Enabling Awesome: Cultivating a Culture of Kindness that Enables Human Potential and Scientific Discovery

Walk into any MBC BioLabs site and you’ll see it on the wall in plain type: Enabling Awesome.

That might read like something a brand consultant workshopped over a whiteboard, and the mild skepticism makes sense. What wasn’t workshopped is 20 years of an organization treating those words as a guiding star, and the value that’s been created in life sciences because of it.

MBC BioLabs exists because of a problem that’s stopped more good science than bad ideas ever have: lab space is brutally expensive. Long-term leases, six-figure equipment, and the operational overhead of running a facility all stand between a founder with a real idea and the moment they can test it.

Our model gets rid of that wall. Shared lab space, shared equipment, and operational services that scale with a company instead of locking it into a five-year lease it can’t afford yet. When a new resident company runs its first experiment on day one in our labs, we make a point of celebrating that. Momentum is the scarce resource here, and protecting it is the whole job.

The infrastructure is only half of it, though. The harder thing to build, and arguably the more important one, is the ecosystem around it: the founders, mentors, investors, and pharma partners who are close enough to bump into each other’s work on a Tuesday. Admission is selective. We’re looking for real science, execution, and a real shot at getting a therapy to a patient. We’ve designed a place where scientific ambition can actually survive contact with reality.

Start. Scale. Succeed. One bench at a time.

The proof isn’t in a tagline. It’s in 20 years of what our residents have gone on to do. Since we started as the QB3 Garage in a repurposed UC utility room in 2006, MBC BioLabs has helped launch more than 500 companies. Those companies have pushed 214 clinical trials forward, brought more than 135 products to market, and raised over $28 billion in funding. Today, more than 209 companies are operating across our five sites. Numbers like that don’t come from a sign in the lobby.

Douglas Crawford, our founder and general manager, talks about wanting MBC to be an organization where the soul shines through.

Here’s the distinction he’s making: you can build efficient infrastructure. You can optimize systems, buy good equipment, and streamline onboarding. You should do all of that. But there’s a piece you can’t automate. It’s the human face of the place, the people who set the emotional temperature of a room, who make a stranger feel like they belong before they’ve done anything to earn it.

Doug’s shorthand for what he’s going for is Cheers, the bar where everybody knows your name. It’s a high bar, and we don’t assume we’ve cleared it just because we said it out loud.

Walk into 1030 Brittan Avenue in San Carlos, one of our five locations, and the first person you’ll meet is Crystal. Pink hair, fully herself, direct and warm in the same breath. That kind of direct only works because the warmth underneath it is real. She is one of the many examples of the humans encouraged to bring their full selves to work at MBC.

Crystal is the clearest version of something we look for in everyone we hire: people who actually want to know if you’re okay. Not “how can I help” as a script, but as a real question, followed by real listening. That orientation toward care, not transaction, is what makes a stranger feel like they’ve landed somewhere instead of just signing a lease.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes hiring for it on purpose, and leadership willing to model it first.

Here’s the part of our philosophy that gets underrated: kindness isn’t a nice-to-have layered on top of good science. It’s a precondition for it.

This tracks with what’s known about how people think and create. A nervous system that’s braced for judgment doesn’t do its best work. It’s too busy scanning for threat to do the quieter, riskier thinking that real discovery requires. Psychological and emotional safety is what lets people ask the obvious question, admit an experiment failed, or try the idea that might not work. Flow states, the state where creative and technical breakthroughs actually happen, depend on that same absence of threat. You can’t force your way into insight. You have to feel safe enough to let go of the bracing first.

That’s the point of all this talk about kindness. When people trust the community around them, they ask for help faster. They lend a piece of equipment without being asked twice. They introduce a contact, share a protocol that took them six months to get right, sit down next to someone they met once and eat lunch.

That’s not incidental to the science at MBC. People do share lunch in the community room, and they do end up borrowing each other’s things and learning each other’s names, and eventually each other’s stories. That’s part of why the work here moves, not a warm distraction from it, we strive to uphold these strong values:

MBC BioLabs isn’t complicated to describe: a community of people, backed by serious infrastructure, inside a culture that takes kindness seriously enough to make it operational. We know how hard that combination is to sustain, and we keep working at it rather than assuming it holds on its own.

Enabling awesome human potential and scientific discovery, especially in these times when global narratives, trends, and values are leaning towards giving up our human sovereignty to machines. “We want to be the last bastion of human kindness in business, if we have to be” (Doug’s words).