I’m Victor Holmes, and I’m excited to work with Lichen Ventures to shape the future of the bioeconomy. For decades, I’ve been driven by a commitment to keep our environment habitable, and I believe supporting biological technologies is one of the highest-leverage ways to do so.

In 2007, I joined Amyris, a synthetic biology company founded to produce biofuels. Over 16 years, I grew from bench scientist to Head of Biology, leading technical teams, managing multimillion-dollar programs, and navigating the shift from fuels to specialty chemicals to consumer products. I’ve seen the realities of industrial biotech from the inside: the promise, the pitfalls, and the make-or-break importance of capital efficiency, market fit, and execution. I watched peers in the field falter and studied the reasons why.

I’m joining Lichen Ventures now because this is a moment of extraordinary potential for biology. The tools of synthetic biology sharpen every year, and the technology is on the verge of dramatically altering our medicine, our manufacturing, and our response to climate change. Much like plastics came to dominate our material world after the chemistry revolution a hundred years ago, I believe a new era of biologically produced, biologically compatible, biologically degradable materials will grow into the later half of this century. Similarly, the growing ability to alter our own genomes and to create biologically-based materials with medical applications will solve—not just treat—a wide range of maladies that currently burden our society. And as those capabilities expand from our own cells to understanding and affecting whole species and ecosystems, biology and biomanufacturing will likely play a huge role in the coming effort to manage the habitability of our environment.