Stef van Grieken - Moonshots projects at Google, Assessing the risk of starting a start-up, Falling in love with biology, Why we need more definite optimists Europeans

Stef van Grieken is the co-founder and CEO of the biotech company Cradle. Based between Delft and Zurich, Cradle’s machine learning platform helps scientists to design and program ‘cell factories’ faster and more successfully, speeding up the development of a more environmentally friendly method of producing almost anything. They have recently raised a 6 million dollar seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. Prior to Cradle, Stef spent 7 years with Google as a Senior product manager for Google AI known as Google Brain and Google X known for its moonshots projects. During this episode we discuss about the founding story of Cradle, how you can program cells to produce milk, plastic and petrol-free chemicals among other things, and why Europeans should change from being definite pessimists to definite optimists and be more entrepreneurial. Stef is one of those rare breeds of entrepreneurs with a high amount of raw intelligence paired with kindness. Thanks so much for the input on this episode to Leila from Kindred and Sofia from Index! Thanks a million! Enjoy! Brough to you by: Rows -  the spreadsheet where data comes to life. Connected with your business data and delightful to share, rows is how teams work with numbers and share their results.  Athletic Greens - all-in-one nutritional insurance, AG covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system.