#y2k home fragrance

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Yankee Candle Vanilla Lime Votive

early 2000s (maybe mid 2000s? IDK)

Found on Mercari, user Lee Canan

[blackfemdoll]

𝐼’𝑀 𝒮𝐸𝒳𝒴 𝒮𝒪 𝐻𝐸 𝒩𝐸𝑅𝒱𝒪𝒰𝒮, takuma ino

black!fem!reader makes ino nervous from being so sexy. weed consumption. ino is wasian. reupload, wc 2.6k

“why you always wearing a beanie?”

ino looked at her with his eyebrows raised, two hands holding a wood horizontally as he moistened the brown leaf. then when what she asked registered, he pulled the leaf from his lips, shaping the soon-to-be blunt.

“oh,” he muttered. then he returned his eyes to his rolling tray and began assorting the crumbled plant into his wet leaf canoe.

“it’s actually not a beanie,” he corrected as he used an old gift card to scoop the weed up. “it’s a mask.” he dumped the contents into the blunt.

she playfully rolled her eyes. “well, why you always wearing a mask?”

ino smirked as he pearled.

she couldn’t lie, seeing a nigga perfectly roll was attractive, even though she didn’t really smoke like that — definitely not blunts. she cool with her joints. so maybe that’s where her fascination came from. he did it so smoothly, no clumsiness. she liked that. she liked the way he rolled. sure, she knew she and ino were friends; that didn’t mean she couldn’t look.

so she looked a lot, actually. when he rolled, when he played video games, when he skated. the way he held onto the steering wheel with one hand. the way he sat with his legs a bit spread. the way he always hid his figure behind large, baggy black clothes. but she always was so unassuming about it. he never noticed her doing so. granted, he was a bit oblivious in general.

he located a lighter, smirk still on his lips, and flicked it. “gotta be ready,” he teased, dragging the small flame along the body of the blunt.

her thin y2k-inspired eyebrows furrowed. “ready for what?”

ino inspected the dryness. in his opinion, it could dry a little longer. so he brought the lighter back up and flicked the light, proceeding in running it along the leaf.

“for when i stick people up,” he replied coolly. then he formed a gun with his hand, followed by childish little pew pew sounds.

it took everything in her to not facepalm.

“you so corny, ino. seriously,” she stressed with a little smile. “i wanna know. i don’t think i ever seen you with your bean— mask off.”

then she plopped beside him on his bed as he rolled. “i finished rolling your joint, by the way,” he added in.

her eyes sparkled, she ain’t even notice! considering she sucked at rolling, she gleefully plucked the rose joint from his rolling tray. he specifically bought the rose joints for her — he personally thought they smoked decent. but he was a blunt guy through and through.

“yeah, i don’t know. i’m so used to it being on, i feel kinda naked without it,” he answered with a shrug and a shy smile. he checked if the blunt was still moist by lightly sliding his fingers along its surface. and deciding it was dry enough, ino reached for the lighter beside him and immediately lit. when he was done, he passed the lighter to her.

she accepted it and hummed thoughtfully, bringing her rose joint up to her lips and lighting it. then she inhaled. she loved her way the petals tasted. exhale.

“would you take it off for me?” she leaned back on his bed, using her right forearm to prop her weight on. then she swung her legs off the edge of the mattress. she smiled sweetly, trying to sway him with her doll-like eyes.

ino intended to give her a side-eye, but seeing her in his peripheral leaning back like that, he couldn’t help himself. his eyes flickered down to her body. he knew his friend was a very desirable woman, but that cheetah print tube top and her low rise jeans were so… ahhh. and her waist was so… ahhh. she had a little ring through both the top and bottom of her bellybutton. it was like a sexy ass constellation. ahhh.

he was unsure what lotion or body oil she used, but it always left behind a sheer glittery shimmer on her skin which popped on her deep complexion and the fragrance was so sweet and warm. if he didn’t have home training, he would’ve been barking like a dog. but his mama taught him how to act around pretty women; when he got around one, he never acted like he hadn’t. don’t nothing put a baddie off like that.

so he tried to ignore it, but she wasn’t an idiot. she knew that he was ogling. she didn’t particularly mind though. he was respectfully quiet about it, so she allowed it. she didn’t blame him. after all, she was so fine. she liked the attention as well. and lastly, she liked the attention from him in particular.

she acted oblivious though, flipping her long braids over her shoulder. this movement caused him to realize he was staring — through a side eye — and his eyes raised to catch hers. she gave him a knowing smirk.

he redirected his attention to his rolling tray. “yeah. go ahead, take it off of me,” he muttered, feeling timid.

she couldn’t hide her giddy smile as she ashed her joint on the rolling tray and scooted closer to him. she raised her manicured hand up to gently pull the beanie-looking mask from his head. then she marveled at him as his hair fell in place. he felt his cheeks grow hot at the proximity and her admiration.

she set the beanie behind them both, not once breaking her eyes from his unveiled hair. “can i touch it?”

he relit the blunt and inhaled from it. “yeah.”

she ran her fingers through his dark brown hair. ino was wasian — half japanese, half white. even though his hair color probably came from his brunette white parent, his texture most definitely came from his japanese parent. it was so thick, so strong, so soft. he was already cute, but him with his hair down? he was fine. she saw the potential even if he didn’t.

“you look good,” she complimented softly, still styling his hair with her fingers. “you should wear it out more.”

ino’s breath hitched when he felt her fingers brush the nape of his neck. “t-thank you,” he replied, his shoulders raising from tension.

she sat close to him before, but in that tube top and her silage enveloping him… he felt a little more fidgety than usual.

her eyebrows furrowed as her eyes lowered to the side of his face. then she dropped her hands to her lap. “why you flinching?” she inquired. he didn’t respond, he just put his rolling tray on his nightstand and squirmed.

“i’m not flinching,” he weakly defended, but she could see a peach color dusting his cheeks. he was blushing. deeply. and she had no idea why. she just kept watching him tense up beside her, his eyes flickering from her exposed thighs, then back to his lap. like he was trying not to get caught.

it took her a few moments to decode his strange behavior, but then a realization dawned on her. she fought the urge to giggle once she connected the dots.

of course. she sexy so he nervous.

she smiled to herself. she loved when guys acted like aliens next to bad bitches. it was cute. he was cute. so she wanted to play a little bit — they flirted here and there in the past, but she never explicitly let ino know what was up with her. now was a good time, considering he was helping himself to admiring her.

she got a little closer. her shoulder brushed his. with a little smile, she spoke with a lower, breathier murmur. her eyes never left the side of his head, but he kept his eyes forward like a racehorse with blinders.

“am i making you nervous?” then she brushed some of his hair behind his ear.

ino’s heart skipped a beat. he was going to lie, but that’d be so embarrassingly obvious. so he just responded honestly as he twirled the blunt in his fingertips, needing stimulation. looking sheepish, he nodded. “y-yeah, a little bit.”

“why? it’s just me,” she feigned oblivion.

he hurriedly lit his blunt to take some of the nerves away. “yeah, b-but you’re so close…” he inhaled. exhale.

“what’s wrong with that?” her voice was so hard to listen to like this. she already had such an attractive accent. but when it was low like that and all whispery, it made the hairs on his neck stand up. “do you want me to back up?”

“no, you can stay,” he offered, cheeks still hot. “but like… not to be weird, but you’re just so pretty and you smell so good,” he admitted timidly. “you sound so good.”

she pushed herself closer to him. “why would it be weird?”

“‘cause we’re friends,” he retorted, somewhat innocently.

twirling one of his tendrils around her index finger, she shrugged. “you can think your friend is pretty. and smells good. and sounds good. there ain’t no rule against that.” she began caressing his head.

“yeah…” he agreed with another inhale from his blunt. “i just don’t know how to take it.” with his words, smoke fell from his pink lips. her eyes flickered down.

“take it however you want to.”

then she stood up and removed herself from him. the little dip in the bed filled out, and ino found himself wanting her close again. he watched her saunter over to his nightstand and pick the rose joint up. she turned around and plucked the lighter from his frozen hands. he didn’t realize he was so stunned by what happened that he just… stopped moving.

she lit the joint. “thank you,” then she slid the lighter back in his hand.

she returned to the same leaned-back position she was in before she began teasing him.

she was so pretty when she smoked. her brown-lined glossy lips wrapped around the end, and she sucked, which illuminated the other end of the joint. she removed the joint from her lips, held the smoke for a few seconds, then exhaled. smoke surrounded them.

she had an eased expression with her incoming high. “so how do you want to take it?”

his eyes widened and he stiffened. it was easy to mindlessly flirt in passing, but when it felt so direct and personal, he became subdued. he wanted to do some real nasty shit. but he didn’t want to say that, it would be too forward. instead, he preferred for her to take control.

“h-however you want to, i guess,” is what he stammered out.

she had a twinkle in her eye as she took another hit. “come on, baby. use your words.” she adjusted herself on the bed, now laying on her side and facing him. she was like a panther, having her prey right where she wanted him before she pounced.

to be honest, he wanted to kiss her. he really wanted to kiss her. he thought about it a few times, wondering what lips so glossy and thick would feel like against his. he imagined how his hands would settle above her hips as she straddled him. he saw her dance before — her waistline was insane. so he also pondered how fluid she would grind into him. she had such an effortlessly seductive aura, ino was a bit shocked she was even entertaining him. he was a bit dorky, he ain’t know what to do with allat! he wasn’t going to act like he did. but she asked so…

“well…” he began, setting the lighter down so he could rub the back of his neck. “i kinda want to kiss you.”

her eyebrow quirked up. “do you kinda want to, or do you just want to?”

he cleared his throat. “i want to kiss you.”

she looked at him with low-lidded eyes and picked the lighter up from where he left it. her dark chocolate eyes scanned him as she did a quick one over, taking in his body language and his expression. he was so awkward, bracing himself for rejection but still anticipating her approval. she smiled to this. she loved how her weed-dealing, gun-toting, stoner friend was tamed into a fidgeting, blushing mess.

“come here,” she commanded softly before she drew smoke from the rose joint. he obliged, scooting closer. since her lungs were full, she only indicated with a twitch of her finger than he come closer. he, again, obeyed.

she wrapped a hand behind his neck to bring him face-to-face with her. then her fingers moved from his neck to his jaw, and she gently squeezed. assuming she was telling him to open his mouth, he did as instructed. then she neared him, placing her lips right in front of his. his whole body was on fire as he could feel the ghost of her mouth against his. she was so close, but so far.

parting her lips, she slowly blew the rose-flavored smoke into his mouth. his eyes widened, but he didn’t waste a bit of it. he felt his lungs fill with her essence. he felt so slutted out, buttt… he couldn’t say he minded.

finally, she sealed the smoke in his lungs with a kiss. he froze at the initial contact, then melted into her softness. she returned her free hand to the nape of his neck as she pulled him closer, pressing her chest to his.

after a few moments, she pulled away as he dazedly pushed the smoke from his lungs. what a tease. a cherry-colored shimmer was left on his lips, matching his flushed cheeks. the kiss lasted no longer than five seconds, but he was ridiculously turned on. she knew because her own core throbbed. feeling a mixture of prideful and flustered, she set her joint down in the rolling tray.

“how was it?” she questioned. but from his deer-in-headlights look, she knew she had him.

kissing her was like staring into the sun. her lips were so soft, with a subtle fruity flavor. she didn’t add any tongue, but she didn’t need to — just the pressure of her lips against his had his hands frozen at his sides. ino had kissed people before, but with her, he forgot all motor functions. he almost forgot how to kiss, then he realized he wanted to impress her so he put that work in.

ino blinked a few times. “so good…” he muttered.

“mm,” she hummed, flipping her braids over her shoulder. a few moments of silence passed as they both processed what happened.

she enjoyed kissing him — at first, he was too stunned to kiss back. but once the initial shock wore off, he reciprocated her slow, deep movements. it felt like a french kiss without the tongue. so simple, but so intimate. she had to pull away because she felt herself getting wet. and yet, she regretted removing herself from him. he felt so good, she knew she wanted to kiss his little shy ass at least one more time. and this time? with a lot of tongue and spit.

biting her lip, she looked away from him and began tracing patterns into his bed. “…do you wanna do it again?” asking for herself.

still dazed, ino’s head bobbed slowly. “mhm.”

to this, her darkened eyes settled on him. she sat up, tucking her feet underneath her bum before leaning forward. feeling the bed shift under her weight, ino turned his head to watch her inquisitively. then their gazes met.

not once breaking eye contact, she pushed her braids back behind her head. she smiled a sweet smile. “then come and kiss me, boy.”

[carachocolatechipcookie]

[2000sandtoday]

y2kcore: Anna Sui

y2kcore: Anna Sui. #annasui #fashion #style #2000sfashion #2000style #y2k #y2kcore #y2kfashion #y2kstyle #2000svintage #2000svibes #2000sthrowback #y2kvintage

American Fashion designer Anna Sui from Detroit has earned many achievements in her lifetime. Among them include “Top 5 Fashion Icons of The Decade”. She also earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of American Fashion Designers back in 2009. She’s done everything from fashion, to fragrance, to cosmetics, eyewear, and home goods amongst other things. In this fall 2000s look, it…

[fortylessonsbeforeforty]

Lesson 13

I’ve learned the importance of creating memories. Unfortunately, when we are younger we take for granted a number of the things that bring us joy. Not that short-lived joy; that intense, in the moment but fleeting feelings of joy, fading quickly in time and memory. But those moments that you can look back on years, even decades later and the sheer thought of it, brings a flood of other images and a smile across your face, bigger than the Cheshire Cat. I’ve found that these memories are deep rooted in our minds and often attached to a combination of our senses.

I once read how purchasing a new fragrance before going on a trip somewhere for the first time, allows you to store memories that can be associated with that particular scent. Since then I have always looked forward to beginning any overseas trip by perusing duty free for the most perfect scent that will become the signature for this new destination and a constant reminder of the adventures had. I only need to glance at the bottles to be taken back to the places I’ve travelled. Or catch a waft of the scent to be transported across oceans to far off places and I’m instantly back in those moments, despite how much time has passed. Scents can conjure up both images in the mind but feelings deep inside too.

The moment that scents could trigger memories for me, goes back to when I was a youngster at my grandparents. I can see the back steps that led from the laundry down to the yard so vividly, with the reddish-brown bricks on the side closest to the ramp and the few steps beside the garden. It was here that I remember my Gran teaching me that rosemary was for remembrance. She crushed a fistful of leaves in her hand and had me smell it. From that moment on, anytime I would see a rosemary bush, I can’t help but grab a few leaves, crush them in my hand and take a sniff, being instantly transported back to those back steps with my Gran. The smell of roses has the same effect, taking me to the most glorious rose gardens that were my Grandad’s pride and joy in his retirement. These roses were so popular that he ended up having to transport them to garden beds away from the street as they would be picked by passers-by, particularly on Valentine’s Day.

The taste and smell of mangoes and passionfruit also take me back to my childhood and invokes memories of the tree house, my dad built in the mango tree in the backyard. There was a passionfruit vine that crept its way along the length of the fence and a trellis outside my older brother’s window. Many afternoons were spent in the tree house, with a bounty of passionfruit, picked straight from the vine. These were the yellow skinned variety, a lot sweeter, and my brother and neighbourhood friends would bite a hole into the fruit, spitting the hard skin into the vacant allotment beside our house and suck the passionfruit seeds out before discarding the emptied shell of the fruit over the fence. Our Nan used to make a passionfruit syrup, which she’d bottle up and share with the family. Even after I’d grown up and moved away, whenever I’d visit home there’d be a bottle to take back with me.

I find the cliché of songs being the soundtrack to our lives to be completely accurate. There are moments of my life that I can relate completely to a particular song or album. I only have to hear the opening bars to Carole King’s ‘I Feel The Earth Move’ from her Tapestry album and I’m transported to my childhood home. Mum would play this record when she was cleaning. As soon as you heard that song, if you weren’t out the door quick enough, you’d certainly be given a job to do. Songs from musicals such as The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and the Wizard of Oz, take me to the loungeroom of my Grandparents, snuggled up on the couch with either of them, a cup of hot cocoa (made on the stove) with everyone singing along. J-Lo’s ‘Waiting For Tonight’ and Kylie Minogue’s ‘On A Night Like This,’ will always remind me of the infamous Y2K New Years Eve and a street party in Rockhampton during my university days. Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’ transports me to a tiny bar in Tokyo, where I tried to recreate her video clip choreography on the bar. There’s certain songs that will instantly remind me of my high school days, working at the grocery store during university, road trips, adventures in new cities, the list is endless.

Today, more so than ever, we have a pocketful of memories, thousands of photos snapped on our phones, but there’s nothing like flicking through a photo album or a slideshow, reminiscing about times from long ago with the loved ones you shared moments with or listening to their stories of adventures had. In a day and age where we ‘capture’ every moment on our phones, it’s just as meaningful taking a picture memory, capturing a moment with all our senses. Brene Brown explains the idea of a picture memory so well in her book, Daring Greatly. She describes a day spent with her daughter Ellen and remembers a moment where she catches her, sitting silently, eyes closed, a quiet smile on her face. When Brene asks Ellen if she’s ok, she responds by saying she’s fine and that she’s taking a picture memory, which she explains is “a picture I take in my mind when I’m really, really happy. I close my eyes and take a picture, so when I’m feeling sad or scared or lonely, I can look at my picture memories.”

@taylorswift sings on ‘New Year’s Day,’ “Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you,” and I couldn’t agree more. Our memories are what keep us going during the bad times, bring us together during the good times. In the end, it’s better to invest in experiences, not things; so that you have stories to tell, not things to show. So I’ve learned to treasure moments, big and small, practicing gratitude each night before I go to bed, in an effort to imprint those memories in my mind for evermore.

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

BBW White Barn Candle Company Pears and Apples White Picket Fence Collection Candle

2003

Found on Ebay, user eajpml

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Jennifer Lopez Will Receive the Video Vanguard Award at the MTV Video Music Awards

Jennifer Lopez doesn't know the meaning of the term triple threat—from years working as a singer, dancer, actress, designer, producer, TV show judge, and fragrance and beauty mogul, she's more like a octuple threat (yes, that's a real word). During tonight's MTV Video Music Awards, all of Jennifer's hard work will be celebrated as she'll give a show-stopping performance and accept the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award—she also has two nominations for her glitzy new "Dinero" video.

With nearly 20 years in the music industry and eight albums and 23 VMA nominations to show for it, Jennifer is well-deserving of the award that celebrates her status as a video icon and "the most powerful entertainer on the planet." After all, not many can make videos that always seem to include impressive dance breaks and enviable style.

Jennifer follows in the footsteps of past recipients like Janet Jackson, Madonna, Beyoncé, and Rihanna and is the seventh woman and the first Latinx artist to claim the award since it was introduced in 1984. Tonight will be her first time performing at the VMAs since 2001 and here are just a few of the reasons she's truly deserving of the honor.

1. Jennifer first came on the scene as one of the immensely talented Fly Girls. Jennifer joined the group of dancers who performed on sketch comedy show In Living Color in 1991 and immediately became a fan favorite.

2. Jennifer danced on the show for two seasons before she decided to bless our lives through acting. One of her first movies was playing the lead in the biopic for the iconic Chicana artist Selena Quintanilla, who was murdered by the president of her fan club when she was 23-years-old. When speaking about the role, Jennifer previously said, "I felt she [Selena] had a sense to live in the moment, that you're not promised tomorrow. For me, that was the biggest lesson. That affected me in my life far more profoundly than the movie did in career terms."

Getty ImagesSCOTT DEL AMO

3. After starring in movies like Anaconda and Out of Sight, Jennifer jumped into music. In 1998, she released her first album, On the Six, which included hits like "Waiting For Tonight" and "If You Had My Love." Jennifer's first VMA nomination was for "If you Had My Love" in 1999. Sadly, she didn't win for "If You Had My Love," but she did win Best Dance Video with "Waiting For Tonight" in 2000.

Jennifer recently said she was involved in the editing of the video and she added, "It was 1999, just about to be 2000 or Y2K—everyone thought the world was going to crash, so the director, Francis Lawrence, and I just threw the ultimate rave in a rainforest!"

4. Even more memorable than the actual music video for "Waiting For Tonight" was the green Versace dress she wore to the Grammys in 2000. Jennifer was nominated for Best Dance Recording, and ultimately took home the unofficial award for most stunning dress and plunging neckline.

5. Throughout her career, the Bronx, New York native has received her fair share of criticism, most notably from singer Mariah Carey. If you've ever heard the phrase "I don't know her" thrown around to shade someone, you can thank Mariah for that one. Even though Jennifer insists she and Mariah have met, Mariah maintains that she doesn't know Jennifer and therefore can't comment on her music.

Being the graceful woman she is, Jennifer continues to let it roll of her back and move along with her successful life.

6. And she doesn't let any performance mistakes trip her up. During her 2009 American Music Awards "Louboutins" performance, Jennifer fell while jumping off the back of one of her dancers, which yeah, fair. While that would've made most people all flustered, Jennifer jumped back up and proceeded to smash the choreography—seriously, this woman didn't miss a beat.

131 of J.Lo's Most Perfect Fashion Moments

7. With her talent and years of experience, Jennifer decided to mentor singers on American Idol. Jennifer joined the judging panel for the hit Fox show in 2011. While on the show, viewers tuned in to see her glamorous style, hear her wisdom, and (sorry) watch her knock all the contestants out of the park with her own special performances.

She also gave us this gem of a GIF.

8. While she was on American Idol, Jennifer worked on a Univision show called Q'Viva! The Chosen.The show was similar to American Idol and followed Jennifer and her then-husband Marc Anthony around Latin America trying to find talented artists to perform in a huge Las Vegas show. Ultimately, the show was canceled after one season, but that didn't spell the end of Jennifer's time on talent competitions.

9. Her next career move was to go back to her dance roots. Jennifer is the executive producer of the dance competition show World of Dance, which premiered in 2017. The show is currently in its second season, and Jennifer also sits alongside dancers Ne-Yo and Derek Hough on the judging panel.

10. She basically invented the Juicy Couture tracksuit trend with her "I'm Real" music video. Jennifer posted a throwback clip of the video and wrote:

"We shot it in one day. The stylists brought me all this fancy couture from all the big designers. But this little known company Juicy sent these sweatsuits for me to chill and hang out in...I loved them so much I decided to wear it in the video with my throwback Adidas and my nameplate and a bun. I shocked everyone when I decided to wear it! It seemed fitting since the song is called "I'm Real", so I decided to be ME!!"

11. She's received a Vanguard award before. GLAAD gave Jennifer the Vanguard Award in 2014 for her work with the LGBTQ community. When accepting the award, Jennifer said:

"[Aunt Marisa] grew up gay in a time when it mean life could be very difficult and that her struggles were mostly kept to herself. It wasn't until I got older that I really began to know and appreciate all the difficulties she dealt with and the struggles of her community. I also realized the quiet lessons I learned from my family about love, tolerance, and acceptance...I always think, I bet she would love this. And I know she is proud of me and everybody here. She's proud of all of us."

12. She wants her work to be representative of society. Jennifer was also an executive producer for ABC Family's The Fosters, which is about a biracial lesbian couple who take in foster children from different cultures and backgrounds. She said, "When I was growing up, the families around me were not reflected in television or film. I wanted to be part of The Fosters because of the show's depiction of a diverse society."

And while she thinks diversity is increasing in Hollywood, Jennifer said it's affected her career. "I've struggled with it in my career because I am a Latin so there are certain roles that I'm not considered for and my name never even comes up."

13. Honestly, her booty deserves an award in its own right, just sayin'. Just take a look at her "Booty" video with Iggy Azalea—it's so booty-full it needed a special warning courtesy of Jennifer herself.

14. In 2014, she performed with rapper Pitbull during the opening ceremony for the World Cup in Brazil.

15. Because watching Jennifer perform here and there at awards shows and the World Cup isn't enough, she got her own Las Vegas residency in 2016.

Sadly, her last Vegas shows will be in September this year.

16. Her most recent video, "Deniro," is all the proof she needs to show she's worthy of the Video Vanguard award.

This content was originally published here.

[jeannesgarrison]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[helloashleygreen2213]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[itsemilyadamsat36]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[davidbailey2613]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn��t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[charlesmatthews0501]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[aaronlawson2183]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company

 instead of the No Compromises

 guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[andrewreynolds214t]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[captainalexandra21jones]

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

Amyris In The Age Of Rapid Change

by Jim Lane

Last month, Amyris (AMRS) and Chevron (CVX) announced that Novvi and Chevron have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and bring to market novel renewable base oil technologies. Novvi is Amyris’ JV with Cosan (CZZ) to produce targeted hydrocarbon molecules from plant sugar for automotive, industrial, marine, and construction applications at unbeatable economics. Think lubricants for engines and machines.

Since launching its first commercial production in 2014, Novvi has been steadily increasing its base oil production to keep up with robust and growing demand for a variety of automotive, marine and industrial applications. Meanwhile, Chevron has one of the world’s largest base oil manufacturing platforms through its own refining network and its base oil technology licensing position. In 2016, Chevron announced an equity investment in Novvi.

It’s good news for Chevron, Amyris and Novvi — and great news for consumers — and it reminds us that just a few years back the market was expecting that Amyris’ great partners would be the likes of Chevron because of the chase on for renewable fuels. That the mutual advantage opportunities for this pair have dovetailed into base oils, that you hear more about DSM Nutrition than Total among Amyris’ backers, that the company has embarked on a major voyage into the health & beauty sector — these are all signs of Amyris’ great pivot. And lessons for all lie in what the company set out to do, what it finds itself doing, and how it sustains itself and its workforce now that its vision has changed so much and people who signed up to change the world find themselves working on facial formulations.

These days, for marketing purposes Amyris has trademarked the phrase No Compromise, but of course the entire company’s mission is a compromise and in fact it is the source of Amyris’ strength, it ability to adapt to changing conditions and find news ways to pioneer when the expected pathways to success turned out poorly for them.

Expect the Unexpected

The unexpected is not to be unexpected — in fact, we live in a new world where markets are disrupting just as fast as science is, making it difficult to bring new products forward, anticipate trends, plan for the future, count on policy support, or tame the flighty tendencies of a fickle public.

We live in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Tesla (TSLA), taxis with an app, drones above our head, and cars without the driver, we have meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow. We live in strange world that is getting stranger. Fast is getting faster, information is beating down our doors, and for all the communication devices we carry around and use obsessively, half the world reports they are feeling more lonely.

How can companies become ready to meet the evolving markets that GenXers and Millennials have begun to dominate?  Absent a crystal ball, it certainly isn’t about the kind of corporate forecasting we used to see in the 1990s that didn’t anticipate Y2K, the dot com revolution, the dot com bust or 9/11. Or the kind of forecasting we had in the mid 2000s that didn’t anticipate the global financial crisis, the mortgage crash, the oil price crash, the rise of fracking, the Moore’s Law environment in genetics, or the advent of mobility as a service.

The Velocity of Change

How fast is fast becoming? To give an example, a company using a 300 baud modem in 1993 (and most companies back then couldn’t even have told you what a baud was, 300 was decent speed back then), could transmit a single color page over the internet in about 12 hours, if you could hold the connection that long, which you almost never could. Today, information travels up to 13 billion times faster via the internet.

And it cost a billion dollars to decode a genome just 20 years ago, and today we’re looking at a few dollars and not long from now it will be pennies. You can get more out of a call to 23andMe today than you could get from all the scientists of our national lab system a generation ago.

What can you really do in an economy that is changing this fast and that much? At the end of the day, values drive habits, habits drive actions, and actions change the world, so if you really want to change the world, it better start with values, rather than value. The value is a product of values, not the other way around.

In some ways, the company is probably going to have to think and organize itself the way that military organizations have begun to. The missions change, the tools, the team, the methods, the goals, the partners, the uniforms, the bases, the timelines. But Semper Fi goes on and on and on. The Marines are a philosophy in action, if you think about it, nothing else lasts and not much else matters except the who and the why. The what, the where and the how are ultimately the liquids of defense preparedness. The people and the values are the solids.

Values drive Habits, Habits drive Actions, Actions change the world

These days Amyris has put its values almost on the home page of its website — it’s just one click from the right location, found as you scroll down a bit on the page titled About Us — and there, the company says that it aims to “make good things, make good impact, make good choices, make good together and make good processes”, and these days they refer to embracing “intelligent risk” as a “learning organization”. Amyris has learned a lot, sometimes by not always taking intelligible risk, even if it was styled intelligent risk.

When the company was founded it was essentially focused on fuels, which made sense to many people at the time because fuels were (and remain) the giant app of the bioeconomy. And, if you could make fuels, you could make chemicals, because after all a fuel is simply a chemical that you burn instead of otherwise using in, say, green chemistry. A company that could make a good $3 fuel could do a lot for itself also selling $5 chemicals made from the same process, and fuels would give the company the base load to achieve meaningful commercial scale.

So went the idea, anyway. The inherent problem was that the company’s primary value engine, converting cane sugar to farnesene via yeast fermentation, was based around a maximum theoretical yield of 28%, and required a second processing step from farnesene (an alkene) to farnesane (a good fuel hydrocarbon).

What was the problem in that? To make a $3.00 gallon of fuel, which weighs in the range of 7.5 pounds, you needed sugar to be available at below 10 cents a pound (which costs you around $2.67 in raw materials even if that’s all the cost there is, which it’s not, and even if you hit the 28% theoretical yield limit, which you never do). Well, sugar never did fall that low. Right now, it trades on the NYMEX futures board at between $0.126 and $0.144 depending on delivery month, and there’s no 10 cent cane sugar in sight.

So, Amyris ran into the NLACM problem we have written about here and here. That is, the Natural Law of Alternative Commodity Markets, which states that no one will use a commodity to make another commodity of lower value. In short, you might as well sell the sugar as sugar.

The hope, one supposes, was that fuel prices would go bananas and Amyris could make a $5 fuel, or that companies would pay a small premium to blend in sustainable fuels sold at a green premium. Then, oil prices crashed — and green premiums were as easy to find as Chinese take-out on Neptune, and Amyris began a furious pivot towards the businesses it is in today.

Amyris’ prospects

The company is projecting for 2018 that it will reach $185-$195 million in revenue and expects more than $10 million of positive EBITDA for 2018. That’s striking — in its slides, it refers to being self-funding in the next year.

Amyris’ current markets

As Amyris CEO John Melo noted, John Melo, “We have organized around three core markets — Performance Health and Wellness, Clean Skin-Care and Pure Flavor & Fragrance Ingredients. Each of these markets is delivering strong, profitable growth underpinned by the most advantaged technology in the sector. We are making good for humanity and our planet with No Compromise products.”

Last November we reported on Amyris’ No Compromise sweetener-market entry, and news that it has sold its 40 million liter capacity Brotas production plant to DSM for $96 million, while it focuses on completing its Brotas 2 plant, where it has not yet revealed the capacity.

Equity analyst Jeff Osborne added:

Amyris has alluded to discussions with “very large consumer companies” regarding the sweetener product, which at the analyst day was referred to by an attendee in the Q&A as “Stevia-like”. Management viewed its “Sweetener 1” product as the company’s largest opportunity though 2021. The company expects a strong ramp in product sales in 4Q, which we believe to be driven largely by health and nutrition.

The DSM-Amyris deal? As CEO John Melo was clear in announcing the sale, Amyris needs different production capacity to realize its current opportunities in higher-value, smaller-volume markets. Total consideration for Amyris Brasil Ltda (which owns and operates the Brotas 1 production facility), intellectual property related to farnesene and an additional value share arrangement over a 3-year period amounts to $96 million. In addition to the consideration upfront there is potential for a future value share in line with Amyris’ business model.

DSM will continue existing supply-agreements to Amyris and other parties. DSM will also supply Amyris with specialty compounds until it realizes its Brotas 2 specialties production facility. Amyris is accelerating the construction of its second facility dedicated to specialty products while maintaining the manufacturing process development and business support capability located in Campinas, Brazil.

Then, there’s the Vitamin A front. As we reported last September, Amyris announced that it has entered into a product development and production agreement for Vitamin A with Koninklijke DSM N.V.

New production bases? Last June we reported that  Amyris and the Government of Queensland announced the next step in their plans to develop a leading industrial biotechnology hub in Southeast Asia. Plans call for developing a new production plant with support from local partners to produce Amyris’s sugar cane-based ingredient called farnesene, which is used in products including cosmetic emollients, fragrances, nutraceuticals, polymers, and lubricants.

Let’s not overlook Biossance, its health & beauty platform. Latest news there is that Amyris successfully launched Biossance into SEPHORA Canada stores, with SEPHORA U.S. sales during the year overall contributing to a greater than 650% increase in total 2017 Biossance retail sales over 2016. The company introduced pharmaceutical grade Neossance Squalane USP through its Aprinnova joint venture opening new markets among FDA regulated products such as topical and dermal applications, including therapeutic skin creams and ointments.

For the long-term

Beyond its products and markets, Amyris is working on informatics and artificial intelligence, for one.

We reported in January that Amyris announced two grants that have been awarded, valued in aggregate at approximately $25 million, to accelerate innovation and enable the company to further extend its leadership position in the industrial biotechnology sector. The first grant is in Europe and focused on furthering the company’s current artificial intelligence and Informatics platform at Amyris and the second grant is from National Institutes of Health for the development of a novel isoprenoid pharmaceutical application.

The Bottom Line

Forecasting is generally focused on the microeconomy and generally assumes not much will happen in the macroeconomy. “My product will be introduced into a market that is changing only in the forces that foster my product,” is sort of the way those business plans were written.

There’s an unknowability in markets, and as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, it it is the unknown-unknowns that keep you up at night, not the things you know but the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. Or, as the Talking Heads put it, “You may find yourself / In another part of the world…And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here? / Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down / Into the blue again after the money’s gone / Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Which is why Amyris’s pivots are really a sight to behold, even if the company has been pilloried by its critics who wander around in some post-Keynesian dream that economies are ordered, that state planning or corporate planning works, that innovation is about anticipating and meeting static and ever-reliable market demand with market supply. That theory works very well if you consider that information works in the same way, at the same speed, and at the same volumes as 100 years ago.  Amyris, for better or worse, looks a lot like companies of the future will all look — a transformative invention followed by a furious search for markets to serve as expected markets fail to materialize and new ones appear.

Which is why I sometimes wish that Amyris billed itself as The Nimble Company instead of the No Compromises guys. For compromise is what finding markets is all about, and the company that changes the world is the nimble one. Xerox made no compromises, Kodak made few either, and neither did Blockbuster. But Apple didn’t set out to make iPhones, Virgin didn’t start out in the transportation or even the music business, Mars didn’t start out with pet foods, and Microsoft didn’t even write much of MS-DOS, Excel, or the first releases of Windows.

Information is changing everything, and especially as biological sciences and information sciences are becoming almost indistinguishable. One of these days we might look at biology as an base-4 information science (with A,C,G.T as the digits instead of 0,1) , and that computer science is ultimately a simplified, inorganic version of biology. Dumbed down and stripped of the forces of life and evolution, perhaps that’s what we’ll one day think of the languages, machines, and technology that we deploy to support information in this day and age.

We don’t have much time to think about all that because information is changing, fast, and that means capabilities, habits, actions, and markets are getting shredded and born at high speed.

Making havoc for companies that attempt to navigate the choppy waters. But Amyris is coming nearer and nearer to shore. One only hopes that its workforce, those there today and those looking potentially at working there, see the mission that lies behind the products.

Biossance is a valuable product platform, but that’s not really what the work is about, is it? Year ago I subscribed to the Musical Heritage Review which wrote of Mozart and the flute this way: “Mozart loathed the flute…nonetheless, he completed and delivered two flute quartets, K. 171 and 298; the concerto, K. 313, and the Andante, K. 315…Mozart chafed under the commission, but he needed the money and hacked away diligently.

Yet Mozart ultimately delivered The Magic Flute to us of which it is written:

Although there were no reviews of the first performances, “it was immediately evident that Mozart and Schikaneder had achieved a great success, the opera drawing immense crowds and reaching hundreds of performances during the 1790s…Mozart’s delight is reflected in his last three letters, written to Constanze, who with her sister Sophie was spending the second week of October in Baden. “I have this moment returned from the opera, which was as full as ever”, he wrote on 7 October, listing the numbers that had to be encored. “But what always gives me the most pleasure is the silent approval! You can see how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed.” … He went to hear his opera almost every night, taking along [friends and] relatives.”

The opera is today the third-most performed of all operas around the world.

What led Mozart to Die Zauberflote? As we see, not love of the flute. It was a commission. Which shows that markets have powerful impact on training great minds upon the task they will become known for; the winds of change blow us towards our most brilliant productions.

Jim Lane is editor and publisher  of Biofuels Digest where this article was originally published. Biofuels Digest is the most widely read  Biofuels daily read by 14,000+ organizations. Subscribe here.

https://ift.tt/2uws3wu

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Bath and Body Works Fall Edition Chubbies Votives in Orchard Fresh Pear, Blissful Blackberry, Spiced Vanilla and Sweet Cinnamon Pumpkin

Fall 1999-2000ish

Found on Ebay, user rospag7