What are you actually doing?

This is a question I've received many times since my LinkedIn update starting as a "Founder in Residence" at Zinc . Unsurprisingly, the answer "I'm doing an impact venture builder" doesn't seem to add clarity.

I'm part of an immaculately curated group of ~65 people, who have joined ZINC to solve a specific Mission: "Environmental Impact on Health". Through a rigorous process, and a top-notch support network of coaches and advisors, our goal is to launch commercially viable businesses that solve problems within this Mission space.

What we've actually been doing for the first three weeks has been literally titled "Bootcamp".

Week one of bootcamp was an intense mashup of us 65 strangers, thrown into back-to-back, design-sprint and coaching activities. Highlight was an improv session with Cara Vaitilingam from National Theater, who had us creating human machines. I can attest that when you’ve huffed and grunted while intertwined on the floor with someone, you’re no longer strangers…

Week two was JUICY! It was “Mission week” where, through talks and research activities, we deep-dived into our mission of Environment X Health.

I am biased towards all things food and nutrition, thus my favourite day was 'Food Systems' with a mind-bending* talk about Regenerative agriculture systems by Wayne Gibbins . Followed by an even more planetary perspective of the Biosphere by Dr Vincent Walsh .

*I literally mean "mind-bending" – referring to Wayne’s psychedelic slides created by DALL-E with some questionable prompts in the wee hours of the night before…

Following on from food, I smugly nodded as?Professor Charlie Lees schooled everyone on fermented foods and emulsifier dangers. He wins best innovation nugget for ‘crapsules’ – which will soon be delivering healthy strangers' microbiome (aka ??) to less healthy candidates.

Wastewater turned out to be a surprisingly ripe area, and one teeming with biodata. It was passionately explained to us by?Andrew Engeli, who used "sewer data" during pandemic – for example, pinpointing that a ship pulling into harbour was a COVIDfest before anyone on board knew!

Final highlight – a talk from three VCs working at the intersection of health & environment Sharon Chen , Zoe Peden and Elizabeth Washburn Surti . Here’s an example of Zoe’s investment: “A girl came to me and said: I have a database of all life on earth”. ?????? That was the beginning of NatureMetrics , a world leading biodiversity monitoring #eDNA platform.

These highlights don’t cover half the topics from Mission Week. We also learned about...

Urban Health with?Dr. Elizabeth Rapoport,?Margarita Skarkou?and?Olamide Raheem. Respiratory Health?with Elaine Fuentes (Imperial College) and?Abhishek Kumar?(Lung Foundation).

And perhaps most impressive was that some of the deep dive talks were delivered by peers within our cohort! Shoutout to?William Hicks?and?Agnes Agyepong for the immersion into Air Quality, including its outsized effect on children’s health. And to Team Built Environment?with?Oliver Knight?and vertical growing guru?Mac Van Dam.

To sum it up – week 1 was social bootcamp, week 2 was intellectual bootcamp, which brings me to week 3 – physical bootcamp (Startups afterall are a marathon, run at sprint pace).

About 75% of the cohort headed up to the Peak District for 3 days (the other 25% were wiped out by Covid. I mean… what else do you get when you jam 65 strangers from various continents into a closed space for two weeks?!) The purpose was to REALLY get to know your potential cofounders – makeup was off, competitive spirit was in full force, and mud was everywhere.

Next few weeks the real work begins, as we start to test out problem areas and potential partners in short design sprints.

I can honestly say I come home from "work" every day, feeling more exhausted and simultaneously more energised than I've felt in a long time.

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