Genentech, Google, and Impossible Foods have little in common:
Three companies.
Three technologies.
Three vastly different effects on the world.
One common thread, however, is that the core technology behind each—recombinant DNA, web ranking, and plant-derived heme—has roots in academia. Whether directly spun out of a research lab or founded by a professor and their graduate students, it’s easy to forget that some of the most impactful companies in history originate in research institutions.
With the broader government shutdown, cuts to federal research funding aren’t dominating headlines as they were a few months ago. This piece is a reminder that when research doesn’t get funded, we all lose. Below, I highlight a few of the academic spinout companies that have changed their respective fields and society at large. I also call out the weird interplay between labs, government funding (or the lack thereof), and venture capital.
I take ideas from Michael Dempsey’s The Venturification of Research & The Resulting Prisoner’s Dilemma blog post, and, in a less-than-profound way, argue that slashing research funding fractures innovation and may lead to the “way-too-early” commercialization of technologies born in academic labs.
But first, some history.
Given that Silicon Valley’s origins can be traced back to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, it’s no surprise that many well-known spin-out companies emerged from these institutions. The Langer Lab at MIT, for instance, has been commercializing technologies for decades.
Still, institutions like UCSF (which spun out Genentech) have played just as significant a role. In 2023, the University of Texas and Purdue were ranked 3rd and 4th, respectively, for universities with the most US patents granted for inventions—ahead of Harvard and Stanford.
Bose Corporation - MIT (1964)
Origin Story: Amar Bose, an electrical engineering professor at MIT, founded Bose Corporation to commercialize his research in the university’s acoustics labs. The story goes that Bose bought a fancy (and expensive) stereo system that sounded like it had been dropped, then dropped again. Determined to improve audio fidelity, he began studying psychoacoustics—how listeners perceive sound.
Core Tech: Bose’s core technology used multiple speakers to reflect sound off walls, laying the groundwork for surround sound. The company also pioneered noise-cancelling headphones, originally designed to help pilots block out cockpit noise.
Societal Impact: Today, Bose’s product line—home audio systems, headphones, soundbars, etc.—remains rooted in the original MIT acoustics research.
Genentech - UCSF (1976)
Origin Story: Often called the world’s first biotechnology company, Genentech was founded in 1976 by UCSF Professor Herbert Boyer and Venture Capitalist Robert Swanson. Swanson was really interested in recombinant technology and asked scientists whether the tech was ready to commercialize; Boyer was the only one to say yes.
Core Tech: Boyer’s work focused on enzymes that could cut and reassemble DNA, enabling scientists to “mix” the genetic code of cells. This genetic engineering allowed bacteria to produce desired proteins—an innovation made possible at a time when NIH science funding was rising and UCSF was emerging as a basic science powerhouse.
Societal Impact: What started as a phone call from a man in a suit to a man in a lab coat led to Genentech’s founding. Insulin and human growth hormone were among the first therapeutics made using recombinant DNA.
Intuitive Surgical - Stanford (1995)
Origin Story: Intuitive Surgical grew out of work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which had been developing a remotely operated surgical robot for the US Army. The goal: let surgeons operate on soldiers in the field from afar. Frederic Moll joined SRI engineers to refine and commercialize the system to advance robotic surgery.
Core Tech: Five years after its founding, Intuitive launched the first FDA-approved robotic surgical system—the Da Vinci Surgical System. Now in its fifth product generation, the robot features more computing power, improved 3D imaging, and sensors that measure tissue stress during procedures.
Societal Impact: Intuitive has enabled minimally invasive procedures across specialty areas that once required large incisions. As of 2023, >11 million procedures had been performed using Da Vinci systems, and many new entrants have since built robotic-based surgical technology of their own.
Google - Stanford (1998)
Origin Story: The Google origin story has probably been told countless times, but its Stanford roots are sometimes glossed over. Larry Page and Sergey Brin—graduate students within the CS department at the time—wanted to create a faster way to search the World Wide Web. Their breakthrough: using the number of hyperlinks to a webpage as a ranking signal.
Core Tech: Page and Brin built their search engine on Stanford’s servers, and when Google eventually spun out, the university received equity in exchange for licensing the PageRank system.
Societal Impact: A similar approach is also seen in medicine, where citations are used to rank the Impact Factor of journals. Today, Google handles billions of queries daily, supporting those searches and organizing the world’s information through its ranking system.
Illumina - Tufts x Cambridge (1998)
Origin Story: Founded in San Diego, Illumina traces its origins to Tufts University, where a chemistry professor named David Walt developed a method for large-scale genetic analysis using fiber-optic microarrays.
Core Tech: Illumina’s bead-based microarray technology detects genetic variations and enables thousands of DNA assays to run in parallel.
Societal Impact: By the mid-2010s, Illumina machines produced over 90% of the world’s DNA sequencing data. Illumina’s technology (along with Sanger sequencing) powered the Human Genome Project, in-depth microbiome studies, and the rise of the consumer genomics market by making sequencing faster and cheaper. In 2015, Illumina spun out GRAIL to commercialize a blood-based multi-cancer detection test.
Ginkgo Bioworks - MIT (2008)
Origin Story: In 2006, a group of MIT researchers won $100k from an MIT entrepreneurship competition through the iGEM program for engineering E. coli to smell like banana and wintergreen. Their vision: to make biology easier to engineer by designing custom microbes that could produce products for various industries.
Core Tech: Ginkgo created a first-of-its-kind bio-manufacturing platform, using genetically engineered organisms to produce target molecules at scale. To do so, they combined sophisticated software for designing custom microbes with automated labs using robotics to build and test thousands of engineered strains in parallel.
Societal Impact: Rather than produce a single product, Ginkgo’s platform supports projects for everything from flavor and fragrance compounds to animal-free protein. The company showed that you can indeed just program biology.
Moderna - Harvard x MIT (2010)
Origin Story: Moderna might just be the most well-known biotech company to start in MIT’s Langer lab. Its founding team includes a post-doc, two professors, and a venture capitalist, who all came together around the shared vision that mRNA-based medicines would save lives.
Core Tech: DNA contains the genetic code of our cells; to interpret it, cells transcribe DNA into mRNA, which is then translated to proteins (DNA → RNA → Protein). Dereck Rossi, a Harvard Medical School professor and co-founder of Moderna, developed a method to modify mRNA so that cells could produce specific medicines.
Societal Impact: Moderna is best known for developing the first FDA-approved mRNA COVID vaccine. After a decade of R&D, the company was able to move the vaccine to human trials quickly. mRNA technology is now being applied to other therapeutic areas, such as cancer therapies.
Impossible Foods - Stanford (2011)
Origin Story: Sebastian Mallaby opens The Power Law with story of Impossible Foods, as it’s a strong case study in how academic innovation and venture capital can intersect (though there are plenty of others in the book). Patrick Brown, a biochemistry professor at Stanford and co-discoverer of DNA microarrays, took a sabbatical from academia to explore the best technology for mitigating climate change. He decided that the global meat industry was the primary contributor to emissions, deforestation, and water use.
Core Tech: Brown derived an ingredient called soy leghemoglobin from plants to replace heme, a molecule that is responsible for much of animal meat’s smell, flavor, and red color.
Societal Impact: By treating sustainable food as a scientific formulation challenge, Impossible Foods helped mainstream the plant-based meat category, paving the way for other entrants like Beyond Meat and mushroom-based Meati.
Honorable mention: CRISPR - UC Berkeley (2012)
Though not a company in itself, CRISPR gene-editing—developed by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier—spawned influential biotechs like Editas Medicine and Intellia Therapeutics, and newer ones like Mammoth Biosciences and Colossal Biosciences. The first patient treated with personalized CRISPR gene editing therapy was at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia this year.
Even before funding cuts, researchers struggled to secure capital. But adding venture investors to the equation can complicate things:
Investors want to capture the value created from novel technologies.
To do that, they invest before those technologies are ready for market.
When research funding dries up, private capital becomes an alternative—but to attract it, researchers often spin out companies prematurely.
That may keep research alive, but it accelerates commercialization timelines, increasing the risk of failure.
Also, while academic labs tend to collaborate (like UCSF’s Boyer and Stanford’s Cohen did on recombinant DNA technology), startups compete, creating information siloes.
After a technology has been technically de-risked, competition is a great forcing function to drive progress and ensure only the best product makes it to the end user.
But when something goes to market too early, it loses the collective learning that academia fosters.
Played out, startups may raise too much money without fully de-risking their science, producing failed products, minimal revenue, and lost knowledge.
The purpose of research-specific funding is to advance technology. The purpose of venture funding is to advance technology and sell a product/service. I’m not sure where all this nets out because at least labs have access to a form of capital, albeit a dilutive one that will prioritize going to market over R&D.
Still, there’s an opportunity for venture investors to step up as scientific research faces real threats. Some funds, like Dempsey’s Compound VC, seem particularly suited to do so in a way that feels like it won’t jeopardize the underlying science.
Sometimes my writing and work overlap, and this is one of those times. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t say: if you’re in the early stages of commercializing science or technology from a lab, I’d love to chat. ~nolan@spero.vc
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