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!

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