There is not one path anymore. Twenty years ago, you worked at the clean bench, you isolated new microbes able to grow on agar plates, and then you isolated single genes coding single enzymes for particular processes, you optimized them, and you wrote books or articles with conceptual and technical developments based on known biodiversity. If you were lucky, a small‐to‐medium company approached you and continued to go further with the applicability of such finding. Today you can be a biogeochemist with bioinformatics knowledge who writes books or articles trying to reveal the mysteries of microbial and genetic adaptation and diversity. It all sounds so . . . uncomplicated, doesn't it? But, of course, THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN overnight. It's been especially in the past fifteen years that a confluence of factors, mainly, technical developments, has resulted in some young people turning their backs on sequencing. But above all, there is the sense that biodiversity is at the centre of a vital scientific universe, with microbes as its capital: we know the communities, how diverse they are, but we are far from understanding the individual members and functions, and how each of them can be helpful, for example, to improve the human condition. It is like our human society: the government knows how many we are, but it does not know how each individual lives, and how many consortia (friends and family, to cite some) we constitute.