This is a conversation with Marc Chevrette. Marc is a post-doc in Jo Handelsman’s group at the University of Wisconsin, where, among lots of other things, he works on the Tiny Earth project, which you’ll hear him describe. He’s also a really good friend of mine. I met him when we worked together at the late great Warp Drive Bio, a biotech startup where we did genome mining together. Marc was the Head of Experimental Genomics there, before he decided to leave for graduate school and pursue his PhD.