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How do measure the durability of the shoes you make when choosing progressive materials that are not commonly used in your application? Can durability be determined by measuring certain properties of the material alone or do you also have way of simulating wear and tear, or partnering with athletes or other folks who can give you feedback from hard wearing use? How long do you expect your shoes to last?

For example, for non-athletic shoes, leather is sometimes seen as environmentally favorable because of their durability; leather shoes last for 15 years or more which few other shoes can match, get more comfortable with time, and can be resoled - and it would be interesting to know environmental impact of the production, energy inputs, etc when accounting for the lifetime of shoes.

Don't hate me for asking this, but what do you think your differences are with Benchling? I'm a biostatistician working in a lab where everyone else does both wet and dry lab research, and they all use benchling as their online lab notebook. Although I don't have much first hand experience using that website, they like having similar tools to what you describe in the browser like Sanger, being able to run multiple sequence alignment, manage lab inventory, etc.

A second question I have is I think it's great to simplify and integrate complex tasks in molecular biology but I'm curious about where one philosophically draws the line for scientific commercial products between ease of use and scientific reproducibility and transparency where such tools were not available or affordable in poorer countries.

That's super cool that you do all those tests! Thanks for taking the time to explain them.

I'm quite interested in your upcoming Plant Leather shoe! In one of your other posts you mention one of a few occasions you may not wear Allbirds shoes is to a funeral. Would you manufacture the Plant Leather shoes to in style of traditional formal wear with leather uppers and leather soles? Having lost one pair of non-recraftable leather shoes to a blown out sole, I try to extend the life of my other leather soled shoes by gluing on those thin rubber no-slip sole+heal protector pads. It would be nice if your shoes had stiff soles to accommodate those.