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Steve Wolfram, the Founder of Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica. So again, it’s this computer guy with this bio guy and mix them all together. We have Vinod Khosla speaking this year with one of the companies in his portfolio on longevity.
And we have Paul Stamets who is the mushroom King, the psychedelics guy. He’s speaking with Martine Rothblatt, who’s somebody an entrepreneur, she founded Sirius satellite radio, she founded United Therapeutics, which is building these, making these pig organs humanized, so that you can use them for transplants. So again, it’s just like these amazing people with amazing stories. But then I’m just the Emperor, sorry, I just bring them together and have them do amazing things on the stage. So when the Lord taught me that you do it incredibly well.
John Corcoran 37:03
John, where can people go to learn more about you connect with you learn more about SynBioBeta
Dr. John Cumbers 37:10
They can go to synbiobeta.com S, Y, N, B, I, O, B, E, T, A and from there, you’ll find a link to our weekly newsletter, and from there, you’ll find a link to the conference that’s coming up in May. Excellent, John, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. John. Really enjoyed it.
Chad Franzen 37:29
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.