The Brilliant Entrepreneurial Lessons of a Plant Hacker Inventing New Flowers

To raise money to put himself through school and earn a biotechnology degree, Sebastian Cocioba would gather orchids that his local Home Depot had thrown out and apply a plant growth serum to bring them back to life so he could sell them back to the store. Later, he would buy used lab equipment in fire sales and resell it back to other labs for a profit. All this bio-hustling wasn’t just to earn some side cash … it’s a symbol of how Cocioba thinks.

His current work is inventing new smells from flowers that don’t exist. Imagine flowers that could smell like old books that you could put into a library. Or flowers branded with a certain look and smell. These are the projects his lab is working on and part of the reason he’s able to do it is because “in the US, genetically modified flower work is covered by the lowest biosafety rating.”

Of course, one would hope his lab also looks at the potential dangers of his genetically modified flowers getting out in the wild and what effect they could have on the current ecosystem … but his unique story of innovation is a perfect example of the sort of unexpected creators that may end up moving entire industries forward because they are able to think unlike anyone else.