You were listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

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I'm thrilled to welcome John to Stanford. We've got a terrific conversation today with him.

Let me tell you a little bit about his background, and then we'll just dive in, have about a half hour of conversation, and then a half hour or so of your questions, or more, if you have more than a half hours worth of questions.

John Mellow is the CEO of Amaris.

Amaris is a leader in synthetic biology to make useful things.

In fact, the company is so terrific at what it does that it won the World Economic

Forum's Tech Pioneer Award for 2006.

And I think if you don't know the company, after a few minutes you'll understand

why they won this award and why we've invited John to be here. Prior to Amaris, John spent

eight years at BP, the big giant oil company or energy company, I should say. And he led

the North American energy business. And while he was also a general manager in the company, he also presided over the complete

repositioning of the BP brand, which I'm sure all of you have seen the beyond petroleum

positioning that the company's taken.

And we can talk about that as well.

Earlier in his career, John worked in accounting here in the Bay Area and also in

entrepreneurial ventures in Silicon Valley. So he had a transition from. Here in his career, John worked in accounting here in the Bay Area and also in entrepreneurial

ventures in Silicon Valley.

So he had a transition from entrepreneurship to big company and back to entrepreneurship.

So we'll also talk a little bit about that today.

So please join me in welcoming John Mello.

So to start, maybe for those that don't know, tell us what the heck synthetic biology is

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