Industrial Microbes CEO Noah Helman’s column yesterday on biomanufacturing was packed with real-world insight. It’s highly recommended reading, and paired well with Liberation Labs CEO Mark Warner’s column on Monday.
First, let’s recap the iMicrobes column. Thankfully, it doesn’t promise the moon. Instead, it delivers something more valuable: clarity. Noah Helman’s take on iMicrobes highlights an economy-minded, scale-conscious approach to metabolic engineering. It’s a story not of grandiose breakthroughs, but of methodical focus—feedstock, product, purification. For readers used to hand-waving futurism in synthetic biology, it’s a refreshingly grounded view.
We agree. But I also want to test how far that clarity goes when read through a different kind of lens—not just one focused on financial realism or technology readiness, but on system structure and adaptive design.
Why? The traditional lens doesn’t always capture the strength or weakness of a technology. Too often, there are surprises. Many people were surprised by the closure of Fulcrum Bioenergy, and many people will be surprised to learn that Enerkem has filed for Chapter 11 reorganization, and Global Clean Energy Holdings, too, in recent days.
Why are we surprised? Probably because the lenses we apply — whether they are modeling success in terms of product, platform, Technical Adoption Models, Technical Readiness Levels, or Internal Rate of Return — are giving us green lights across the board. We need a lens that shows yellow lights and red lights, not just green, and in the right way, at the right time.
The Toolkit Behind the Curtain
The General Theory of Evolutionary Systems and Information (GTESI) is a diagnostic toolkit for analyzing persistence. In a world of dazzling demos and imploding startups, GTESI asks a sharper question: is this thing built to last?
In developing GTESI, I took a ground-up view and built a thermodynamic model, with specific vectors that capture more than spreadsheets can. GTESI assesses whether a system is exporting entropy, maintaining symbolic trust, aligning its narrative with its structure, and preserving operational memory. When applied to companies like iMicrobes, GTESI becomes less of a prediction machine and more of an X-ray. We’re not here to issue verdicts—we’re here to illuminate pressure points, pattern strength, and possible failure modes.
To do this, GTESI uses four core metrics:
- IPR: Inverse Persistence Ratio — “Value without memory.” Measures the gap between valuation persistence (e.g., investor enthusiasm, forward statements) and operational memory (e.g., infrastructure, track record, ecosystem ties). A high IPR signals symbolic inflation or collapse risk.
- SCD: Symbolic Compression Divergence — “When your story breaks from your system.” Tracks misalignment between the company’s outward narrative and internal motion. A high SCD means entropy is leaking through broken symbolic alignment—early warnings of trust erosion.
- TRFI: Trust Ritual Failure Index — “Rituals keep systems sane.” Monitors failure or decay in the ceremonial structures of trust: filings, forecasts, continuity. A rising TRFI points to breakdown in legitimacy.
- EED: Entropy Export Deficit — “Adaptation stalls, pressure builds.” Scores whether the company is offloading entropy—through alliances, scaling, diversification—or hoarding it in an unsustainable state. High EED = bottlenecks, layoffs, pivots, collapse.
Let’s walk through how GTESI sharpens the picture around iMicrobes.
What the iMicrobes Post Gets Right (and we affirm)
iMicrobes’ strategy emphasizes precision, focus, and bounded ambition. It avoids the hype trap and aligns narrative with process.
- EED: Entropy Export Deficit — “Adaptation stalls, pressure builds.”
In GTESI, entropy isn’t just metaphor — it’s the cost of complexity, the friction of scale, the heat a system has to shed to stay alive. Companies that adapt well export entropy: they shift burdens outward by solving problems, opening new markets, or aligning efficiently with supply chains. iMicrobes is doing that. Its strategy to tune strains not only for feedstock availability (input constraint) but also for customer performance targets (output constraint) is a textbook example of entropy export. They’re matching biological motion to real-world fit — not just producing novelty for novelty’s sake. That’s entropy relief through design, not marketing gloss. And it suggests a low EED: adaptive, directional, unblocked. - TRFI: Trust Ritual Failure Index — “Rituals keep systems sane.”
A strong TRFI score often shows up in the cracks: missed filings, vague metrics, changing roadmaps, or leadership churn. But a low TRFI — a sign of symbolic health — shows up as coherence. In Noah’s piece, iMicrobes signals with clarity: their challenges are named, not dodged; purification burdens are acknowledged, not waved away; and price-performance constraints are built into their model. That kind of clean, ritualized transparency reinforces trust — internally among teams, and externally among investors, partners, and customers. It’s the ceremonial discipline that says: “We’re real. We’re here. And we’re not hiding.” That’s ritual, not just realism.
GTESI affirms this approach. From a persistence perspective, iMicrobes is reducing the likelihood of catastrophic breakdown by keeping narrative and system aligned. It’s a quiet signal of resilience.
Where GTESI Expands the Insight
GTESI helps us see beyond current momentum into systemic structure.
- Purification and Separation: An Entropy Pressure Point
In GTESI, entropy isn’t just a metaphor for disorder — it’s the measurable cost of keeping complexity in motion. High downstream separation costs signal trapped entropy: energy, capital, and complexity piling up in one part of the system without a way out. That’s not just a margin drag, it’s a thermodynamic bottleneck. Unless iMicrobes can export that burden — through cheaper tech, streamlined purification, or smart partnerships that spread the load — pressure will build. That’s a classic EED flag: entropy accumulating where it should be dissipating. - IPR: Inverse Persistence Ratio — “Value without memory.”
GTESI’s IPR lens looks at how much of a system’s perceived value is backed by durable memory — data, infrastructure, results, traction. Right now, iMicrobes looks well-aligned: pilot data, design experience, and clear customer signals are holding pace with the story. But if buzz outruns memory — say, with valuations or media hype growing faster than the operational base — IPR climbs. It’s a warning of symbolic overinflation. For iMicrobes, keeping IPR low will matter more if attention spikes. - SCD: Symbolic Compression Divergence — “When story breaks from system.”
Right now, the iMicrobes narrative tracks with what’s actually being built. But SCD rises when ambition outpaces structure — when the slide decks promise multiple pathways, global scale-outs, or integrated stacks before the scaffolding exists. GTESI doesn’t penalize ambition — it just flags when the story gets ahead of the system. If that divergence appears, watch for SCD drift. - TRFI: Trust Ritual Failure Index — “Rituals keep systems sane.”
In GTESI, TRFI doesn’t measure tone—it measures rhythm and ritual. Are filings timely? Is the roadmap coherent? Are leadership signals consistent? iMicrobes shows strong ritual discipline: challenges are named, not dodged; steps are sequential, not scattershot. But as scale builds, scrutiny rises. TRFI reminds us that trust isn’t a one-time award. It’s a habit that must be renewed.t.
The Bottom Line
Wondrous science, grit, drive, caring beyond caring, long hours, cheap feedstock, proven commercial deployment, supportive policymakers, devoted investors, hours of demonstration of robust performance, and ready offtakers standing by to use the product — if having these was enough to produce success, Enerkem would be thriving right now instead of reorganizing its capital structure. Success over the long term requires more. Companies survive, over the long term, because their internal logic maps to the physics of the world. Now, that doesn’t sound like a one-size-fits-all-answers-are-very-quick-and-here-they-are kind of lensing system.
GTESI isn’t easy, because success is complex, and worth studying. GTESI doesn’t promise easy answers. But it does offer durable tools for founders, investors, and policymakers seeking to understand not just momentum—but endurance. Through this lens, iMicrobes looks less like a bet and more like a build. The road ahead is long. But the structure is promising. And that may be the most important signal of all.
You can read more about GTESI and how to use the toolkit, here. The original Noah Helman article is here. And, as a bonus, here’s Mark Warner’s illuminative column on taking biomanufacturing to scale.
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