It’s been about three years since Arcadia opened its doors. We’ve sorted through many challenges, tried out a symphony of operational and scientific ideas, and published a lot of results and tools that we’re proud of. And, unsurprisingly, our operating principles have evolved.

We are at a new inflection point as a company. In short, we have more focus. We’ve moved past our initial stage of maximizing random walks to explore a greater space of possibilities. We are now pushing more intensely on fewer goals that we have much higher conviction about. 

More than ever, we are determined to get some hard things done. As a result, we are updating our original operating principles to the ones below, which better reflect what defines our team today. 

We are ambitious, self-driven individuals who take control of our fates. We bias towards immediate problem-solving rather than finger-pointing. There’s a high degree of trust and autonomy amongst Arcadians, and we expect exceptional results and accountability in return.

We are scientists who believe in taking an iterative, rational approach to all we do. We pride ourselves on being curious, experimental, nimble, and even admitting when we’re wrong. We often repeat the mantra: data, not drama.

We are working on what we believe is the most important effort in the world we could be contributing to. We move quickly, refusing to waste our privileged, time-boxed opportunity to make a meaningful, scalable impact. We won’t wait for others to do what we think is right.

Our actions today can shape the future. We lean towards envisioning new realities that we can help build anew, as opposed to iterating on existing problems or systems that need a reboot. We want to shift the Overton window (aka what people think is “normal” or acceptable).

If our operating principles resonate, check out our latest job opportunities and FAQ page. We are more excited than ever about where we’re headed. There’s some fun but tough work ahead, and we want the most talented, mission-oriented team to tackle this with. After all, science is worth it.

Updating our core tenets as we embark on a new phase

Last month, Arcadia turned two. It’s been a wild ride. It doesn’t feel so long ago that we were huddled in a small warehouse space putting together our first website, learning how to incorporate. 

As we’ve been iterating, the question we get most often is “what are you?” After much pivoting and even more Cheez-its, we now have a much clearer answer for you. Arcadia is a for-profit startup incubator with our own research platform that leverages evolutionary biology for discovery. 

Don’t worry, we still love weird organisms. In fact, our shared in-house platform is a suite of technologies built by our scientists who are fully devoted to figuring out how we find the right weird organisms to inspire new inventions. We believe that comparing species across the tree of life can speed up our ability to deploy impactful solutions in therapeutics. We’re making this process replicable, scalable, and useful by incubating our own homegrown startups. 

Our setup has similarities to existing venture creation studios, including some aspects of how to strategize and operationalize biotech startups. We don’t need to fully reinvent the wheel here, and we’re lucky to be able to learn from their successes.

But there are important differences that make us unique. 

Fundamentally, Arcadia is a science-first company. We were founded by and for scientists, so that we can figure out new ways to sustain the kind of research we’d like to see more of in the world. We are very process-oriented and see knowledge as one of our products, in addition to successful startups. You can gauge our priorities by how we share our work.

Although we have two key external investors, we are also scientist-owned. Arcadians have shares in our company, and the way we distribute them is informed by our understanding of the full research lifecycle. Whether someone is de-risking early ideas, pouring plates, engineering tools, editing publications, or incubating startups — it’s all needed for scientific innovation. This is reflected in our profit-sharing approach.

Arcadia’s translational portfolio is also driven by our scientific process. We are trying to maximize the return-on-investment for our research by applying it to important, real-world challenges. The odds of success increase if scientists have enough context to think concretely about where their science is useful. It breeds a different kind of creativity. We therefore teach all of our scientists about market opportunities and bottlenecks. They are investors too, after all.

In short, we want to create a scientist’s vision of entrepreneurship at Arcadia. We are training and ramping up hiring to enable all of this. We are building an invention factory with scientists, engineers, builders, and entrepreneurs who can execute this very ambitious vision. Check out our new wave of job ads to see if this might be you too.

We know we have our work cut out for us, but we are intent on giving it our all to make the most of this opportunity. Our goal is to reach financial self-sustainment within the next 10 years. Having said that, we hope to one day report that our science-centric mindset yielded a strategy that was even more profitable than we could have imagined and also shaped how others approach their science. We are scientists and optimists, and this is our bet.

An update on our vision at the two-year mark of our experiment.

We have science news to share. But it’s not the type of update you might expect. It’s kind of an anti-announcement, if you will. We are excited to tell you about all the latest research we don’t plan to work on — and why. 

Because we are focused on exploration, Arcadia’s research is biased towards risk and breadth. For us, failing fast and often is a feature, not a bug. We see our “misses” as knowledge wins. With every roadblock, there is a lesson. If we’re doing it right, we should be churning out lots of lessons.

We know it’s not the norm to put time into sharing work we don’t plan to pursue. But we’ve decided that these pieces of work are more useful in the public domain than stored away in our freezer. Not only could this approach benefit other researchers, but there are also advantages to Arcadia as a company. Sharing science accelerates collective progress to move past mutual bottlenecks, brings in users for future tools we may build, gives potential job candidates clearer insights into what we do, and fosters a strong scientific community around us. We hope other companies consider adopting open science as a win-win strategy.

So today we’re announcing a new way we’d like to highlight our library of lessons, which we have coined our “Icebox.” These are literature searches, discussions, and research pilots that we worked on for a few months and decided to pause. 

It’s easy to assume that when projects don’t move forward in science, it’s because of bad ideas. But as most scientists know, there are typically lots of practical bottlenecks to navigate before you have the privilege to exercise taste in choosing whether an idea is “worth” pursuing. We will describe these bottlenecks in our iced pubs.

The usefulness of this effort depends on other scientists, which could be you. We hope our Icebox pubs help de-risk your ideas. Maybe you are building a technology perfectly suited to address a critical hurdle. Or maybe it helps you replicate our work, avoid our mistakes, or bring renewed attention to a problem as fields evolve.

You will also note that sometimes we release efforts that did, in fact, technically pan out. These are opportunities that we believe other scientists would be better positioned to move on. It’s not a signal for you to back off — it’s an explicit invitation. We are stating our intent to not pursue it for various reasons, such as technical expertise, mission alignment, commercial viability, or some combination of these.

To ease interpretation, we’ve come up with eight common reasons that we may ice a project at Arcadia. We’ve listed and defined them below. Look out for our tags and explainers in actual pubs in case you hold the key to unlocking their progress. We are excited to see if this experiment accelerates our work or yours.

If you want to revisit one of our ideas and take it off ice, go for it. Comment publicly if there’s anything we can do to assist. We’ve tried to flesh out our pubs so that they’re actionable to the next set of researchers. Give us feedback. Let us know how we can help you heat something up.

To make an impactful advancement, we’d need further technological or conceptual development.

We've decided not to pursue this area of science at the moment because it doesn't play to our unique strengths as a company.

We learned what we needed to learn from the project and there is no reason to continue.

What we discovered during the project lands us in an area where we lack internal expertise, or taking the project to the next step would require expertise we don’t have (yet).

We tried to derisk a project, but could not overcome barriers that would enable us to move forward, or our hypothesis was wrong in a way that the remaining possibilities are not of interest for us to pursue.

The market is not appropriate, big enough, well-scoped enough, or is in an area where we are not well positioned as a company to have a competitive advantage. The time horizon to make this translationally actionable is too long or the challenges are too layered to align with translational goals.

The project can’t be done without massive resources, it’s inefficient, or we don’t have a high-throughput approach to scan enough search space and have confidence we’ll be successful.

We lack the facilities, equipment, or tangible resources to act on this project.

Curating a menu of our stopping points that others can carry forward

Announcing an Anti-announcement: The “Icebox”

Unlocking the technological potential of biology through discovery and translation.

Applying an evidence-based approach to iteratively build a new type of science organization.

Confronting big challenges together — with purpose and relentless optimism.

Embracing open principles to advance knowledge faster and more rigorously.

We apply an evolutionary lens to accelerate purposeful discovery of nature's greatest innovations.

Arcadia is a science company.

We apply an evolutionary lens to accelerate purposeful discovery of nature's greatest innovations.

We are Arcadia Science.

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Arcadia Science is based in Berkeley, CA.