Pod Insights Equity Podcast Found: Cellino About this episode Find the Found feed here: https://pod.link/found
Not only is this week's guest the TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 Battlefield winner, but Nabiha Saklayen is also democratizing access to life-saving cell therapies by using—you guessed it—lasers. Nabiha is the co-founder and CEO of Cellino which is a company developing the tech to automate stem cell production that will lower the cost of cell therapies and increase the yield of viable cells. In this episode, Nabiha tells Jordan and Darrell how she built a start-up beginning with the tech and finding a business fit, her evolving leadership style, and why this work is crucial to the biomedical field.
Take our listener survey and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND.
Connect with us:
On Twitter
On Instagram
Via email: [email protected]
Call us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello Equity family. This is Alex. Happy holiday week. It is Thanksgiving here in the United States, which means that we are mostly all off eating lots of food and working on our waistline expansion, but we do have something special for you today. So what we have is an episode of Found. Found is our sister podcast here at TechCrunch. It's run by Jordan Crook and Daryl Etherington, two of our absolute best. So what is Found? Well, it's a weekly conversation with early-stage founders. So it's always nice to hear from tech luminaries and what they did 10 years ago. But if you want to hear from founders who are currently in the trenches, what's going well, what they're struggling with, what they want to work on, and maybe what they're doing, it's a show for you. So it's very, very TechCrunchy. We're very excited about it. Please sit back and enjoy this lovely episode of Found, and Equity is back Monday morning. Okay, bye.
0:51 Speaker 01 Hey, I'm Daryl. Welcome to Found, TechCrunch's show where we talk to a different founder every week about how to build a company? Yes, Jordan? Do you think that's accurate?
1:01 Speaker 02 Sure. Maybe with less hesitation. Normally, the founders build their companies with less hesitation than Daryl just spoke those words. But yeah, how to build a company.
1:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. And that, of course, is my faithful co-host and also the stem cells to my mature cells.
1:21 Speaker 02 The stem cells to your tired, old, dying cells. Yeah, Jordan Crook here. Glad to be here.
1:27 Speaker 01 Injecting the youth and vitality into Found every week.
1:36 Speaker 01 So my intro signals who we have on this week. It is Navia Saklaiyan from Solino, which is on a mission to democratize cell therapy. Cell therapy is not a new technology. It's been around, but it's been extremely costly, and it's not really accessible to most people because it usually involves building custom cells from scratch. And it's kind of like if you had an artisan building you like a custom shoe. Like, it's like, it's very time-consuming. It's a one-off thing.
2:05 Speaker 02 It's like the highest-paid person in the room has to go and do something.
2:09 Speaker 01 That's right.
2:09 Speaker 02 Pretty manual in order to get these cells and like only a few of them are any good, kind of like hundreds or thousands.
2:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. And they got to discard the rest, which is like terrible, terrible.
2:21 Speaker 02 Waste, not want not.
2:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. But Selena has figured out a better way. They have a machine that they say can create bespoke cell therapies, so specific to the individual in a lab, a lot more quickly, at much lower cost, with way better yields. Very exciting technology. They've been working at it for many years.
2:39 Speaker 02 Cause it's like as sci fi, I think is we've gotten maybe on this show so far. We talked about like metal tires. So that was kind of sci fi, but lasers and AI to develop custom cell therapies. It's very, you know, 3020.
2:55 Speaker 01 Yeah. Navia's expertise is in optics, is in lasers and physics, like Jordan mentioned there. And then she's teamed up with cellular biologists to kind of develop this new way of doing things. It's one of these really cool startups that comes out of academia and the research side of academic pursuits and higher learning. So super cool, super cutting edge. And also the winner, I'd be remiss if I didn't say the winner of disrupt battlefield 2021. So they were a not a dark horse entry, I guess. So yeah, wild card. Yeah.
3:25 Speaker 02 They're a wild card. So they, they went into the startup alley, got selected as a wild card to go pitch. They didn't get like the same four months or whatever of trainings and practices and preparation as all the other battlefield companies. They just like, kind of had to go for it, whip it out. And they did and went to the finals and then ended up winning.
3:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's an interesting.
3:46 Speaker 02 It's a true underdog story. I love it.
3:48 Speaker 01 Choice of words, but yes.
3:52 Speaker 02 I mean, you whip out your deck and your presentation, your incredible demo is, I don't know what other meaning could be interpreted from that.
4:02 Speaker 01 That's true. There's only the one possible meaning. Good point. Um, all right. So let's go ahead and let Navia explain in detail Selena and how she got there and how they did it, how they won disrupt, which is the highest honor anyone can ever receive.
4:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:23 Speaker 01 Hi Navia, how's it going?
4:24 Speaker 03 Hi Darrell, it's great. Good to see you.
4:26 Speaker 01 Yes, you too. So congratulations are in order. I don't know when listeners will be hearing this, but it's fresh right now that you've won Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch's own Startup Battlefield, something we know a little bit about, right Jordan?
4:40 Speaker 02 I'm familiar with the concept, yeah.
4:45 Speaker 01 But I mean, very exciting. We, I watched the whole thing, watched your presentation, super impressive. Also impressive because you were the wildcard company, which our listeners might not know, but that means you kind of were a late entry into the process. Didn't have as much time to prep as some of the other teams at all. I mean, that's the understatement for sure.
5:07 Speaker 01 How does it feel Navia? I mean, was it exciting for you? I hope so, but...
5:11 Speaker 00 Was it exciting for you?
5:12 Speaker 01 I don't want to presume.
5:13 Speaker 02 Come on Darrell.
5:15 Speaker 03 Absolutely thrilled. I don't know if you saw that announcement video where I'm so shocked when they announced your name and I'm sort of looking in all directions and I'm just like, what is happening? So that was absolutely my feeling in the moment because we were a wildcard entry. We were invited just a few days before everything started. And then over the weekend, of course, the TechCrunch team was fantastic. They said, hey, the live demo is a very important piece. So what can you do with your team that can show the system and say, wow, that's really hard because we have an automated process running right now to make stem cells. And I said, it's a big ask to ask my team to try to demo something, given that they're in the middle of running a three-month process that's been pre-scheduled.
6:00 Speaker 03 But I still ended up calling our Senior Automation Engineer Eric on the weekend. I said, hey, there's this amazing opportunity. We should try to do something. What do you think? Can you make it happen? And he said, yeah, I can make it happen. So that was phenomenal. I didn't even know we could do something like that. And Eric was so impressive and got the demo together very quickly. And yeah, we were excited. We were humbled. It definitely was, the TechCrunch disrupt win for me really symbolized how hard my team has been working for the past two years to get this automated system built. And we really got to celebrate this incredible accomplishment to have a system running, to make human-specific personalized stem cells in a fully automated way.
6:43 Speaker 03 So I dedicated the win to them because the demo was so, so exciting and really got everyone's attention.
6:50 Speaker 02 It's always cool to know that your team, when you're like, uh, no, it's actually pre-built and scheduled and doing its own thing and we don't touch it at all. And then being like, oh no, they're totally capable of that. Must be a nice, uh, feeling to know that you can rely on your team in a pinch. But I loved what you were saying about the reaction video, because I remember I was in the studio at the time and we, we had, um, the runner up announced and they put the logo up before they cut to the runner up reaction. And I remember sitting there with our production team and being like, hey, can we swap that around next time? Like when you announce the winner, like go straight to the winner. Like I, you want to see the reaction exactly in the moment. Um,
7:32 Speaker 02 and they did it and it was, the look on your face was priceless. I thought it was, um, it was a really, really fun moment. So congratulations from me too.
7:42 Speaker 01 Around the office for sure. So yeah, that's great.
7:45 Speaker 02 And I just want to tell you also, just because you are working on stem cells, which is like a, you know, noble cause and stuff, but like my work is to decide, not to decide, but to predict who wins the battlefield. And I just want you to know, I called it the second you finished presenting. I called it.
8:03 Speaker 01 So Jordan, I have this pretty great too, just in case.
8:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I also am an overachiever. Like one could say, I too, I'm saving the world.
8:14 Speaker 01 I don't know if we can go that far.
8:16 Speaker 02 But I did call it. I felt it in my bones. You're gonna win.
8:20 Speaker 01 I was also going to ask you to explain Selena, but you actually got it in there at the end of the thing. But do you want to give kind of a more fulsome, kind of like elevator pitch about Selena, just for our audience, in case they're not familiar and didn't watch Disrupt, which they should definitely go back and watch at this. I think there's a way they can do that, right, Jordan?
8:37 Speaker 02 Totally. Yeah. There's a way to do that.
8:39 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Yes. Happy to. So Selena is on a mission to democratize and industrialize access to cell therapies. Cell therapies are super powerful because there's a whole new wave of medicines being developed where we can actually make new human cells and transplant them into a patient to cure them of diseases like Parkinson's, diabetes. Blindness and Salino is building the world's first automated manufacturing platform to generate these human tissues at scale with no human intervention. It's an AI driven platform. We also use our core technologies based on lasers because I'm a laser physicist by training. It's really fun. It's a multidisciplinary approach across laser physics, machine learning and stem cell biology.
9:21 Speaker 03 And we're working together to change how manufacturing happens in the biotech industry.
9:27 Speaker 02 I think one of the keys for me, when you were explaining it was you were talking about how that process works today, right? Which is like 10%, I think is what you said of stem cells that are grown are useful, right? Or like valid or able to go on to the next step. And that human doctors, like people who have spent $250,000 to go to school are out there trying to scrape them into beakers or whatever. And that can also harm them. So it's super manual, super slow and you get very little out of it.
9:56 Speaker 01 Your yield rate is terrible, right?
9:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then I think in your pitch, you're like, our yield rate is like 80% or something like, correct me if I'm wrong. But like, that was the moment where I was like, oh, like this is going to be a game changer.
10:07 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Yes. In the world's best institutions and companies, the yield ends up being 10 to 20% in the hands of these highly trained scientists, like you mentioned, Jordan. And Salino's goal is to get the yield to as high as possible. We've set a target of 80% and above, and that will be amazing because when you do a fully automated process at high yields in a closed system, we do have, our approach is up, is designed to be in a closed system. That's when you get these massive cost reductions. So you go from your hundreds of thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs to tens of thousands. And then in the future, it'll get even cheaper as reagents get cheaper and DNA sequencing gets cheaper, those kinds of things. Yeah. So very important problem.
10:51 Speaker 03 And we feel very grateful that we get to work with some of the best experts in the world who are developing these treatments for patients. And that's very important because it's not just an idea. We're not living in the zone of, oh, we have a cool idea. Let's see what happens. That we're actually working with the world leading experts to see what are their challenges and how can we solve them using? Our technology.
11:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. So like, to me, it feels like you, when you're talking about, you're talking about bespoke treatment, right? You're talking about treatment tailored to an individual, which sounds, it's amazing to me that you're able to make that scalable. When I think about other things that are like, like even on demand T-shirt printing, this is a horrible analogy, but I feel like I have to make it because it's so dramatic, but like,
11:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:31 Speaker 01 before you would, you would make T-shirts and like bulk because it was like, it's impossible. And like only recently, we've developed kind of technologies that are like, well, you know, we can do one-off printings and make it still kind of reasonably cost effective for the individual and decent enough quality. Like that's a thing that's happened, I think, within our recent lifetimes. So to imagine that you can do the same thing for stem cell treatments for individuals seems just mind boggling. But I would love to hear, like, this must have started in the academy, right? So what, when was the idea phase and how did that kind of come together? If you can walk us through that.
12:03 Speaker 03 Yep, absolutely. So the stem cell industry has been a very active space for about 20 years. And one of the biggest discoveries in this space was awarded the Nobel Prize is the discovery that we can make stem cells for everybody, for all adults. So you can start with blood cells, you can start with skin cells, hair cells, any cells in the body, and reprogram them to turn them into their original stem cell state. Very cool because.
12:30 Speaker 01 And this I remember because like, when you first hear about it, I remember hearing as a sort of casual consumer of this, the news, right? Like you better preserve them from your anabolic fluid or whatever, like when you're, and then have them stored so that you can use them later on. And that seemed to be, that was like the only way to get them. This development is like, no, that's not, or was that just a false popular culture kind of representation? No, that was okay.
12:54 Speaker 03 No, I think that was absolutely, so there are some really nice cells in the, right when children are born, that are really high quality. So if you wanted to make even these stem cells that we work on in induced pluripotent stem cells, those original cells are really good starting materials. So yes, for our future generation, I think it would be really cool to have some type of cord blood banking. Where right at birth, those cells are collected, shipped off and turned into induced pluripotent stem cells, banked so that that person has a lifelong bank of stem cells that are really high quality. So that anytime they need new skin or new eye cells, new hair cells, they can be generated from that original bank.
13:34 Speaker 01 So that's still valid. Okay. Good. Cause that's me and Jordan's startup idea.
13:39 Speaker 03 Oh, cool.
13:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:40 Speaker 03 Well.
13:40 Speaker 02 We're launching on Tuesday. Um, we also are working with some of the world's greatest experts, including Ashad and Maggie, our producers on the podcast.
13:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we got to figure that.
13:53 Speaker 03 Salino, Salino would be happy to manufacture all the cells for you.
13:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:56 Speaker 01 Perfect.
13:57 Speaker 03 Please give us a call.
13:57 Speaker 02 Partnership.
13:58 Speaker 01 That's an MOU, I think. That's what we call that.
14:04 Speaker 01 But, but.
14:05 Speaker 03 But yeah, Daryl, to go back to your original question, which I think is very important. So, yes, and stem cell biology is hard. It is not easy. It's quite amazing how a baby forms in a womb, when you think about it. It's starting from one fertilized cell and then magically over nine months knows how to execute the code to become this entire human being perfectly. So for the past 20 years, biologists have been working exceptionally hard to figure out what are those codes? How do we execute some of those codes to make eye cells and hair cells and all of those things? And what's really exciting about where we are today is we have a very strong, reasonable understanding of how the biology works. We can replicate, we can reproduce it to a certain degree, but getting precision in
14:50 Speaker 03 the process is really hard. And the analogy I like to use is cell culture can sometimes feel a lot like cooking. So you take some chemicals, you put it in a pot, you stir it, see what happens, taste it. May or may not work. Sometimes recipes go wrong because you messed up some of those ingredients and you go back, you try to get, you get better over time. And what's nice about what Salino does is we bring super precision to the process. You know, with lasers, lasers have single cell precision. You can target one cell. You can also target them at different time points. You could do that at every second, every minute, every hour, 15 times an hour, whatever you want. So the movement that Salino is bringing to the table, and there are other companies
15:32 Speaker 03 who are also bringing different types of precision, but we really focus on lasers is, hey, let's take a process that is a lot more random and make it single cell precision and also be able to control those time elements. So that's how you maximize your yield.
15:48 Speaker 01 So, but you had that realization, like, how did you get that, have that realization that this was a way that you could do it? Your training wasn't in cellular biology, right? But you, you knew the laser part, you had the optics part down.
15:59 Speaker 03 Correct. Yeah. So my story, I've been a diehard physics fan for as long as I can remember. There was this little girl obsessed with space and time travel, those kinds of things. And my mom's a teacher. She's been a teacher for almost thirty years now, so she fully supported all of my creative ideas. And I just always knew I had to be a physicist. I was like, I'm gonna be a physicist. And I had an interesting upbringing, so I traveled the world growing up. So I was born in Saudi Arabia. I grew up in Germany. Went to high school in Sri Lanka. And in high school, picked physics as my universal language. Like, I wanted that to be the language through which I wanted to process the world. Because it it didn't change with every move. I liked that. And it was challenging. I liked that part two. And then I moved to the US to go to college, still wanted to be a physicist.
16:44 Speaker 03 And before grad school, I moved to Boston. I went to Harvard. That summer was a tough summer because I lost my grandma to diabetes. And I realized that doctors don't have all the tools that they should have to save patients, which was shocking to me in many ways. And when I got to Harvard, I decided, okay, I could pursue my intellectual curiosity. If I did that, I would have become a string theorist or particle physicist. Those were the things that really satisfied me intellectually. But the real world applications are hard to come by, may not happen for the next several centuries. We don't know. So I decided, okay, I want to live at the interface of physics and biology and develop tools to help biologists do better biology. That was my thesis when I started the PhD.
17:28 Speaker 03 Ended up joining a laser physics lab and nano fabrication lab and started working in this multidisciplinary space to invent new methods of engineering cells with lasers and nanomaterials, which was a really fun experience. You know, when you think of a PhD timeline, there's so many things to do and things take forever. So I personally never imagined that I would get to real world applications in my PhD timeframe. But it did happen. The last year, I'd done all the simulations. I'd done all the nano fabrication. I was starting to test things out with the laser and started working with biologists. So I knocked on a lot of doors. The Harvard Stem Cell Institute is across the street from the physics department. That was my first introduction to stem cells, and my mind was blown.
18:12 Speaker 03 I just couldn't believe there's this one cell type that has the code in it to become every cell type in our body. That was magical. And I also learned from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute team that it's really hard to engineer these cells. They suggested, why don't we try to engineer them with lasers? We'll see what happens. And it worked. That was the surprising part. So when it worked, everybody started talking about, you need to do something with this. You need to do a startup. And I told them, I don't know what that means. I never thought of doing a startup. And they said, no, you really need to consider it because this level of precision is so important for biology. It could really have a meaningful impact. So that's how the startup idea came into being.
18:49 Speaker 01 Wow. Yeah, that's an amazing path, especially imagine that when you were talking about, you know, your intellectual curiosity was in this different direction. I think it's important to emphasize how different that direction is for maybe an audience that is not familiar, right? Like you alluded to it, but the one is very abstract, very theoretical. Like, like you said, like, it's almost not an impossibility, but it's very unlikely that you're going to see the practical application of what your work is in your lifetime, right? Or even in multiple lifetimes. So
19:18 Speaker 02 Especially string theory.
19:20 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So to go from
19:21 Speaker 02 I know a lot about that from Daryl's favorite show, Big Bang Theory.
19:26 Speaker 01 Get out of here. No, I hate that show. This is not for this podcast.
19:32 Speaker 01 But yeah, like that decision must have been very difficult for you. They're so different. It's such different worlds. It's hard to imagine making that choice. I'm trying to think of an equivalent Jordan for like us.
19:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, like someone who didn't go to Harvard and fell in love with physics. Yeah, I think it would be like the equivalent of pursuing skateboarding your entire life and really loving being a skateboarder and then deciding to do, like make dog beds for a living.
20:02 Speaker 02 You'd be like, wait, why?
20:03 Speaker 01 Wildly different. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So how did you wrestle with that? You mentioned you had your personal experience and that cemented like, oh, you want to do some real good in the world now. But was it difficult for you to make that choice?
20:15 Speaker 03 Of course. Yes. You know, when you become a physicist, you don't do it because you think you'll be rich or famous or anything. You do it because you're pursuing intellectual curiosity. It's challenging, it's stimulating, you like to do lots of math and work by yourself. But you know, when when I thought about it and getting accepted to such a prestigious PhD program was a very important in my life and my career. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. And then really coming to terms with what do I want to do in the world? What do I want my legacy to be? And at that point, it was very much, oh, I want to help develop tools for biologists. That was my motivation. And in that moment, it wasn't that tough of a decision.
20:55 Speaker 03 Um, and you know, just a little bit more about my upbringing, I I did spend my high school years in a civil war. So that makes you very practical about your your privileges. And I I knew, yes, I I'm in a position of privilege. I could do many other things, but I do want to support experts who are trying to make human health better because, you know, my family suffered from lots of diseases that don't seem to have cures. And if there's anything I can do to build a better tool or technology or some type of measurement technique, great, that would feel good to me. Yes, it was hard. I do miss that aspect of not being able to live in my world of intellectual curiosity. But the work I do now is so rewarding from a human health impact standpoint from a
21:40 Speaker 03 and everything we do is so innovative. I had never really engaged with the machine learning AI space until we started the company and we fully embraced it. Now we are absolutely a software driven company where everybody across the board is learning how to code, including many of our incredible biologists, so that they can use all the automation software. It's that pretty amazing. And then, of course, to be able to work with this team, it's the joy of a lifetime. So, yeah.
22:04 Speaker 02 Can we talk about day one, right? So you made your decision. It was a tough decision, but also like not even really a decision. You were like, I have to do this.
22:12 Speaker 03 Correct.
22:13 Speaker 02 And then you decide, okay, I'm gonna go make a startup and do that. What?
22:19 Speaker 02 What were the first few steps like, right? Like, where did you go first? Were you like, okay, I need co-founders? Or I need to incorporate? Or let's start talking to investors? Like, where did you actually start?
22:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So with me, I wanted to rely on some of my core principles of how I like to live in the world, which is I love to work with teams. That's just been how I've always liked to work. So I said, okay, I need to build a team. If I'm gonna do this startup thing, I know very little about startups. And the first person I asked was Marina Madrid, who used to be my lab mate at the time. She's an applied citizen. We'd worked together so well for four years. I knew we have this amazing team dynamic. So I found her in the lab and sat her down and said, hey, everybody's saying I should do a startup. Would you do it with me? And thankfully, she was so enthusiastic. She said, yes, let's do it. What do we have to lose? You know, if it doesn't work out, you can go get a job in industry. I'll go into teaching. Marina is an excellent teacher.
23:13 Speaker 03 So I said, okay, great. So that gave me a lot of confidence. I had one amazing person that wanted to try it out with me that I knew I had a strong working relationship with. And then the other piece, I started tapping into this amazing Boston ecosystem, which is such a strong network, and started asking everybody I knew, hey, I'm trying to build a startup in this space. What advice do you have for me? I'm trying to find advisors who have experience building instrumentation or working with stem cells, whatever it might be. I had all these categories of advisors I wanted to engage with. And just a few weeks after that, somebody connected me to Matthias Wagner, saying, hey, Matthias is super experienced in the instrumentation space. He's built multiple companies. He's been CEO before. He'd be a great mentor. I said, fantastic.
23:58 Speaker 03 So I went to this coffee date with Matthias, and it was an instant connection. So on the second meeting, he said, we both said, let's do this. Let's build a company together. So that was awesome. I do see in my story how it's very important to share your intentions with the universe and be proactive. I was very proactive about. I need to work with people who I have a good working relationship with and people have done this before. And because we've had Matthias on our team from the beginning, we've definitely made some really smart choices about how we use our capital, how we find product market fit, all of those things. And it's really cool to see the past three years of existence where we've been building the prototypes and finding our product
24:41 Speaker 03 market fit, building the core team, and now we're getting ready for our scale up. It's been awesome.
24:45 Speaker 02 What was the hardest part? Like, this is gonna sound a bit weird, but something gives me this feeling that like, the actual tech isn't so much of a challenge for you, right? Like, you just seem like super duper smart. It sounds like your team knows what's going on, and you're like, okay, problem, solution, we got that part. But like, running a business is like a whole different thing, right? That like, you didn't study. You were studying physics and biology and lasers and, you know, those are the technical terms. And so, what to you was the hardest part about turning ultimately what is science and research into a business? And like, what was the biggest challenge of the business side of things?
25:25 Speaker 03 The biggest challenge to me was figuring out what the business should be around this very broad platform. What are the applications? There are about a hundred different things we could do. There are a hundred different business models we could pursue. And I started this massive customer discovery process. So that first summer after Matthias and Marina had joined the team, you know, we were starting to work together. I interviewed hundreds of people that summer to understand what are the possibilities to educate myself. But really, the switch that flipped in my brain was, I'm going from scientist inventor to business person. I have to figure out how we're going to make money. What are people willing to pay for? And can we actually deliver
26:08 Speaker 03 on their expectations? So, looking at a lot of adjacent technologies, what were the company trajectories there? Were they selling devices? Were they doing a service model? Were they doing a therapeutics model? What were the pros and cons? So, we ended up exploring all of those options very thoroughly and then making choices about.
26:28 Speaker 03 Okay, this is we're definitely not taking this track. It's not an attractive business.
26:32 Speaker 01 Hmm.
26:33 Speaker 03 In terms of what the revenue model looks like or the margins look like. Oh, this is more attractive. Oh, this is too hard. That was a very challenging, Jordan, but also super interesting. And I would say that strategic piece of my job is the piece of my job that I I love. And it's absolutely intellectually stimulating every day to make these decisions in an industry that's just starting to exist.
26:57 Speaker 01 Right.
26:57 Speaker 03 So you're building the business model in an industry that's just taking off and it's really cool.
27:02 Speaker 02 I love that methodology of like, we could do one hundred things with this technology. I mean, there are a lot of startups that start from the opposite direction, right? They're like, we want to do this one exact thing and we're just going to build for that. You like had something built essentially. And to decide how to use it. And I love the idea of putting like, it makes me think of when I wanted to paint my wall red. Put all the paint chips up and just slowly every day would pull a couple down, you know, until there's one left and that's the one.
27:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:30 Speaker 02 I think that's really interesting.
27:31 Speaker 03 Yep, absolutely. And and those other ideas that those other paint chips that we didn't end up painting the wall with are still around. And very cool. So there are a lot of interesting applications in the plant cell space and the microbiome space. Which we're not working on at all right now, but they're still there in the background.
27:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, one day.
27:52 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, do you have this? You could start one business of focus on, or you could sort of do the thing where you kind of like, maybe remain in the academy, but then like have a hand in the founding of of multiple businesses, right? I mean, that's another model we've seen people take to you. Like you do evaluate all these options and you sort of thought like, this is what I want to do for the business and also for personal motivation. Like, that's kind of how you made your decision?
28:19 Speaker 03 Yes, absolutely. Staying in academia was not an option for me. I think academia is too archaic and too slow and too rigid and not.
28:28 Speaker 01 Whoa, say what you really think.
28:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, throw him right under the bus, Harvard. Damn. But like, wait, what were you gonna do with string theory then? Isn't there only one option?
28:37 Speaker 03 Exactly, right? So that challenge, I think a lot of us face because we love science. We want to be in science, but being in academia is really hard. Getting jobs is so hard. And you look at so many of my brilliant friends who've published in Nature, science first author, but they're not translating into academic positions. So there's a lot of systemic challenges in academia that are beyond what I can resolve. And I'm very happy with where I am in industry. Most of my friends who are working in industry are also feeling really good. I do have some friends who are doing exceptionally well in academia, but most of them did multiple years of postdocs
29:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:13 Speaker 03 and didn't end up with a position, you know? And they're also, everyone is underpaid. It's very depressing how underpaid academics are. Yeah.
29:21 Speaker 01 You always gotta be scrambling to try to get your research funded, too. It's like, yeah, the hamster wheel never stops.
29:26 Speaker 02 I love that you can solve stem cell problems, but like, the archaism of academia is beyond what you could solve. I love that. It's like, that's the bigger, that's the bigger, more unflappable challenge, right?
29:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's so ensconced, right? It's like, talking about inertia problems. It just has all this detritus of years of tradition and institutional inertia. And it just builds up and up, and then builds up on top of each other, like the layers, you know, nothing's kind of like undoing it. And you just keep adding to it. I mean, I have my own unpleasant experiences that.
30:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, you just like, you just like ran a feather over a constant itch for Daryl. So he could go off. Just wait. Get him started on that plus Canada and we're done.
30:10 Speaker 01 I mean, I was in creative arts and nobody even wants that. So, yeah, I mean, the other interesting to me about your personal story about is like, you're like, oh, like you grew up and I just liked being off, kind of alone and doing this, this work and like really enjoyed being by yourself and doing it. But then you also mentioned you really like teams. Personally, on that side, like aside from the business, like is the interpersonal, has that been a challenge for you? Or it sounds like you like collaborative work, but you also like the opportunity to go solo and get into your own thoughts. So how has that been for you?
30:42 Speaker 03 That's a great question. So I do love working in teams and we do a great job at Selena at making sure we're communicating well. So we have a lot of efforts on that side. I do have a head of transformative leadership and her entire job is to help the team communicate and engage across disciplines. So those parts of my job super priority. The piece that I think is hardest for me, because I think naturally I'm more of an introvert, but I can be very extroverted when necessary. My parents are very extroverted. So I think that's, you know, we grew up performing music with my parents. But all the media aspects of my job and the external and the attention that comes with it are personally very challenging for me.
31:24 Speaker 03 But of course, I understand they're really good for the company. They're really good to draw talent towards us and meet great partners. But I struggle with that piece for sure. So, you know,
31:33 Speaker 01 I do too. And Jordan knows.
31:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:38 Speaker 01 I mean, we're on this. It's, it's, it's a very tiring thing to do, even if you're very much enjoying it. When we do these podcasts, I love doing these podcasts, but they take a lot out of me. It's basically like my day I see it and I'm like, okay, there it is. The whole morning is going to be lead up to that. And then afterwards is going to be kind of like decompressed from that. Right? I think I'm like, you like, I'm naturally an introverted person and I can be extroverted and really enjoy it on occasion, but it's not my natural tendency.
32:05 Speaker 02 I think most people think I'm an extrovert, but in reality I need like a lot of fuel time introvertedly. And I also think just in general, we're all so good at multitasking because that's what like our careers and whether it's in school or in the workplace have asked us to be good at multitasking. So like, when you're not doing something like this, you're slacking with like 40 different people across 40 different projects, you know? And so to like come into an
32:30 Speaker 01 A focused environment.
32:32 Speaker 02 Room like this. Yeah, exactly. It's like, whoa, it's so, it's so draining. Cause you're used to giving like little bits to a lot of people at all the time.
32:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. Now, do you have a dashboard up right now? So like at the automated process and like, oh no, it's going, do you have to monitor it that closely or no? No. Are you able to kind of step back and be like, team's got it. Team's got it handled?
32:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, team's got it. They give me very regular updates on when we're on schedule and we're ahead of schedule, when we're behind and we try to adjust to make sure we're always on track. No, I, I don't, really don't believe in micromanaging. So definitely rely on my team to keep me updated on when they need help to figure through things. And they do a great job. So.
33:13 Speaker 01 I think you've done like a TED Talk of some kind too, right? So you've done like presentations, you've done all this media, you did the battlefield stuff. So is that, you mentioned like you have leadership coaching in-house, right? Leadership guidance in-house, which I think is awesome to do. And I've seen that at other companies too. And I think it really, really helps with cultural issues and just making sure the company stays in the right direction. But what else do you do to kind of cultivate that part of the job and of your personality? Because as you mentioned, it is very important. And I think there's a lot of founders who would like to learn how to grow that part, how to nurture that part of their personalities, right?
33:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. And for me, it's always practicing self-awareness and self-reflection. I sometimes tell my team that, just to put into context, of course, the company is growing at a very rapid pace. And we have a lot more things we have to do, more partners that we're working with, et cetera. The team is growing. But my personal growth has been the steepest out of anybody at this company, because I went from being a lab scientist to, you know, a CEO and founder of a small startup, and now a scaling startup. So my day to day has changed dramatically from where I was spending more time spending with the team. And now I still spend all that time with the team, but then also have to take care of our investor relations, external relations,
34:30 Speaker 03 and so many other things that I wish I had more time to do. So it's always an assessment. And we're getting into this next phase of the company. What do I need to do to be effective in my job? And there are different priorities that emerge. And I'm doing a very honest assessment of where I think my skill sets are and where I need to improve my toolset and working with my executive coach. I work with Nancy Stubbs to build those pieces out. And a lot of it is about time management, efficient decision making. In general, I'm a very warm and understanding person. I can usually see everybody's perspective and really empathize with where they're coming
35:11 Speaker 03 from. But, you know, to move quickly, we're going to have to make decisions and not everybody's going to be happy about that. And I have to Get more and more comfortable with that to manage my time well. So obviously, there are many examples of entrepreneurs who have a certain style of operation, and this is how they operate in the world, and they're extremely successful. And maybe they're very unpleasant to work with or have an expectation for being a slave driver. I think there are many, you know, we could point to a lot of examples here, very famous people. I definitely operate in the mode of, I want to treat people well. I want to make sure my team is happy, they're productive, they're balanced, they already work very long hours, even though I never asked them to. So what can I do to support them to take wellness breaks,
35:56 Speaker 03 take care of their emotional, mental, physical well-being, because those are all the things I need to do my job well.
36:02 Speaker 02 Right.
36:02 Speaker 03 So that's where I'm coming at it from. It's very interesting because biotech classically is a very hierarchical industry, so there are a lot of layers and levels. And at Solino, we're starting to get amazing talent joining us from very large companies, established companies. But the founders feel very strongly that we should feel very intimate. We don't want to have that many levels because the best ideas can come from anywhere in the company. We want those ideas to come out. So we pursue a very horizontal and flat structure, which works really well for us, but there's a lot of conversations we are continually having with everybody across the team, why we believe that, and how do we make it work? I said a lot of things there, Daryl, if I didn't answer your question.
36:46 Speaker 02 No, no, no, you did. Yeah, you did. I'd love to revisit that. Go ahead, Jordan. Well, I'd love to revisit that in the future, the, the pursuit of a flat company, right, and a flat structure. Because it's, I think, something that is almost, hmm, maybe not necessary, but it really is important early on. And when you have a small team, there's something that really bonds the team together and I think creates a lot more productivity. And at a certain point, I believe it becomes somewhat untenable, right? Because that many people in a room, it's just cacophony. So I'll be interested to see, you know, you're smart. Maybe you figured it out at a thousand-person company. I don't know.
37:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:23 Speaker 02 If anybody would, it would be you.
37:24 Speaker 01 It's tough with scale, but I mean, it's also like, it's one of those things where it's tough early on, even because you mentioned bringing on legacy people, right? So if you bring on people from more established organizations and they're very used to hierarchy, it's going to be difficult from the other side because you're kind of like, okay, we need to integrate you in this culture and like, you want this, you seek this structure and you seek this stratification and it's not going to be there and it's going to be uncomfortable and difficult for you, right? But that's an interesting debate that we should do a whole special series on that because I know
37:50 Speaker 02 We should.
37:51 Speaker 01 Shopify also espoused like a very flat organization and continues to as an organization with like, whatever it is, 4,000 employees globally, right? But does it have one?
38:00 Speaker 02 Well.
38:01 Speaker 01 Good question.
38:01 Speaker 02 And like, well, and that's the good thing about the flat structure too. Like even at a big company is like, some of the bullshit that comes up with all that stratification at like these established, particularly in bio, right? And like health, that stratification also creates like this layer of bullshit that goes all the way down, right? Where it like starts with something that's highly vetted at the top and then gets like re-vetted over and over again as it trickles down to more and more employees. And by the time that like the fourth layer has received that information, they're like, what is this bullshit? This isn't even a real human speak, right? This is so corporate. And I'm sure some of those people that are coming over from those established places to you guys are like, oh, it's so nice for someone to like talk and just for that to
38:46 Speaker 02 be the truth and what they were saying from the heart. But then also I want to be the boss of someone right now, please, you know? So it's like, it's hard.
38:54 Speaker 03 Well, you know, I think what we're making a priority to have very honest conversations about how we like to operate as a company, what's worked so well for us thus far. And I understand it's impossible for me to have 50 direct reports going forward. That's just not going to happen. I understand that, but as long as we have a shared understanding of how we make decisions and just because you're a flat organization doesn't mean it's a democracy necessarily. So there will be different topics that different people get the final say on. So that's how we're thinking about it, but absolutely a work in progress. I'd love to have more conversations with you. I'd love to learn to see how other companies have done it because I haven't seen anything so far that's been the ideal solution.
39:36 Speaker 01 Hmm.
39:37 Speaker 03 And you know, and now with remote work. That's another layer of complexity that's being added to everybody's lives. Like, how do we balance that? How do we work effectively across different time zones? How do we make it feel intimate if you're never going to be at the office together?
39:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, they're all challenges that have no real, like, great answers at the moment, but definitely stuff people are trying to figure out. I mean, from our TechCrunch perspective, we rely a lot on our few in-person events that happen, you know, and that's been a challenge during COVID. But I think that's one of the things that's really solidified our team dynamics, right? Because we've always worked remote, but then if you have those check-ins, like, it really helps you feel, feel like you're
40:16 Speaker 02 It like washes your sins.
40:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
40:19 Speaker 02 Like, it resets a lot of the relationships and challenges and frustrations.
40:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, anyways, we're not good at this, though, because we don't seek to
40:26 Speaker 02 Let us teach you.
40:28 Speaker 01 We don't seek to do anything good.
40:29 Speaker 02 And if there's anything you need to know about lasers.
40:31 Speaker 01 Make people happy within the organization. Externally, people are always like, well, what about production numbers? And we're like, no, I mean, we just want people to feel good, have a good time.
40:40 Speaker 02 If they feel good, it'll be okay, probably, we think. We're pretty sure it'll be okay.
40:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:46 Speaker 02 And sometimes they don't even feel good, so don't, really don't come to us.
40:49 Speaker 01 Exactly.
40:52 Speaker 01 Well, Navi, I mean, I think we're just out of time, but it's been amazing chatting with you. And again, congratulations, well-deserved win for TechCrunch Disrupt. We're so excited to see Salino grow and continue to innovate. Be sure to let us know anytime you got, you got news and you got something new coming up.
41:09 Speaker 03 Thank you so much. This was such a fun conversation and I've just been blown away by the whole experience of TechCrunch Disrupt. It's something that, of course, I watched on Silicon Valley and I knew that that was, that was a big deal. And then to come in as a wild card and go through the different rounds. The judges were fantastic. They asked exceptional questions. I was so impressed. So, um, thank you for an incredible experience and looking forward to staying in touch.
41:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, we will. We're, we're claiming you as our own, so we'll be very close in touch. Don't worry about that.
41:51 Speaker 01 All right. So that was our conversation with Navia. Obviously much smarter than me and you.
41:58 Speaker 02 Fair to say.
41:59 Speaker 01 I guess we could just use that as a generic outro to the show too.
42:03 Speaker 02 The person we spoke to is more smart and also more accomplished than either of us.
42:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, but smart enough to win disrupt. As you mentioned at the at the intro to the show, like very little preparation, just killed it. And our judges were super blown away by how good they were. We talked about people doing game changing things or doing world changing things. This is, this is right up there. And yeah, just working on something that only a few years ago was just kind of like an idea and is now becoming reality, right? So they're out there, they got the printers going, they're printing off custom cells. And it's, it's exciting how it can go from something Navia was studying, like in her advanced studies to, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to make it a business. And I think that was one of the more interesting things to talk about with her was how she went from that academic
42:52 Speaker 01 research mindset to I'm a business person and I got to build a business and that's my main focus.
42:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, kind of like her multiple pivots, right? Cause like she grew up wanting to be a physicist, right? And being like string theory, which you can't get anywhere in string theory, really. I mean, you hope to, but it's big, big, big. And
43:14 Speaker 01 It's a pursuit of the mind. It's the life of the mind. You're just like,
43:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, like, but without answers. Like you could also live a life of the mind and be like, oh, I have this theory. Could I prove it? Like, yeah, that works and I'm right. Woo hoo. Like you can't with string theory, right? You're just like, I'm pretty sure it's right, but I don't know. To like, okay, now I'm going to kind of jump off of this ledge over here and focus on how I could use like lasers and some of the, what I've taken from physics to like focus on biology and how I could actually make a difference in people's lives, still in a very academic sense. And then be like, oh, I'm going to network my ass off. I want to meet everyone. She was in kind of the Boston, Cambridge area, right? So like lots of good networking to be had there.
43:58 Speaker 02 And decided, let's go build a business out of this. Let's commercialize it. Let's have real world results. Let's be able to go from A to B and say like, look, look what was done, but still with the same, I mean, maybe not the exact same scale as figuring out a theory around string theory, but big scale in terms of the impact it could make on the earth and on the world.
44:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting debate to be had about that. I feel like even if she uncovered some things that were like seminal in string theory, I don't think that the impact on the lived human life would be as great. She solves this problem, right?
44:34 Speaker 02 Well, it's a particularly interesting debate to have with me. Who knows? Nothing about either. Right? I am just fishing for words to string to string together, so to speak. Yeah, thank you.
44:48 Speaker 01 But yeah, I love talking to her about that sort of pivot and that decision. I think it was touching to hear about that it was driven in part by like personal experience and just realizing like medicine has a long way to go and could have done a lot even for her grandmother. And it's always great to hear from sort of founders who are pursuing it for like a really personal reason that is applicable to just about everybody else, right? Like, how can I help people avoid this thing that caused me a great amount of pain and sadness, right? Or like just extend so a person's lives a little bit longer. So people can have more time with one another, right? It's a great mission. And I think also just it's one of these things where you're like, this is a thing we've heard about for a long time. We've heard about stem cells or you've heard kind of at the periphery of like, oh, well, you know, this is a new technology coming up
45:32 Speaker 01 that could change everything. And it has a lot of hope and hype attached to it, but it's never really borne fruit in the way that I think a lot of us may be expected to when we first heard about it. So that also is really exciting just to hear like, maybe this is the way that it really has that effect where we go into the doctors and they're like, don't worry about it. I'm going to laser print you a stem cell therapeutic.
45:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, or whatever. Pretty big.
45:54 Speaker 01 Pretty big. You could say that. Yeah. And I mean, her ideas around leadership too are interesting. I think it was interesting. She was talking a bit about like having maybe too much empathy can be a hindrance to being like an effective leader, right? Like if you need to also realize that you're running a company and that sometimes the decisions are going to not be as widely loved, right? Yeah. And that's not a perspective we get, I don't think, as much on this show. So I think that was great to hear from her. I mean, it's definitely true. It's something that you don't even, most people don't vocalize much in the day to day running of their business, even if they're aware of it, because it's uncomfortable to be like, well, yeah, I mean, we're just going to do this because this is the right way to do it. And everybody's going to hate it, but we gotta do it that way.
46:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is a reason to kind of listen back to the full, not to like shamelessly plug found, but like, it's interesting. The more founders we talk to, the more it feels like they're like a patchwork of one another in a way. Cause they'll align on how to do X, but not Y, and then not Z. And then if you are a founder trying to start a business, you can kind of pull and mix and match yourself from a lot of what these founders talk about, how they operate, how they make decisions, how do they, how they lead people, how they fundraise, because ultimately it's like what works for you is going to work for you. Right? So hearing all the different ways that it can be done is, is pretty interesting.
47:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's a much better exercise to go back and listen to the found archive than to try to read a business book. Cause no one business book has all the answers. They're all bad, by the way, all of them.
47:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're terrible.
47:25 Speaker 01 Except for in case we have one sponsoring the show or whatever and we have to.
47:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, those ones are good. Those ones are super good.
47:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:34 Speaker 02 Sponsored one. Yeah.
47:35 Speaker 01 And then if we write one later, that one is also good.
47:38 Speaker 02 That one's gonna be great.
47:43 Speaker 01 All right. So if you enjoyed this week's episode, if you enjoyed any episode of found, please leave us all the stars on the review platforms. Positive review, comment goes a long way too. We love reading those. They warm our souls cold winter nights. Also.
47:58 Speaker 02 Creepy.
48:00 Speaker 01 You can fill out a new listener survey that we have. We'd love to hear from you, your direct feedback. Just go to bit.ly, that's B I T dot L Y slash found listener survey, all one word, and you can fill out our survey there. It's just a few questions, really, really valuable to get your feedback. So please go ahead and do that. Thanks very much. And I think we'll see you next week when we all have new limbs grown from stem cells. Found is hosted by myself, TechCrunch News Editor Daryl Ellington and TechCrunch Managing Editor Jordan Crook. We are produced by Ashad Kulcarney and edited by Kel Keller, and Maggie Stamets is our associate producer. TechCrunch's audio products are managed by Henry Pickavet. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your
48:43 Speaker 01 podcasts, and on Twitter at twitter.com/found. You can also email us at [email protected] , or you can call us and leave us a voicemail at 510-936-1618. Also, we'd love if you could spare a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly/foundlistenersurvey. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
Previous Financial flash mobs meet fundraising memes Next Equity Monday: New unicorns kick off the week as India get cross with Starlink Page updated October 25, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
