ep. 06 - Richard Resnick: Serial Entrepreneur, CEO, and TED Speaker on Genomics
TED SPEAKER ON THE IMPACT OF GENOMICS ON ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR, AND CEO
Bio
Richard Resnick began his career working on the Human Genome Project as a software engineer under Eric Lander. Since then, he has gone on to bridge the research and commercial worlds as a serial entrepreneur.
Most recently, he led GQ Life Sciences, a company that focused on innovation in genomics and how industry players could best create competitive advantages using genomics. GQ Life Sciences was successfully acquired in late 2016.
Prior to GQ, he was the CEO of Harmony Line, Inc., an MIT Media Lab company, where he partnered with the famous composer/technologist Tod Machover to develop and commercialize music software and technology. Prior to Harmony Line, Resnick was the CEO of Mosaic Bioinformatics which he sold to NetGenics in 2000.
Beyond his success in business, Resnick consistently speaks to audiences about the history and promise of genomics.
Transcript
ep. 06 - Richard Resnick: Serial Entrepreneur, CEO, and TED Speaker on Genomics
Kyle Davis: All right, Richard. How are you doing today?
Richard Resnick: Fantastic.
Kyle Davis: [00:01:30] Good. I think it probably would be a good place for us to start is if you could give the audience or listeners a little bit of background as to who you are and what it is that you’ve done and we’ll go from there.
Richard Resnick:
[00:02:00] Sure. Thanks, Kyle. I’m something in between a serial entrepreneur, a CEO, a technologist and a genomics hacker. My entire background educationally is in computer science. I did an MBA at the Sloan School at MIT, but my first job right out of college, I had a choice between working for this software company that was trying to build software to help public radio raise money better.
[00:02:30] This was back in ’93. I think the salary they were offering was $40,000 a year which I thought was pretty fancy. The other job was working on this thing called the Human Genome Project and that was at a lab at MIT called the Whitehead Institute and the salary for that was $32,000. For some reason, the second one seemed a little more interesting. I didn’t know anything about the Human Genome Project except what I learned in basic biology in high school.
[00:03:00] I took that job and since then I haven’t really been able to escape that field. Fast forward, my most recent gig which was just acquired was a venture-backed software-as-a-service company that sold information to pharma and biotech companies, agrochemical companies around genomics, genetics and innovation in that space.
[00:03:30] In that company primarily that’s when I really started to do a lot of public speaking about that topic. One of the things I put a moonlight doing is I speak about genomics, the Human Genome Project and the implications of our quickening understanding of how genetics work on medicine, on the food we eat, on the relationships we have, on how we live, what kind of pets we have and how we can change them.
[00:04:00] Our basic human rights and indeed how we ultimately make babies reproduce and die. That’s the framework for one major area of public speaking that I do, but with a background in business, I spend a lot of time looking at early stage deals as well and do a lot of leadership and coaching in that area. That’s another area where I’m really passionate.
Kyle Davis: You’re like a jack of all trades?
Richard Resnick: I think a-
Kyle Davis: Or renaissance man?
Richard Resnick: Really a renaissance man, I’m not sure about that. I do like a good bourbon, but I’m not really sure that was quite the drink of the renaissance.
Kyle Davis: [00:04:30]
Probably not.
Richard Resnick: No.
Kyle Davis: Too bad. Bourbon is good. Let’s talk about the Human Genome Project for a moment. I know that when we last spoke a few weeks ago that you were mentioning just the cost and how the Human Genome Project started. It’s just very, very expensive to seek when someone’s genome … This is a field that I can speak very little too, but I can sound very confident in.
Richard Resnick: By the way, that’s the key to all public speaking is to sound confident.
Kyle Davis: [00:05:00] Confidence is key. What you’ve mentioned is that … I’m forgetting whose law this is, but basically the cost has just come down dramatically from millions of dollars to a couple hundred bucks, maybe a thousand dollars or so to map someone’s genome. What were the early days like in that project and then what is it doing for people today?
Richard Resnick: [00:05:30]
That’s what makes the whole story so interesting and interesting to lay people. You don’t need to understand the science. The way that this whole thing started was really back in the 80’s we recognized that this was an important thing we needed to decode, the string of letters, the A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s that when spelled out, tell ourselves how to be human and how to be tall or short or faster with memory or have more fast twitch muscle versus low.
[00:06:30] The technology that we had at the time was terrible. We had to take very small pictures of the genome using this really archaic approach. Long and short of it is it caused about $4 billion to sequence the “entire” genome and it took about 12 years. Now, the genome is spelled out in about 3 billion letters, so for the sake of the math of a physicist, let’s just use orders of magnitude. They’re roughly 3 billion, 4 billion versus about that many dollars.
[00:07:00] That’s about a dollar for each letter. That’s how much it used to cost. In the end, 2001, ‘02, ‘03, it’s hard to mark exactly when the genome sequencing project was finished because there was a lot of polishing going on. We claimed victory and there it was. Let’s say it’s 2003. If you fast forward just seven years, the technology, the sequence of genome changed so dramatically it got small so quickly that we can now sequence that same genome that took 12 years we can do in half a day.
[00:07:30] Instead of it costing $4 billion, it cost about a thousand dollars. That change is, I think you were talking about … The law I was referring to is of course Moore’s Law.
Kyle Davis: That’s it.
Richard Resnick: Is that idea that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months and that’s just the way that computer technology is evolved forever. This is way faster than that. I mean, this advancement, the speed of this change makes Moore’s Law look not like an exponential curve, but like a linear curve. It’s like an exponent’s exponent.
[00:08:00] That is the thing that unlocks this whole story because it allows us to do all sorts of crazy things from sequencing the genomes of our dogs, understanding how malaria gets carried through mosquitoes and in fact even more than that, engineering organisms, both plants and animals to remove and eradicate disease and to allow corn to grow in more salient environments.
[00:08:30] All of these things come, they’re scientific accomplishments, but every scientific endeavor they all come with this big ethical questions and that’s really the nature of the talk that I like to give is explain the science in a way that can be understood by a lay person, but then really get into what does this mean for society and where are we going with all of this?
Kyle Davis:
[00:09:00] Let’s talk about the most salient example, if you will, of this which would be today’s GMO issue and you have some people who are totally for it. Some people are ardently against it. You have some people who just don’t know what it is. If you can explain what GMOs are with that and then what are the ethics behind that.
Richard Resnick: Thank you for that question. I’m sure now to get a whole series of death threats in the mail.
Kyle Davis: So will I.
Richard Resnick: [00:09:30] This is a religious debate. If we really stick the facts on this. There still are two sides to the story and I’ll try to do that. GMO, genetically modified organism, that’s what it stands for, and what it’s come to mean is all the foods that are out there that we’ve done some sort of breathing that goes beyond just pairing two organisms, but actually integrating other genes into plants.
[00:10:00]
[00:10:30] I’ll give you a few examples. One is corn. I think something like 80 to 90% of all the corn that’s grown in the United States is genetically modified. In particular, there’s a gene that we’ve added to corn that produces a protein that makes beetles, the kinds of beetles who like to eat corn while it’s growing in the field. When they eat the corn, it makes them choke up and die.
[00:11:00] Now, I want to back way up because everybody who’s listening is saying, “That sounds horrible. I don’t want to eat that kind of corn.” Truth is you’ve all been eating it all the time and even if you don’t eat corn, all that high fructose corn syrup is doing it. Let’s really back up for a second and say what is a gene? A gene is very simply, it’s a region on the genome which codes for … Just like a computer program, it codes for the creation of a protein.
[00:11:30] That’s all it is. It’s basically a message that the cell uses to make a protein. What is a protein? Nothing more than a string of another thing that you’ve all probably heard, I’ve called an amino acid and it’s a string of amino acids and these things have slightly different properties and as you arrange them in a line, based on the properties of the individual amino acids, the protein will take a three-dimensional shape.
[00:12:00] The basic central dogma of molecular biology is that a gene codes for a protein and the shape of the protein drives its function. If a protein has a certain shape, it might interact with another protein in a funny way which might interact with something else and so on. The core of everything that we are is genes that make three-dimensional structures of these proteins and those proteins are made of amino acids.
[00:12:30] If you eat a protein, if you eat any protein no matter what it’s shaped, the first thing that happens is your gut tears it up into its constituent amino acids. It doesn’t matter what the shape of the protein is. It rips it into pieces and it takes those amino acids and it shuffles them all over your body, through your blood so that your cells can use its genetics to make proteins that are human shaped.
I mean, that’s essentially what we are is amino acid refactoring machines. Now, back to GMOs. Let’s say you eat this corn, but we’ve added a gene which expresses, which produces a protein, which when bugs eat it, it causes them to slow down and stop. It’s because it gets caught in their tiny little [inaudible 00:12:57].
[00:13:00]
[00:13:30] You as a human eat this protein and just like all the other proteins in your gut, it gets shredded up into amino acids and circulated among your body. From a scientific point of view, from a medical point of view, there is nothing dangerous about that. Now, don’t send the death threat yet because there still are issues with this and the issues are largely in this case … I can go through a bunch of other examples, in this case, the issues are largely ecological. They’re largely environmental.
[00:14:00] We’re creating this massive amount of this one crop which has this very specific property and guess what, those beetles are subject to evolution and they get to fight back and so how far does this go? For each example that we might look at in the realm of GMOs, we have to really ask ourselves, is there a danger to humans and then just with respect to consuming the thing and then what are the larger system effects? What are the larger ecological effects?
[00:14:30] Soybean, 94% of the soy that’s grown in the US is what we call Roundup ready. Roundup is a chemical called glyphosate and glyphosate kills … It’s an herbicide. It kills most plants, but what we’ve done with this soybean is we’ve given it a gene which makes it immune to the effects of this glyphosate. I’ll name the company. Monsanto is the company that produces this chemical, Roundup and also the soy that’s grown. You plant this soy and then you spray the herbicide all over everything and everything else dies and the soy grows.
[00:15:00] Now, with respect to you eating that soybean, remember the proteins, the genetic modifications that make those proteins that are shaped slightly differently, they just get shredded up in your gut, but in this case, there’s also glyphosate which is a small molecule chemical which hopefully wash all that off, but maybe not.
[00:15:30] Now a lot of studies have been done in the show that glyphosate is … You have to drink gallons of this stuff for it to kill you, but we haven’t done enough studies and so this is where the religion gets ignited on either side. I believe that, look, we’ve been modifying organisms genetically since the inception of man from the moment that we began to brew beer and make cheese and pick the wolves that were friendliest to join us and become dogs.
[00:16:00] We’ve been modifying things genetically. We’re part of that system and we are modifying ourselves genetically. That’s all happening overtime. The question is for each of these technologies, for each of these new GMO foods, what are the system effects and we humans are just really bad at measuring system effects. I’ll finish by giving you an analogy about that.
[00:16:30] Anything that’s a system effect by definition, you turn the dial and it changes something which changes something else which changes something else and then you might get that feedback, but it’s not going to be immediate. Just imagine yourself going into the shower and it’s one of those showers where it’s just a little bit too cold so you turn it up and doesn’t do anything.
[00:17:00] You turn it up again and it doesn’t do anything. You turn it up again and it doesn’t do anything. All of a sudden, you’re burning. You absolutely gotta jump out of the shower, you're way down and it doesn’t help. Then it’s way too cold. Whenever you put a time delay in anything, humans get really screwed up and so I think from my perspective talking about genetics and GMO, that’s the concern that I have is we don’t know what we don’t know and mistakes that we might make have a global implications.
Kyle Davis:
[00:17:30] It’s like the second order, third order, fourth order effects and the unknown, unknown and all that fun stuff. When we talked last time, you were mentioning a program I guess, it’s available now for … I guess, it’s copying some part of the genome. I think it’s called cipher or something like that. This just boggled my mind so I just wanted to get your … Let you fill people in on this and what it’s all about.
Richard Resnick: Strap on your seat belts because this is really scary. I’m a risk taker. I’m not a guy who gets scared. It’s also really exciting. The technology is called CRISPR.
Kyle Davis: Oh, CRISPR.
Richard Resnick:
[00:18:00] C-R-I-S-P-R. CRISPR is basically just a name of a gene. Biologist have a funny ways of naming genes and proteins. I’m still not entirely sure how that all happens. It’s like naming stars. What this is, is this is … We’re quite good at reading genomes. As I’ve said, we’ve gotten really good now at editing them. I talked about GMO’s and we put a gene into this corn or this soybean.
[00:18:30] The way that we do that is we take the genome. We put it in a little vector. It’s another chromosome essentially. Think of it that way and if that doesn’t make any sense to you, think of it as like a really blunt object that works some of the time and if it works then we really lock in to it. What CRISPR is, is a way to make precession edits in genomes, in vivo. Take a living cell and make a precise edit while it’s alive and it goes off and does these things.
[00:19:00] The analogy is to think about the global search and replace function in Microsoft Word. Find all occurrences of this string and replace it with this word. We cannot do this in any genome. This technology has been shown to work in very simple cells, prokaryotes as well as eukaryotic cells, all the way up to and including human.
[00:19:30] What does that mean? We’ve used CRISPR in a variety of places. We’ve used it to change the genetics of all sorts of organisms. We can change the mosquito genome so that it produces the antibody for malaria or for Zika. Now, the mosquito might bite some host and take some blood in its disease, but it’s own immune system will kill the virus.
[00:20:00]
[00:20:30] We have the ability to … In China, they made these little micro pigs. They’re tiny, little cute pigs and so adorable. They’re selling them as pets. We’ve been able to do this with monkeys. In fact in China, in 2015, a paper was published where we did precision genome editing on a human embryo. There’s nothing stopping us from permanently changing the human genome, the germ line of humanity except our ethics.
[00:21:00] What’s really exciting is that all of the research that we can do in the lab, some of the listeners of this podcast may have read this book about Henrietta Lacks, this woman whose cells we … After she passed away, we’ve produced an enormous amount of these cells and have used them for research. We can just change the genetics of these cells in a Petri dish and then we can see how changes in genetics relate to response to drug and so on that’s all really important research that we shouldn’t stop.
[00:21:30]
[00:22:00] We can also change one cell human organism that is a human embryo that has just been created and let that human come to term. The question is should we and the answer is … I’ll let your listeners fill that in, but the scientific community had their first ever human genome editing summit in December 2015 about a year ago and the consensus was surprisingly we should proceed with using this technology for research.
[00:22:30] The kinds of genetic engineering on cells that we don’t actually allow to become full blown humans, but there should be a moratorium on the genetic engineering of humans. The question is blurred. The lines are blurred because if you think about a couple that’s been struggling to get pregnant and they finally do and their baby has Trisomy 13, some horrible genetic abnormality.
[00:23:00] If you could imagine that this is their last hope, this is their last chance. Would we use that technology on them? I often survey audiences using mobile technology so they can text the answer to that question and everybody is, “Yes, of course, we would fix that problem.” The difference between using this technology to remove a bad trait versus to add a good trait, that’s where the ethical line is a bit blurred.
Where do you stand on that, Kyle? How do you answer that question? Wouldn’t you want your kids to have the best genetic advantage possible? Where does that leave us?
Kyle Davis:
[00:24:00]
That leaves me to dating in the Ivy League. Shout out to all my fellow Columbia grads. Roar, Lion, Roar. To that point, you look at what … I hate to give eugenics or whatever spot in the light, but you look at what a country might do to create a superhuman force, feeding them steroids or giving them meth and say, “Hey, go fight.” Then you could obviously see where some … I don’t want to say just adversary to the US, but it could even be us in the future, who knows. You could definitely see somebody or see somebody go rogue and just do this and make some superhuman whatever. It would be interesting.
Richard Resnick: [00:24:30] You could. I think the question that we’ve got to ask and answer for ourselves is that, is that okay or not? Even Darwin in the descent of men back in the 19th century, he wrote something like humans were the only species known on the planet that aide their weakest to not only survive, but also reproduce. Is that a good thing? Is that something we should be doing?
[00:25:00]
[00:25:30] I mean, if you ask any family who has a disabled child, they’ll say it’s the greatest blessing and by the way, I’m one of those families, but at the same time, is that right? There’s a gene called Myostatin. If there’s a gene, there’s a protein. The protein what it does is it inhibits the production of muscle mass. There’s very rare human genetic mutations which cause you not to produce that protein and when you don’t inhibit the growth of muscle mass, you end up with real hyper musculature.
[00:26:00] You see a five-year-old who’s got ripples right down their abs and across their back. You can knock this gene out using CRISPR in dogs and you make these military scaled dogs. I mean, I’d be in to that. Should we be like that? Certainly [crosstalk 00:26:07].
Kyle Davis: From a pure vanity standpoint, I mean sign me up. I’m looking to get shredded.
Richard Resnick: Exactly. Without having to work about it. If you’re running a military and you catch wind of this, you’re researching it, how could you not.
Kyle Davis: [00:26:30] It’s so interesting too because I’m one of these millions of millennials who have ADHD. Mine is significant and pretty hardcore. I would be left in that pile of people have to fend for themselves if I was my younger self because I had no clue of what was going on with the world. Thanks to your prescription for Adderall and all that other fun stuff, I can actually focus and get things done.
Richard Resnick: You’re going to hook me up with some of that later, right?
Kyle Davis: No. The DEA is listening. The answer is no.
Richard Resnick: Okay, sorry.
Kyle Davis:
[00:27:00] No. The reality is that there’s a lot … What I’m trying to get at is, at least I read a lot of these articles from Business Insider, the most reputable business magazine ever.
Richard Resnick: For sure.
Kyle Davis:
[00:27:30] For sure. Talking about all these CEOs who have either bipolar or ADHD or all this other stuff. These are all very, very successful people who just have a different way of thinking or different way of doing things. It would be easy to knock that out and just, “Hey, if everybody was normal and that Kyle guy was a little bit more calm all the time, he’d be better to deal with.”
Richard Resnick: That would be horrible wouldn’t it?
Kyle Davis: I mean, I’d love not being calm. If I’m not anxious-ridden and ready to go, where’s the fun?
Richard Resnick:
[00:28:00] Check this out, Kyle. Sometimes when I give talks about genetics to CEOs and I pull them using that mobile technology I was talking about, one of the polls I say is, let’s say you could give a DNA test to your employees and you can combine it with personality test, because a lot of CEOs like to get personality test to key people, right?
Kyle Davis: Yeah.
Richard Resnick: You combine those together and let’s say that could provide a significantly more accurate prediction of their behavior under stress, do you employ it? The total running average response I have is 92% of CEO say, “Yes, they do.”
Kyle Davis: You have to have your minions.
Richard Resnick: [00:28:30] You have to have your minions and you have to know exactly what they’re going to do. Then I ask the follow up question. All right, so you learn a great deal about the health of your employees including the facts that one of your key managers working on a multi-million dollar deal, let’s say, he’s likely already experiencing a genetically based early onset Alzheimer's. What do you do? Over half of the CEOs say take them off the project and 10%, fire them.
Kyle Davis: Interesting.
Richard Resnick: [00:29:00] That gets to the question of do we really want to do it? The problem with all this revelation about genetics is that it really quantifies the inequality and like anything, like the iPhone where we westerners, we’ve got one in each back pocket or fancy foods or whatever access we’ve got it’s not homogenous. There are places in the world that you go to where there are people that simply don’t have access to that.
[00:29:30] If we could in some way wave a magic wand and everybody could get the same level of access to all of the benefits of modern society at once, that would be equality, but we can’t. With genetics, it’s the exact same thing. There are going to be genetic refugees that come out of our deepening understanding of this and they’re going to be winners. There are going to be people who have the ability to give their kids every embodiment of what they think is successful genetics. That’s really at our fingertips now.
Kyle Davis: [00:30:00] That is a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever would have thought of, genetic refugee. That’s fascinating. Let’s pivot real quick because like you mentioned in your introduction of yourself, you’ve owned a few businesses. You’ve done a few things and let’s talk about the world of business and what you did with GQ Life Sciences and what you’re doing now.
Richard Resnick: [00:30:30] Sure. GQ Life Sciences was a funny company. Essentially what we did was we looked at genetics from the perspective of what can you protect? Can you patent a gene, for instance? The answer turns out to be, “Yeah, kind of.” The Supreme Court had a number of rulings about this. That’s a funny question.
Kyle Davis: Like the BRACAnalysis?
Richard Resnick: [00:31:00] Yeah, exactly. There’s a company called Myriad that really led all of this debate about this question. This company, GQ was a venture-backed company that provided, I think, probably the leading software application that allowed you to search. Here’s a gene or here’s a small portion of a gene that we are doing research on to see if some interaction with some drug is going to be fruitful and can we protect the drug once we’ve determined that?
[00:31:30]
[00:32:00] In that role, the company was really pretty simple software-as-a-service business with a content, a backend, a database, a proprietary sequence, DNA sequence that was related to these patents and a machine that works pretty well. A lot of fun to work with. I think of all the companies that I’ve run in some ways and all due to respect to any of my employees or investors that are listening, it was a boring because we were really doing some quite simple which was extracting information and structuring it and making it useful to customers.
Now having a love for the employees and a love for the customers makes it fun and so that was what really drove me through that, but let me talk about a previous company.
Kyle Davis: Yes, please.
Richard Resnick:
[00:33:00]
I did this MBA at the MIT Sloan School and this was back in 2003 or ‘04. I was really passionate about the idea of using biology to produce hydrogen. As some of the listeners know, hydrogen is sort of like a battery. It’s not a fuel source, it’s a way to store energy. Our idea was to genetically engineer algae so that they could use sunlight to split water, H2O producing oxygen which we all like and hydrogen and then sequester the hydrogen and to sell it.
It was the most exiting business I think I ever invented and it went absolutely nowhere because of gas subsidies. It was just ten times more expensive than buying gasoline. That’s come down a bit, but what happened to me was right at the end of that, I was looking around saying, “Man, I don't know what I’m going to do, I’m just about to finish this MBA. I’ve invested the whole MBA in this energy company and it’s not going anywhere.”
[00:33:30] For all of you listeners out there, failure is the only time you ever learn anything and so I learned a bunch of things which I’ll tell you when I see you in person. I ended up bumping into this crazy, wonderful, genius musician professor at the MIT Media Lab. His name is Tod Machover.
[00:34:00]
[00:34:30] He is this amazing composer, technologist. He’s made guitars for Prince and cellos for Yo-Yo Ma that sensed the amount of perspiration and the temperature of the instrumentalist and allows you to use all these signals to change the music, the tonality of the music. He’s just a brilliant guy. He fuses music technology, neurology and he had a piece of software called Hyperscore.
It’s this simple PC based application. It’s still out there today and it allows anybody with no musical ability to compose music. I was working at the time with this mentoring service at MIT called the Venture Mentoring Service, VMS and they knew that I was struggling with the energy company and they said. “You’re a musician. You should talk to this guy,” and we started talking.
[00:35:00] I just fell in love with Tod and I fell in love with the software. The basic idea is that if you’re a kid, you’re eight years old, and your mom is telling you to play the piano and you’re like, “I have ADHD. I don’t want to play the piano. This is so crap. I’m not doing it.” In fact, for it to be rewarding, for it to be meaningful, for it to change your life, you might need to invest three years, five years, eight years to get there.
[00:35:30] What this technology do is it gave you an immediate positive experience with music and it did so by allowing you to compose music really by just drawing lines on the computer screen. I was so compelled by it that I ended up starting a company with Tod. This is my absolute biggest failure, no question about it. It was by far the worst endeavor that I ever entered into.
[00:36:00] We raised a bunch of money and we said, “Let’s get this software, this desktop software on the desktops of everybody.” We tried to do deals with retailers like Target and it was really … The software had this educational purpose. When you did demos of it, it was great but not really there and then what we saw was … This is back in 2005, ‘06, maybe ‘07. There was this weird blip where ringtones were valuable. People would spend a dollar on a ringtone.
Kyle Davis: Exactly.
Richard Resnick: [00:36:30]
The ringtone market was billions. It caught our eyes thinking about personalization is really important. If you think about the cell phone, if you lose your wallet, it might take you six hours to realize it, if you lose your cell phone and you know it immediately. You don’t blend your cell phone out to other people. It’s yours. “Don’t touch my damn phone. How do I make this my own?”
[00:37:00] What we decided to do is build a social network to compete with MySpace that would allow you to use this software to make your own ringtones and then hopefully sell them to your mom or something. We did all sorts of deals and try to make that work but it really didn’t. The truth is, that multi-billion dollar ringtone market has dominated 95% by the top 10 stuff.
[00:37:30] Nobody cares about what a little 11-year-old, Johnny’s music composition sounds like even if it’s really important to Johnny’s mom. That company, we ended up turning into a nonprofit and it continues to thrive today as this really interesting piece of software where Tod Machover, the professor, he’ll go into a city and he’ll organize a whole bunch of kids to use the software to compose some piece of music and then he’ll have the local symphony orchestra play it and sold out house. All these kids are the composers and it’s a really special experience, but that was a rough go for Richard Resnick, no question.
Kyle Davis: [00:38:00]
At still it feels like a lot of fun. I tried playing the guitar. I tried drumming. I’ve tried a lot of stuff and I’m just not … Whatsoever. I’m not musically inclined, but I feel in my head that I can just do it. I don't know what the … Help me out here. You’re the smart guy. You know how there’s like the musicians who see in color?
Richard Resnick: That’s called synesthesia.
Kyle Davis: [00:38:30]
Synesthesia or something like that. I feel like that sometimes, but, boy, when I try to create anything, it’s horrible. Just no one should ever listen to anything that I’ve ever done. It’s just that.
Richard Resnick: Kyle, the first thing you got to change is the belief.
Kyle Davis:
[00:39:00] Look, I come from the startup space and my goal is you push, you push, you push but at some point you got to learn when to pivot. I’ve pivoted this and I’ve decided to let it “sunset.” My musical talents, you won’t be seeing those anytime soon.
Richard Resnick: I got you. That’s awesome.
Kyle Davis: Every once in a while, I will catch myself banging on the table or something like that.
Richard Resnick: I’m sure everybody gets up and dances as soon as you start.
Kyle Davis: No. Maybe, who knows. Maybe. This was exciting conversation and I really enjoyed it. Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Richard Resnick: [00:39:30]
Geez, no. Except that I’ve had a really fun time talking to you and I’m glad for the experience and thanks a lot.
Kyle Davis:
[00:40:00] Cool. Thanks again, Richard. If you want more information about the podcast, please visit gdapodcast.com where you’ll be able to find Richard’s page as well as the transcript and any blog post or anything else that may come of it. If you’re interested to book, Richard, for your next event where you can talk about the Human Genome and the ethics of everything when it comes to the life sciences, feel free to reach out to GDA Speakers. You can do that by visiting the website, gdaspeakers.com or calling 214-420-1999. Hey thanks, Richard.
Richard Resnick: Thank you, Kyle.
ep. 06 - Richard Resnick: Serial Entrepreneur, CEO, and TED Speaker on Genomics by GDA Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at gdapodcast.com.