• Spider silk is very strong
• Spiders eat each other when farmed; previous efforts have required finding many many spiders for forced silking - not economic; tapestry from 1.5M spiders - 1kg of silk, 7 feet by 4 feet
• Many other interesting biomaterials eg barnacle glue
• Can take single cell organism such as brewers yeast, engineer in the gene for spider silk or barnacle glue, and scale up the amount of yeast
  • We know how to make yeast at scale - fast exponential growth
• Bolt Threads has intentionally not started in healthcare because it has a high regulatory burden; they need a less regulated field in order to perfect the technology first, so have gone into consumer apparel
  • Selling tie and beanie
  • Recently mushroom based (mycelium) leather
  • Hedging timeline risk - give yourself time to make the technology work, rather than going straight to a high tech application