Who you are defines how you build. This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.

Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner. On today's episode, we have Dan Widmeyer, co-founder and CEO of Bolt Threads, which is producing biofabricated silk fibers based on proteins

found in nature. Before launching Bolt Threads, he was a research associate at Amgen and studied

chemistry and chemical biology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he focused on

spider silk proteins. Here's Dan.

Thank you for welcoming me for your last session of the quarter.

Just before I start going through the presentation,

I would recommend you follow the wonderful team at Bolt Threads.

I'm sorry if you have the misfortune of following me on Twitter.

You'll mostly get rage tweets about the Seahawks games and things like that.

And so I'm going to tell you about the company I started after graduate school called Bolt Threads.

But before I can get into what Bolt is and some of the things I've learned,

I kind of have to give you a little view on how I view the world,

and why there's a problem that's worth solving here. So the planet we live on Earth,

about a little over four and a half billion years old. If we look at fossil records, life has

been on this planet for, I say four billion years. It's actually like 3.8 is the current

estimate, but I always say what's 200 million years between friends? And if you

think about us Homo sapiens, we've been here for about 200,000 of those years. We've got some

ratio 23,000 to 1 up there. I actually like an analogy as a way to understand this a bit better.

So if you say Earth is about one day old, humans are about 3.76 seconds old, and the decimal points really

matter on this when you're talking about such a big ratio. And what astounds me is that in that

time that we've been here on this planet, in two human lifetimes, 150 years, humans have had a dramatic

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