Last month, Arcadia turned two. It’s been a wild ride. It doesn’t feel so long ago that we were huddled in a small warehouse space putting together our first website, learning how to incorporate. 

As we’ve been iterating, the question we get most often is “what are you?” After much pivoting and even more Cheez-its, we now have a much clearer answer for you. Arcadia is a for-profit startup incubator with our own research platform that leverages evolutionary biology for discovery. 

Don’t worry, we still love weird organisms. In fact, our shared in-house platform is a suite of technologies built by our scientists who are fully devoted to figuring out how we find the right weird organisms to inspire new inventions. We believe that comparing species across the tree of life can speed up our ability to deploy impactful solutions in therapeutics. We’re making this process replicable, scalable, and useful by incubating our own homegrown startups. 

Our setup has similarities to existing venture creation studios, including some aspects of how to strategize and operationalize biotech startups. We don’t need to fully reinvent the wheel here, and we’re lucky to be able to learn from their successes.

But there are important differences that make us unique. 

Fundamentally, Arcadia is a science-first company. We were founded by and for scientists, so that we can figure out new ways to sustain the kind of research we’d like to see more of in the world. We are very process-oriented and see knowledge as one of our products, in addition to successful startups. You can gauge our priorities by how we share our work.

Although we have two key external investors, we are also scientist-owned. Arcadians have shares in our company, and the way we distribute them is informed by our understanding of the full research lifecycle. Whether someone is de-risking early ideas, pouring plates, engineering tools, editing publications, or incubating startups — it’s all needed for scientific innovation. This is reflected in our profit-sharing approach.

Arcadia’s translational portfolio is also driven by our scientific process. We are trying to maximize the return-on-investment for our research by applying it to important, real-world challenges. The odds of success increase if scientists have enough context to think concretely about where their science is useful. It breeds a different kind of creativity. We therefore teach all of our scientists about market opportunities and bottlenecks. They are investors too, after all.

In short, we want to create a scientist’s vision of entrepreneurship at Arcadia. We are training and ramping up hiring to enable all of this. We are building an invention factory with scientists, engineers, builders, and entrepreneurs who can execute this very ambitious vision. Check out our new wave of job ads to see if this might be you too.

We know we have our work cut out for us, but we are intent on giving it our all to make the most of this opportunity. Our goal is to reach financial self-sustainment within the next 10 years. Having said that, we hope to one day report that our science-centric mindset yielded a strategy that was even more profitable than we could have imagined and also shaped how others approach their science. We are scientists and optimists, and this is our bet.

An update on our vision at the two-year mark of our experiment.

We have science news to share. But it’s not the type of update you might expect. It’s kind of an anti-announcement, if you will. We are excited to tell you about all the latest research we don’t plan to work on — and why. 

Because we are focused on exploration, Arcadia’s research is biased towards risk and breadth. For us, failing fast and often is a feature, not a bug. We see our “misses” as knowledge wins. With every roadblock, there is a lesson. If we’re doing it right, we should be churning out lots of lessons.

We know it’s not the norm to put time into sharing work we don’t plan to pursue. But we’ve decided that these pieces of work are more useful in the public domain than stored away in our freezer. Not only could this approach benefit other researchers, but there are also advantages to Arcadia as a company. Sharing science accelerates collective progress to move past mutual bottlenecks, brings in users for future tools we may build, gives potential job candidates clearer insights into what we do, and fosters a strong scientific community around us. We hope other companies consider adopting open science as a win-win strategy.

So today we’re announcing a new way we’d like to highlight our library of lessons, which we have coined our “Icebox.” These are literature searches, discussions, and research pilots that we worked on for a few months and decided to pause. 

It’s easy to assume that when projects don’t move forward in science, it’s because of bad ideas. But as most scientists know, there are typically lots of practical bottlenecks to navigate before you have the privilege to exercise taste in choosing whether an idea is “worth” pursuing. We will describe these bottlenecks in our iced pubs.

The usefulness of this effort depends on other scientists, which could be you. We hope our Icebox pubs help de-risk your ideas. Maybe you are building a technology perfectly suited to address a critical hurdle. Or maybe it helps you replicate our work, avoid our mistakes, or bring renewed attention to a problem as fields evolve.

You will also note that sometimes we release efforts that did, in fact, technically pan out. These are opportunities that we believe other scientists would be better positioned to move on. It’s not a signal for you to back off — it’s an explicit invitation. We are stating our intent to not pursue it for various reasons, such as technical expertise, mission alignment, commercial viability, or some combination of these.

To ease interpretation, we’ve come up with eight common reasons that we may ice a project at Arcadia. We’ve listed and defined them below. Look out for our tags and explainers in actual pubs in case you hold the key to unlocking their progress. We are excited to see if this experiment accelerates our work or yours.

If you want to revisit one of our ideas and take it off ice, go for it. Comment publicly if there’s anything we can do to assist. We’ve tried to flesh out our pubs so that they’re actionable to the next set of researchers. Give us feedback. Let us know how we can help you heat something up.

To make an impactful advancement, we’d need further technological or conceptual development.

We've decided not to pursue this area of science at the moment because it doesn't play to our unique strengths as a company.

We learned what we needed to learn from the project and there is no reason to continue.

What we discovered during the project lands us in an area where we lack internal expertise, or taking the project to the next step would require expertise we don’t have (yet).

We tried to derisk a project, but could not overcome barriers that would enable us to move forward, or our hypothesis was wrong in a way that the remaining possibilities are not of interest for us to pursue.

The market is not appropriate, big enough, well-scoped enough, or is in an area where we are not well positioned as a company to have a competitive advantage. The time horizon to make this translationally actionable is too long or the challenges are too layered to align with translational goals.

The project can’t be done without massive resources, it’s inefficient, or we don’t have a high-throughput approach to scan enough search space and have confidence we’ll be successful.

We lack the facilities, equipment, or tangible resources to act on this project.

Curating a menu of our stopping points that others can carry forward

Announcing an Anti-announcement: The “Icebox”

We founded Arcadia with an optimism for a different way of doing science. We wanted the Arcadian way to be rooted in our values and unique goals.

Our values can’t just be ideals though; they must be embodied in principled actions. This is, of course, easier said than done. Building a new organization involves a seemingly endless onslaught of decision points and pivoting. Abiding by principles in the face of this uncertainty and discomfort requires commitment.

To keep ourselves accountable, we’ve developed a set of operating principles to guide us. Our principles are both emergent and aspirational — reflective of the collective qualities of current Arcadians and also representative of what we want to strive toward. And that work is never done. By putting these out into the world, we hope you will help hold our feet to the fire too.

Below, we’ve shared the operating principles we think are most unique to Arcadia and our mission. As a team, we discussed concrete places where these ideals show up in our day-to-day, and we provide examples below.

Honesty and integrity are critical for our success. Principles shouldn’t be context-dependent, so the “right time” is always right now. We don’t wait for situations to be less risky or more convenient.

One of the ways this principle shows up is how we share our work with the scientific community. Most research findings stay hidden for months or even years before they’re published in scientific journals, adding drag to the scientific process. In our first major blog post, we stated, “...no work produced or funded by Arcadia will be published in journals.” Rather than wait for better platforms, more aligned career incentives, and greater certainty of the path forward, we decided to just start publishing our work on our own terms. We’ve since released 17 pubs — read more about our ongoing publishing experiment here.

This certainly made the decision to join Arcadia harder for some. This is a feature, not a bug. We understand the immense privilege we have to take this risk, but every Arcadian believes waiting for a more convenient time is a greater risk to scientific progress as a whole.

2. We maximize the utility of our science.

Ultimately, we want our science at Arcadia to be useful. We define our success by how much our science gets reused by others. This has to be our constant North Star.

We want all aspects of our science to have utility, which extends beyond commercial applications. We want our science to be reused in all sectors. We often discuss a very practical consideration — that our research equipment and reagents have to be cost-effective enough for most scientists to be able to adopt our approaches. The return-on-investment ceiling for our science depends on it. For this reason, we value frugal, scalable science. This guides our decision-making in a variety of areas, like which microscopes to buy, which software packages to build upon, and what general strategies to take. 

We also try to write about our work in a way that is simple and accessible. Learn more about our work, and check out a specific example of an imaging tool that we’ve designed to be useful to others.

We believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our strength lies in coordinating diverse, complementary strengths across the team to tackle science that can’t be achieved otherwise. Arcadians are low ego + high ambition individuals, and we work hard to align personal goals with collective mission.

A few months into starting Arcadia, we had our first company-wide scientific brainstorming session. It was kind of magical. With low-ego, mission-aligned people in the room representing an exceptionally diverse array of scientific disciplines, our ideas moved in directions that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. And then Arcadians experimentally went after the ideas together at warp speed without being territorial. We’ve continued with these brainstorming sessions, now called “Sandbox.” And because you can't engineer people prioritizing collective outcomes, we aggressively recruit for people who already have this mindset.

We are trying to unlock a new way of doing science, which is critical for human progress. Our degree of impact is directly related to how many people outside Arcadia can adopt our model, so we must make it scalable and replicable by others.

We’ve been generously funded to try out a different approach to science over the next decade. We hope our lessons inform new organizational models that others pursue, sparking ecosystem-level change. But if there isn’t sufficient philanthropic funding for new efforts, the potential impact will be limited. That’s why we are testing the hypothesis that fundamental science can yield sufficient revenue to sustain operations, if approached strategically and over a long enough period of time. If we show that basic research is indeed a smart financial investment, our experiment could expand the pool of investors and resources for similar efforts.

To best position ourselves for this experiment, we made the early call to switch to a for-profit tax structure. Read more about our thinking.

When in doubt, do the experiment. We believe in the scientific process — an empirical and iterative approach. In the absence of an established blueprint for how Arcadia should work, we will be pragmatic and evidence-driven in lieu of inaction or forceful opinions.

Diving into the unknown means accepting partial information about what next steps are best. Ironically, the less we know, the more opinionated we become. However, in moments of uncertainty, we should strive to be more objective and scientific. This means running informative experiments. Our Software team has taken this approach many times. There are often differing opinions around tool selection, team structure, and computational training at Arcadia. Luckily, there are usually small test runs we can do to collect key data. For example, this is how we ultimately chose to use Nextflow as our workflow-building tool.

Arcadians should strive for self-awareness and learn to notice when we’re slipping into drama without data. Read more about how our Software team has navigated some of these moments.

We are doing something hard. We need to learn from every experiment. Poor execution is a bad experiment. We expect excellence across the organization, from science to operations.

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. If you’re excited to join a team of people who hold each other to a very high bar, check out our latest job opportunities!

How we’re aligning our values with action, especially when the going gets rough

Unlocking the technological potential of biology through discovery and translation.

Applying an evidence-based approach to iteratively build a new type of science organization.

Confronting big challenges together — with purpose and relentless optimism.

Embracing open principles to advance knowledge faster and more rigorously.

We apply an evolutionary lens to accelerate purposeful discovery of nature's greatest innovations.

Arcadia is a science company.

We apply an evolutionary lens to accelerate purposeful discovery of nature's greatest innovations.

We are Arcadia Science.

Read the Arcadia blog

Check out our latest research

Arcadia Science is based in Berkeley, CA.