My Experience at The Knowledge Society (TKS)
How I’ve gone from being ambitious to learning and building in biotech
No need to be a genius or live anywhere in particular. Only prior requirement is being a teen who’s curious and ambitious enough to learn, build, and 10x themselves in 10 months.
Learn and build what? Ok. If you’re already interested in anything like blockchain, AI, synthetic biology, 3D printing, gene editing, or IoT (just to name a few), then The Knowledge Society could be even more interesting.
What if you’re only interested in solving a problem like climate change, gender inequality, or cancer? That’s just perfect. TKS was started to train the next generation of innovators to solve the world’s biggest problems.
But it’s still a STEM program, isn’t it? This will sound cliché, but it’s WAY more than that. From my point of view, TKS brings together entrepreneurship, personal development, and STEM. We call it a human accelerator.
If you’re into entrepreneurship, you must’ve heard about startup accelerators like YC. Well, TKS does just that, but for teens. The point is to train unicorn people who make a positive impact on billions of people in 10 years from now.
That’s TKS in a nutshell. What follows is a story of how and why I got in, what I’ve learned and built over the past 10 months, and what’s next for me after this acceleration process.
The story
Pre-TKS
Today I’m sure that more than 1 person will resonate with this. Before discovering TKS, I felt alone. Ambitious teen, wanting to change the world, but only getting good grades at school. That was me as a 14-year-old living in a small city/town in Mexico.
One day, the marvelous YouTube algorithm recommended me a video about CRISPR. I was shocked, inspired, and excited. I kept on watching videos about it for months, until I’d pretty much consumed everything there was on YT on the topic.
Since nobody around me even had even mentioned the word “biotech”, I felt like I’d found a secret. I remember lying in bed at night and asking myself how many other kids my age in the world were even close to hearing about CRISPR.
I felt urgency to learn more before everybody else discovered the secret. I asked my teachers but they couldn’t help me, so I just kept reading articles, and watching videos as time passed by.
One day, I saw a tweet of a longevity scientist. It was a picture with a 13-year-old longevity enthusiast. I couldn’t believe that a) she had met that idol of mine in person and b) she not only knew about longevity science, but was DOING SOMETHING about that passion.
I watched one of her interviews too, and that was when I discovered another secret world: TKS.
It was December of 2019 when I entered their website and the only thing I could think of was: I NEED to be part of this community somehow.
Few months later, I applied to their 2020–2021 innovate program, which (without exaggerating) impacted my life in the most positive way I could imagine.
During TKS
The program is actually more complex than the description I previously gave. I wasn’t mistaken when I felt like I’d discovered a whole new world because that’s what TKS is.
Have you ever heard the words focus, hackathon, explore, braindate, challenge, brainpod, squad, T, or velocity together? Well, it’s all part of the TKS experience.
Although our group sessions happen only in the weekends, there’s a lot happening throughout the week, both individually and in groups, on Slack, and inside the amazing tks.life.
Since I’m located in Mexico, I was part of the global virtual program: 150+ teens, 12+ countries, same ambition and curiosity across different technologies and topics.
The sessions always had 3 main components: technology or challenge, skills, and mindsets. We would have insightful discussions on exponential technologies, do research and pitch our ideas on how to use these technologies to solve a problem, or work on challenges to solve real-world problems for companies or organizations like the United Nations.
Skills were really aligned with the challenges. We would learn how to create a presentation deck that would actually look good in a TED talk, we would train our presentation skills, do speed research, and get ready to implement time management, networking, and more.
What everybody considers last and least is perhaps the most basic and therefore important element: mindsets. At TKS, we train a new mindset each week. Some examples are: anti-fragility, perspective, boss mentality, 10x thinking, first principles, courage, and done>perfect.
So if we weren’t doing anything of the above, we would for sure be working on our focus, having braindates, or meetings with our mentors.
The focus is a process that I honestly love. It’s a unique learning process that allows you to learn and build with a technology, even and especially if you have 0 previous experience on it:
- Be curious about a technology
- Gain breath of knowledge about it
- Build something that already exists
- Go specific on a topic or build something more
- Create something unique (an idea of your own)
My biological computing focus 👇
I don’t want this article to be just me throwing a bunch of information at you about the program. Let’s get into why and how it actually changed my life…
3 life insights
1. Know where you’re going
And you learn that it doesn’t matter where you’ve already gotten to, but where you are going, and if you don’t know where you’re going, anywhere will do — Shakespeare
We were told this in the very first session. For good or for bad, this isn’t a one-time thing in life, especially when you’re a teen and the world is changing as rapidly as it is now. Personally, I’m constantly getting lost, but find my way back by aligning my mission and vision with my goals and sometimes, reinventing these.
If we’re not too philosophical, we find that success can be defined as simply as “accomplishing your goal(s)”. Therefore, if you want to be successful, knowing where to go makes the most sense.
If you are where I was before watching that YouTube video, my best advice (coming from TKS too) is knowing that you don’t find your passion, you develop it.
I entered the program being just interested in gene editing. Then I picked synthetic biology as my first focus, again just as an interest. Throughout these 10 months I’ve actually developed a passion for synthetic biology. So much so, that I’m working in a middle-term project with some TKS friends.
2. You can do anything you put your mind to if you don’t put your mind to everything
Life is a buffet with more delicious plates than the ones we can try — Ray Dalio
I entered the program being completely convinced that I could do more than 5 extracurriculars, have more than 3 projects, keep a good GPA, do all of those successfully, and not explode in the process.
I now appreciate the power of focus. Having a strong desire for something, and committing to making it happen. Prioritizing is what they call it. Experts suggest always having 3 priorities in life.
My current priorities are: my synthetic biology project, iGEM (project above), internship @G_Y_O_C (find us on Twitter and IG ;)). This is literally more than enough, considering the kind of life I want to have and how successful I want to be in each one of these. I actually wish I was only doing 1 project at a time.
3. Have the courage to get started
I have gained knowledge in various areas of biotech, cultivated a super valuable network of people in the field, and trained the skills mentioned previously in this article. What have I built? What have I done with these?
So I’ve done literature research, worked on a couple of biotech experiments at home, and built some simple AI programs. The truth is that it’s disappointing and embarrassing for me to say that I haven’t done something that I’m truly proud of.
The mindset that I have left to practice is courage. I’m scared of not starting that biotech startup that I want to start, and not having the quality of life that I want to live. Those fears aren’t stopping me too much though. What’s really stopping me is the fear of making the wrong choice.
Every time I start a project, I’m curious and excited. Then I reach the point in which I could start to build it more seriously, but I don’t. I pivot to another one because I’m scared that I’ll waste mine and other people’s time on something for which I don’t have a strong desire.
This summer (right now actually) I’m taking initiative to find a project that I can commit to for a longer period of time (6+ months). Not sure yet if this is the best way to approach the situation, but I’ll let you know how it goes.
3 Unicorn skills
The biotech industry is about to explode (or that’s what experts say). The problem is that a in many cases, scientists have to partner with people who “know about business” to launch companies out of the lab. Why? because they haven’t trained the necessary skills.
That’s an unfair advantage for us TKS innovates. We’re training real-world, 21st century skills at a young age, which are totally transferable to getting or having job, starting your own company, and even school.
Presentations
Of course, presentations itself isn’t a skill. The training includes having the right body language and tone of voice, being persuasive, designing a presentation deck, knowing who your audience is, and doing that fast enough.
Networking
Among the 4Cs for the 21st century, we can find collaboration. Even as an introvert, I learned to value team work and network. Using platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter is part of this.
Throughout the past months, I’ve had the pleasure to meet more than 40 new CEOs, VCs, and scientists who work at companies like Ginkgo Bioworks or Microsoft, were part of Y-Combinator or Thiel Fellows, did research at universities like Stanford, or have raised millions of dollars for their startups.
Many times people ask me why I do this. Well, first of all, because I’m genuinely curious to ask questions that Google can’t answer; to get perspective on what’s it like to do what those people do. Second, to show those people what I’m working on.
Time management
The TKS culture encourages working out, eating healthy, sleeping well, and taking care of our mental health. For what’s the point of being a unicorn person if you can’t even take care of yourself and are unhealthy?
We train on different systems like time blocking, day theming or updates. The point is finding what works best for you, always taking into account the self, relationships, and professional aspects.
This lets us see that TKS is not an extracurricular activity. At least in my experience, TKS is a lifestyle.
What’s next for Sofi?
Same ambitious teen, wanting to change the world, living in the same place, AND doing more about her passion. That’s me at 17 years old after the TKS innovate program.
I have 3 wishes for myself over the next months:
- Focus: don’t have FOMO and just do what you’re curious about. Understand that you still have time, a lot of time. You just need to make the most out of it and set your own tempo for life
- Compound: be patiently impatient. Understand that unconventional success takes a certain amount of time depending on your work and external conditions. Failure is stagnation, so the best you can do is continue investing in your knowledge, skills, and mindsets every day
- Execute: failure is also learning without applying. There are no excuses when you have things like DIY biology or computational tools. It’s better to make a simple project happen than save the world in Word document.
I would love to say that I’m starting a biotech startup this summer, and that I’m planning to raise pre-seed capital over the next months. I’ve discovered that the first step to do that is developing a passion for a problem.
I believe that the best way to make a positive impact in the world is by solving a problem. The world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities, according to Peter Diamandis.
To develop that passion, I’ll be entering the next phase of the TKS program: activate.
Stay tuned to know the journey.
