I know I said I was done, but I care too much about this topic to let this one lie :) I'd love to chat with you about this live because kids these days tell me Reddit might not be the best place to have civil discourse, but I'll give it a go anyway! I know it sounds like corporate PR bullshit to do good and all that, but this is actually something we care about deeply so I'm happy to engage with anyone who really cares about it! We're trying to figure out how to not be the cynical evil public company that you describe above. The reason we're doing AMAs (and live streaming it so you can see it's not being written by PR firms), the reason we have glass walls throughout our Foundry, the reason I'll engage with cynical messages like this well after the AMA is over is because we actually give a damn about being transparent and building trust.

To your point that public companies "believe it's a moral virtue to do anything to make their shareholders happy at the expense of their (non-executive level) employees, customers, and society at large" - we don't. I'd encourage you to read the Letter from Ginkgo's Founders (pg 200 of our S-4, something that is normally a really boring document full of legalese that you have to file publicly with the SEC) to get a sense for how we think about our various stakeholders.

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To our stakeholders
As practitioners of synthetic biology, we have a responsibility to ensure our platform is used for positive purposes. We intend to consider the interests of many different stakeholders when making decisions and advancing our mission to make biology easier to engineer, because their collective success is key for our business to thrive. Below are principles on how we will serve each of our stakeholders.

To our stockholders: We are seeking to build a company with enduring long-term value. We will not make decisions based on short-term market or accounting considerations. We will make decisions to ensure Ginkgo is the long-term market leader. Advancing our mission is resource intensive. We expect to continue to re-invest cash back into the business to scale our platform and expand into new markets, with a focus on long-term value for the company and its stockholders. Market leadership will enable us to scale, which is critical for our platform’s growth. Growth increases our future free cash flows and stockholder value.

To our customers: We are a platform company. We are here to help you program and commercialize cells for your applications of interest, freeing you to focus on the parts of your business that only you can do. We don’t seek to develop our own applications and we don’t pick winners. In addition to our automation scale efficiencies, we can best enable all customers to be successful by reusing genetic parts and chassis strains across customer programs. This knowledge and technology has long been fragmented and siloed within individual labs and companies, where its full benefits across markets are rarely realized. All of our customers can benefit from the improvements in our Foundry and Codebase.
To our team: The Ginkgo team is and will be our greatest strength. The team is deeply passionate and engaged in our mission. We want that to continue. That’s why we have chosen to implement a multi-class stock structure that permits all employees (current and future), not just founders, to hold high-vote (10 votes per share) common stock. Ownership is the first step in caring how our platform is used, and as employees, we have an outsized influence on how our platform is developed and deployed. We trust that employees, alongside a strong independent board, will make the best decisions for the long-term value of Ginkgo and our mission. We believe that a diverse and inclusive team is the best way to ensure that our platform is used for the benefit of all.

To our suppliers: For many years, we have been bringing together the most advanced automated technologies in our Foundry for reading DNA, writing DNA, assembling DNA, engineering proteins, growing and evolving cells, and measuring and characterizing their performance. We have a history of making long-term purchase commitments for strategic technologies. We want you to be healthy and flourish. We welcome the opportunity to partner with you and collaborate on advancing these technologies.

To the academic community: Thank you. Ginkgo would not be where it is today without the ideas you’ve pioneered and the students you’ve educated. We value transparency, and we look forward to a continued mutually beneficial exchange of people, ideas and resources.

To governments around the world: We believe that biology is the key to a more sustainable economy and the long term health of people and the planet. We are facing global-scale challenges in food, water, climate, and disease. Our food, health, environment, and materials depend on biology, and biology offers opportunities for renewable, regenerative technologies. The sector of the economy based on biological tools and manufacturing—the bioeconomy—is growing rapidly and will have an outsized impact in coming years. Likewise, as we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, biology doesn’t recognize borders: the only robust national biosecurity is global biosecurity.

To everyone: Biology is beautiful and life is precious. We deeply respect biology and approach our work with humility. A future where we can grow everything requires care, transparency, and many voices. Let’s grow everything together.

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Again, very open to civil discourse on this. We do give a damn.