We don’t decide what interests take lasting hold of us. We are just drawn to certain subjects, usually because they connect to both our affinities and anxieties. At least that’s what happened to me. One summer in middle school, in a moment of insecurity, I became a perfume nerd. This seemed like a strange fixation for an 11-year-old, but would change the course of my life.

I was an aspiring computer programmer on the brink of puberty living with my parents in College Station, Texas. We were one of few Jewish families in the area, so every summer they sent me to Jewish summer camp, and that’s where I first encountered fancy kids from Houston and Austin. This was a minor culture shock for me. These big city kids seemed so confident, so assured of their place in the world, and were starting to date. I was used to being an outsider looking in. My way of bridging that gap was to deconstruct all the distinctions that eluded me. Some were easy to see. I was wearing free T-shirts and jeans from TJ Maxx, while they rocked polo shirts and ripped jeans by Abercrombie & Fitch. But there was another factor that seemed just as important, and it happened to be invisible: Polo Blue, Fierce, Davidoff Cool Water.

These mass-market fragrances were powerful status symbols — invisible messages from the molecular realm that affected how we perceived each other. Like advertisements, another childhood obsession of mine, these chemicals held us in peculiar thrall. How on earth did they do that? I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and so it stuck with me. I’m still that way: if I can’t make sense of something, it gnaws at me until I do. In this case, it just so happened that I had stumbled on enough mystery to sustain my curiosity for a lifetime.

My parents, understandably, refused to buy me my own expensive fragrances. They thought of perfume as plumage, a way of attracting romantic attention — not something I needed as an 11 year old. Luckily, I turned out to be pretty good at hustling for cash. I started making websites and designing logos for local businesses. I even had a little scheme going with online promo memberships — reading the terms and conditions carefully, canceling them just in time, and selling the free gadgets I received in bulk. Via all these income streams, I first bought myself various deodorants, then discounted perfumes they sold at TJ Maxx, until I finally had saved up for a bottle of Bulgari Black.

Bulgari Black isn’t a popular or long-lasting perfume. The whole experience only lasts 45 minutes. And still, it made my brain tingle more than any movie I’d ever seen. A spritz from the hockey-puck shaped bottle unleashes a drama in three acts. It first smells like a screeching rubber tire, which soon gives way to the aroma of leather and vanilla, and finally evens out to the smell of tobacco smeared out on an old armchair. This subtle beauty was new to me, and was only intensified by the fact that no one I knew seemed to be thinking about it so deeply or experiencing it as consciously. 

But how did it actually work — how does the brain turn molecules into these fleeting perceptions and emotions? This, along with many other questions I had about what drove human behavior, inspired me to study neuroscience. But delving deeply into the academic literature of how smell works on the brain, I found many more questions than answers. Fundamentally, we didn’t even know how scents worked — specifically, how their molecular structure corresponded to the particular smell they produced. There was no way to look at a molecule and predict what it would smell like; and, at that point, the idea was firmly entrenched that there probably never would be. At first, this just nagged at me. Soon, I started to view it as an affront and a challenge. 

This idea that scent, at base, was unquantifiable — that couldn’t be right. My inability to accept this mystery is one reason why I specialized in olfactory neuroscience in grad school. But I only got to fully tackle it head on years later, when I made it to Google Brain, at the tail end of a golden age for industrial research. At Brain, we were encouraged to create our own ambitious projects and I decided to lead a research team dedicated to using artificial intelligence to demystify the molecular origin of smell. Thanks to their heroic efforts, we managed to solve one of the essential mysteries of olfaction: mapping out what molecules carry what scents. The Principal Odor Map we created would become the foundation for our company Osmo, where we have since been working to digitize the world of scent.

As a CEO, you’re expected to project constant enthusiasm about the thing that you’re making. Luckily for me — I’m bad at faking enthusiasm — the work we do is a natural continuation of my lifelong passion. Many of the projects we’re working on would have thrilled me to no end if I’d known about them in middle school. Our foundry of scents, paired with our machine learning approach to combining them has allowed us to create brand new fragrances that the world has never smelled. Our master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel is in fact responsible for two of the fragrances (Fierce, Polo Blue) that dominated the literal airwaves in my middle school summer camp. Full circle! 

In the future, we plan to make that technology public. That will mean that everyone has the tools of a master perfumer — including, say, a Zoomer version of me. Our most ambitious project is one of the greatest challenges facing modern olfaction: a technology that allows us to record scents in one part of the world, map their molecular configuration, and reproduce them elsewhere — we call it Scent Teleportation. Essentially, a perfumery that draws on every existing smell. 

Strange to think that none of this may have happened if it weren’t for a bunch of cool kids in a Texas summer camp. If you happen to have a young nerd in your life, consider supporting their weird obsession. I got very lucky with mine. It still makes my brain tingle — the prospect that we could all contribute to a sweeter-smelling world.

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