Zack Abbott and the trouble with doing everything yourself

Zack Abbott had found a way to shorten his commute. He slept at work. His lab was in Berkeley; the place he could stay was with his parents in Sacramento. The drive took about 90 minutes on a good day. A spot beside the lab bench, followed by a shower at a nearby gym, was more convenient. It was also cheaper than paying himself enough to rent an apartment in the Bay Area.

This was the first year of ZBiotics, the company he started in 2016. Abbott was a microbiologist trying to turn an idea into something he could put in another person's hands. He understood experiments. He understood the pleasure of having a problem small enough to fit on a bench and difficult enough to occupy him completely. The floor was an accommodation to the work, rather than much of a bedroom.

Eventually, the experiment worked. That presented him with a fresh inconvenience: a working invention required a working business. Abbott would need to learn about packaging, manufacturing, customers, hiring and money. There was no corresponding gym membership that could take care of all that. The job he had created was about to become several jobs, most of which he had never done.

A scientist with a detour through Rome

Abbott grew up in Sacramento with an enthusiasm for science that extended to his Halloween costumes. He read about scientists and inventors for school book reports. At 12, he spent a summer in Rome with his grandparents, an experience he connects to his interest in classical history. By college, he had accumulated two quite different sets of questions about the world.

At the University of California, Berkeley, he took science classes across several majors while taking classics classes for pleasure. The pleasure proved surprisingly productive. By his junior year, the classics degree was taking shape more clearly than any single science degree. He finished with studies in molecular and cell biology and classical art and archaeology. His scientific specialization was immunology. Ancient objects and microscopic organisms shared the transcript.

It would be tidy to claim that this combination made him an entrepreneur. His account is less obliging. He loved science without knowing how to build a career around it. He bartended, played rugby and spent summers building houses for a nonprofit on Native American reservations in Idaho, Oregon and Nevada. His route included work with tools considerably larger than a pipette.

The invention came before the job title

A job in an analytical chemistry lab in Berkeley in 2006 brought Abbott back toward laboratory work. He later worked at UC Davis, then entered the University of Michigan. Under Michele Swanson, he studied bacterial genetics and the ways bacteria regulate their genes. He earned his doctorate in microbiology and immunology in 2015. The scientific training was deliberate; a future as a professor held little attraction.

He has described telling his doctoral mentor early on that he wanted to make a product. The ambition was concrete even when the career plan was vague. He wanted to use the techniques he was learning to build something useful. An academic appointment was one possible destination for a scientist, but it was never the only destination he could imagine.

Entrepreneurship arrived with encouragement from former colleagues who had entered the startup world. They kept asking him to try the idea he had discussed with them. In his recollection, applying seemed sufficiently unlikely to work that it felt safe to attempt. Acceptance removed that comfortable distance. He would have to decide whether the idea deserved more than an interesting conversation.

The early support included a Y Combinator fellowship. It preceded the company's participation in the accelerator's Winter 2018 batch, a distinction that can disappear in a compressed startup biography. There was a stretch of figuring things out before there was a cohort, a larger team or a product launch. The route had more intermediate steps than the neat version suggests.

“the science was the easy part”

Zack Abbott, reflecting on becoming a CEO

A good experiment still needs a manufacturer

Abbott developed his first prototype in April 2017. Stephen Lamb joined him the following month. Lamb was finishing a joint law and business degree at the University of Pennsylvania; his expertise gave the venture something its inventor could not supply alone. Someone had to think about the business surrounding the experiment while the experiment continued to demand attention.

Abbott's scientific approach remained useful outside the lab. He could gather information, examine an assumption and change course when the evidence required it. But collaboration became the lesson he singled out when considering what his doctorate had contributed to his work as CEO. The venture needed skills distributed across people. A founder with a very long working day still had a finite range of competence.

Manufacturing made that limit tangible. Growing microbes was an established activity; finding a company willing to manufacture this particular engineered strain proved another matter. Abbott has recounted conversations with more than 100 manufacturers before finding a partner. An activity can be familiar to an industry while a new specification remains an awkward request. The lab result could not sign its own production agreement.

The argument printed on the bottle

Abbott also wanted the company's language to be unusually direct about how its products were made. ZBiotics put genetic engineering in plain sight. The phrase “proudly GMO” became part of the brand. Where a label could have offered an opportunity for euphemism, he chose a statement customers could notice and question.

His reasoning involved trust. A company that relies on a technology while avoiding its name invites an awkward conversation when customers eventually learn about it. Abbott preferred to explain the choice at the beginning. In interviews, he has urged other founders using genetic engineering to be equally forthcoming. He treats disclosure as part of building a relationship with the buyer.

That approach also gave him a public role beyond running experiments. He would have to speak, answer questions and explain why the company existed. The scientist accustomed to an audience of specialists now had to make an unfamiliar idea legible to someone encountering a package. A detailed explanation is of little help if nobody understands the opening sentence.

Even his analogies show an effort to move between audiences. In one conversation, he likened the underlying technology to a bacterial API, borrowing the language of software to describe a platform capable of supporting different applications. The comparison makes his commercial ambition easier to grasp: he was building a way to develop a succession of products.

The founder acquires colleagues

The first commercial launch came in August 2019, three years after Abbott started the company. In August 2024, ZBiotics announced a $12 million Series A led by Spring Tide Capital. The announcement described plans for broader distribution and further product development. The business around the invention had become substantial enough to require a different sort of attention from its creator.

Capital brought obligations along with possibilities. More distribution requires coordination. More development requires choices. A company can be busy in every department while still needing someone to decide which work matters most. Abbott's challenge increasingly concerned the connections between the jobs, as well as the quality of each individual job.

In his account of executive coaching, Abbott describes leadership as something that can be practiced. He draws on having played sports: identify the missing skill, then work on it. The comparison suits a founder willing to admit that expertise in one field does not automatically transfer to another. A doctorate had prepared him to be a scientist. He sought help with becoming a leader.

“You go from doing to managing to leading”

Zack Abbott, on the changing job

Leaving room for somebody else

By August 2026, Abbott described a team of 45 people. The figure belonged to a company that had once consisted of a scientist deciding where to sleep. Each additional function made the old habit of personal involvement harder to sustain. Caring about the details had helped him get started. It could also make handing those details to somebody else unexpectedly difficult.

He has identified research, brand messaging and customer service among the responsibilities he found hard to release. These were all areas in which he felt personally invested. Yet an organization needs people with the authority to do their jobs, including jobs the founder enjoys. Delegating a task while retaining every decision would leave the central problem largely intact.

The retail expansion introduced another kind of compression. Online, the company could offer explanations and respond to questions. A shop shelf offered seconds. Packaging, placement and a concise message had to carry more of the conversation. The work now included inventory and retailer relationships alongside the familiar questions of what to make and how to explain it.

Abbott's aspiration remains to make genetic engineering understandable through products people can choose for themselves. His own education as a founder continues alongside that project. He started with an urge to invent and acquired a company full of people whose expertise he needed. The bench once gave him somewhere to do nearly everything. Leading the business means making room for work that happens beyond his reach.