SynBioBeta San Francisco 2016 is upon us, and with only a matter of days until the conference begins, we’d like to give our readers an introduction to the distinguished individuals who will be taking part in this year’s Investor Panel discussion. Read on to learn about the educational and professional record of the Investor Panel’s moderator and panelists, as well as to get a preview of some advice that they have for both entrepreneurs and investors in the synthetic biology space.John Melo, moderator: Mr. Melo is the Chief Executive Officer and President at Amyris, Inc. With 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur and leader in the fuels and technology industries, he has served in a number of senior executive at BP Plc, serves on the board of directors of U.S. Venture& U.S. Oil Inc. and Renmatrix, Inc., and is the Vice Chairman of the board of directors at BayBio. Since 2007 Mr. Melo has been with Amyris, pursuing his mission to make sustainable chemistry mainstream.Joško Bobanović, panelist: Dr. Bobanović has been working in various fields of venture capital for the last 14 years. Since 2010 he has worked at Sofinnova Partner’s Green Seed Fund and is responsible for investing in green chemistry and bioenergy. Prior to his tenure at Sofinnova, Dr. Bobanović worked in cleantech and information technology investments for the MSBi Capital fund at iNova Capital in Montreal. Dr. Bobanović holds a PhD in physical oceanography from Dalhousie University and an MBA in finance and marketing from McGill University.Vijay Pande, panelist: Dr. Pande is a director of Stanford University’s Biophysics Program and a professor of Structural Biology and Computer Science, as well as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he is responsible for leading investment in companies whose technologies lie at the intersection of biology and computer science. He holds a PhD in Physics from MIT and his research is centered on computational methods and their applications in medicine and biology. Dr. Pande is known for being the founder of Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project, a protein folding computer simulation for disease research. He is also the co-founder of Globavir Biosciences, a successful startup focusing on drug discovery for cures to Dengue Fever and Ebola. He currently leads Andreessen Horowitz’ investments in Benchling, Freenome, TwoXAR, and uBiome.Amanda Cashin, panelist: Dr. Cashin is Co-Founder and Head of the Illumina Accelerator in San Francisco, a business accelerator for launching startups in the genomics industry, including therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture, synthetic biology, and more. Previously, she served as the SVP of Life Science at Alexandra Real Estate Equities, Inc. and Alexandra Venture Investments, where she invested in breakthrough life science technology companies. Dr. Cashin holds a PhD in Chemical Biology from Caltech and transitioned from academia to the business and venture capital side of science about 10 years ago.Seth Bannon, panelist: Mr. Bannon is a Founding Partner at Fifty Years, a seed fund that backs entrepreneurs solving the world’s biggest problems with technology. He has invested in a range of synthetic biology startups shaping the world for the better — from a company engineering microbes to produce industrial chemicals sustainably, to a company automating lab work with robots, to a company culturing meat to eat. He is also the co-founder of impact.tech, a community of entrepreneurs combining purpose with profit. Impact.tech has held events on engineered microbes, the future of food, and preventative medicine, all with some amazing synbio entrepreneurs. Mr. Bannon is also the founder & CEO of Amicus, a startup that builds digital organizing tools for nonprofits and political campaigns. He is a Y Combinator graduate and was named twice to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list for Social Entrepreneurship.Matt Ocko, panelist: Mr. Ocko is a co-Managing Partner and co-founder of Data Collective. He was trained as a physicist at Yale and has been building complex hardware and software systems for three decades (since he was a teenager), across multiple successful companies. Today he holds over 40 patents to his name. Also since his youth, thanks to famous relatives like Dr. Charlie Yanovsky and their lab partners like Dr. Paul Berg, he grew up with a fascination with complex biological systems. He has invested and actively helped build successful companies in synthetic biology, including ones that accelerate the synbio toolchain with advanced compute and AI such as Zymergen, Nervana (INTC), Transcriptic, Pivot Bio, Atomwise, Vicarious, 3Scan, Citrine.io, Moleculo (ILMN), Twist Bio, D-Wave, Rigetti Quantum Computing, Ginkgo Bioworks, Omniome, and multiple stealth investments.Do you have a message or a lesson about investment in the synthetic biology industry that you'd like to communicate to entrepreneurs?Josko Bobanovic: More often than not, discoveries in synthetic biology are just a first step towards building a product, and business and patience is required to further develop those products and process. Most of all, these later steps should not be underestimated by entrepreneurs.Amanda Cashin: As a venture investor, I participated in a few industrial biotech deals in the past where the business models and capital structures were less efficient than the models we’re seeing today. Now, we’re seeing companies like Ginkgo BioWorks, MetaMixis, and others focusing their business models on the most valuable upstream steps the synthetic biology pipeline where they can discover valuable pathways to engineer/design organisms to produce the specialty chemicals of interest with the large scale chemical manufacturers and partners. My advice to entrepreneurs: focus on building a diverse and productive team with a culture of innovation, respect, and dedication.Seth Bannon: Scientists looking to potentially found a synbio startup—and there has never been a better time to do so—should start immersing themselves in the world of entrepreneurship. Start reading Hacker News, attend Y Combinator's Startup School, read Founders At Work. It's important for people coming from academia into startups to immerse themselves in the ways of Silicon Valley because, unfortunately, many of the habits you develop to become an excellent scientist are not helpful in becoming a successful founder. Great academics need to relearn a lot to become great startup founders.Matt Ocko: We like to say “software is eating glassware,” by which I mean there is a huge opportunity to do in silico what used to be very expensive in terms of capital equipment and people to run it. We like companies that substitute compute for capex and opex, both in their own operations (longer run-way, higher margins) and in how their product is transformative for customers’ businesses. We like to see long-term, sustainable differentiation and crushing technical advantage that solves an urgent customer problem with billions of dollars on the line, ideally but not mandatorily in a contrarian/scary market. People doing today what was literally impossible a year ago excite us. And if we can back a woman or non-white founder (senior leadership of more than half the companies I named previously) to poke conventional wisdom in the eye, even better.Do you have a message or a lesson about investment in the synthetic biology industry that you'd like to communicate to investors?Josko Bobanovic: Investors need to realize that this is a new sector that requires unique skill sets to build the company and they should be building up experience and transferring it to entrepreneurs that are tightly focused on the success of their current project, often the first one for them.Amanda Cashin: Of course, as Head of Illumina Accelerator, I am passionate about the intersection of genomics and synthetic biology. As the costs of next generation DNA sequencing continue to decrease, new innovations are becoming accessible in genomics and synthetic biology. Seth Bannon: Many investors, especially at the seed stage, aren't aware of how fast the costs of launching a synbio startup are dropping. They’re used to traditional biotech budgets, where you need tens of millions to build out a wetlab to prove your first assumptions. Due to a number of factors—like the falling costs of computation, storage, sequencing, and sensors; and the rise of lab automation, cloud labs, and biohacking spaces & shared wetlabs, and freely available datasets—the costs of launching a synbio startup are falling rapidly. Software is increasingly filling in for what used to be wetlab time or what used to require human eyes, dropping costs even more. It's becoming possible for an increasing number of synbio startups to validate their initial assumptions on seed-round budgets. It certainly seems like we're going to see a rise of synbio in the garage. Many entrepreneurs are going to fund their early validation off their credit cards from their garages—no wetlab needed.Matt Ocko: We don’t have sharp elbows, we know our stuff, we add huge value, we have deep pockets and a patient time-frame, and we usually buy lunch, so let’s go build some great companies together!