Robert Green is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He's the director of Genetics Research at Brigham and Women's hospital and the co-founder of Nurture Genomics, where they're doing genomic screening for infants to detect and mitigate actionable genetic conditions.

If you don't understand what that means, you're in the right place because we have a long conversation, digging into that topic and picking it apart for your understanding.

This is a super exciting frontier for medicine. We are at a point where we know the science, and we know how to sequence a genome. We know how to correlate some of those things that we see in the genetic code to actual health problems that are predictive.

Some of this is just a bug in the code that causes you to get some kind of cancer or other degenerative disease. We know it's there and in a lot of cases, we actually know what to do about it.

There is no systematic screening for people, much less for infants. That's what Robert's trying to solve. This is very important, very exciting stuff and It will change the future of how we take care of people and prevent genetic diseases from disrupting their lives and taking their lives.

You want to know about this. This is a great conversation. He's very good at explaining what's been found in the science and how they're implementing it. Enjoy!

• G2P
• Nurture Genomics
• Harvard Medical School
• Brigham and Women's Hospital

Robert C. Green, MD, MPH is a medical geneticist and physician-scientist who directs the G2P Research Program in translational genomics and health outcomes in the Division of Genetics at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Green is currently Associate Director for Research of the Partners Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine, a Board Member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and a member of the Informed Cohort Oversight Boards for both the Children's Hospital Boston Gene Partnership Program and the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative. He was the lead author of the recently published recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics for management of incidental findings in clinical sequencing.

Two nerds bullshitting about feeding the output from one industrial process as the input for another.

I met Dan Shapiro years ago when I went out to fly kites with Elan Lee. What a delightful guy! Dan is an inspiring entrepreneur with boundless energy, always upbeat.

He's had, I think, four companies that succeeded, maybe three that were venture backed.

Dan did something super cool. He got excited about making a board game that would teach kids how to program called Robot Turtles. He made that game using Kickstarter or something, and in the process really figured out how to succeed at crowdfunding. I think at the time it was one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever for game. But then he took that knowledge and he used it when he started Glowforge.

Glowforge is a desktop laser cutter. This is a tool you can use to cut materials. You draw something on your computer, click print and it'll literally use a laser to go cut or engrave materials.

You've seen this kind of thing. Things engraved in wood that are done this way now, and lots of parts can be made this way for all kinds of projects.

Dan wanted to democratize that. I don't know if my laser cutter was the first one he ever saw, but one way or another, he ended up with one in his garage and they were like these kind of crummy, chinese laser cutters with print drivers from hell that are used to operate them, and they're sort of dicey, but it's still inspiring because what you can do with them.

Dan had one in his garage to make Robot Turtles. So the next company he wanted to make, Glowforge, was to try and take that amazing tool and bring it to everyone. And this was very analogous to what Makerbot had done with 3D printers, which I got to help with a little bit.

In those days, Dan asked me what I thought about it and I got to help him, be a little advisor for Glowforge. They made this thing a very big success, in part by crowdfunding the first version and this was really hard to do. They made the first prototype. Made a very inspiring video about it. They did a crowdfunding campaign and got world record pre-orders for this thing and that's how they funded starting the company and it's hard to do that. Hard to keep everybody happy.

All these things, especially hardware projects always take longer than you hope or estimate. I think they probably lost some of their backers along the way for those reasons. But they did ship, which was not true of a lot of other crowdfunding campaigns. I'm a Kickstarter junkie, so I back all kinds of stuff and a good fraction of it never shows up and a good fraction of it shows up and by the time it does, I can't remember what it was in the first place.

I've been wanting to share this conversation with Dan with you guys for a long time. He's a great entrepreneur. I have a hard time getting him to say anything mean about anybody or anything, he's so positive. You'll learn about not only Glowforge and what they've done, but also, a little bit about how to think about these technologies and bringing them into the world. Enjoy!

• Glowforge
• Robot Turtles
• Dan Shapiro
• Photobucket
• MakerBot

Dan Shapiro is a high networth individual based in Seattle, Washington. Dan is a Co-Founder and serves as the CEO of Glowforge. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of Robot Turtles, Google, Sparkbuy, and Ontela. He was also the Founder of Photobucket. He seeks to invest in consumer internet, mobile, finance and education-based companies operating in Seattle and Silicon Valley.

Shapiro is currently investing in private equity, including venture capital fund strategies.