With the rise of Bubble and other no-code platforms, it seems like you be technical to start a company. In fact, “vibe coding” with Cursor and Windsurf allows people to instruct an LLM to build entire code bases with a few prompts.
For entrepreneurs and startups, this means rapid prototyping and MVP development with significantly reduced time-to-market. Take Strabo, for example, a fintech startup whose two founders spent only a month building a global personal finance tracker on Bubble’s platform. They now serve over 10,000 financial institutions in 11 countries, with a valuation exceeding ยฃ1.5 million. We have come a long way since Facebook started moving servers and coding out different PHP environments for each school.
However, the top entrepreneurs today are those who have entered the technology early before “democratisation” tools became widespread.. As the barriers to entry have been rapidly eroded, the software market has become increasingly saturated.
This realisation leads me to look beyond software to areas where technical expertise still offers significant competitive advantage. Synthetic biology represents precisely such a frontier.
The Dawn of the Bio-Creation Age
While we’ve been focused on the information age and its evolution into the AI-powered knowledge age, I believe we’re on the cusp of what might be called the “Bio-Creation Age”-an era where humanity harnesses biotechnology to discover and create novel materials and solutions.
The synthetic biology market is expanding rapidly, calculated at US$25 billion in 2025 and forecasted to reach around US$193 billion by 2034, accelerating at a CAGR of 29%. This growth is fuelled by advancements in technologies like CRISPR-Cas9, which has revolutionised gene editing since its development as a tool in 2012.
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology was first identified in E. coli in 1987, but its role in bacterial immunity wasn’t discovered until the early 2000s. By 2012, scientists had harnessed it as a tool to modify targeted regions of genomes.
The implications are profound. We’re moving into an age where humans can:
- Create rapid responses to novel diseases
- Enhance physical attributes through gene editing
- Tailor agricultural products for specific characteristics rather than working within evolutionary constraints
This could potentially dwarf the impact of the original Green Revolution, which itself transformed global agriculture through technology transfer initiatives and high-yielding crop varieties.
A Personal Reflection on Technical Expertise
Looking back at my time at Oxford, I regret not leveraging the available resources to develop deeper technical understanding in biotechnology. I was captivated by management theory and economic models, overlooking the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge biological engineering techniques.
In today’s world, merely understanding business or management is insufficient for truly innovative entrepreneurship. The most impactful founders will be those who develop deep expertise in emerging technical fields-particularly those not yet democratised by no-code equivalents. Identifying and developing expertise in the technical frontiers of tomorrow-before they become accessible to everyone-remains the surest path to building something truly revolutionary.
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