Biggest challenge — wants to do direct to consumer because he loves helping people directly, gather data, craft a good pipeline and give them reports like 23 and me while they develop clinical stuff

Taking a leave of absence to do this but it’s scary, he needs to build his own lab, it has to be certified, initially thought about building the lab in Utah since it is very central to ship stuff and also it’s not too hot. When should we start making that move, how to strategize this

What’s scary?

working with the wrong people. How to balance team vibe with high standarts

been 3 years doing this technology, the science works but if I mess up the business, you will loose the chance for the doctors

how to present like steve jobs

Assaf Magen

Learn how he’s telling the story - when talking to non-scientists is hard, how to pitch and tell the story in a moving way

Figure out the milestones, the R&D plan, what are the milestones that make sense to investors, how to build rapidly even in deep tech, how to move fast

As a founder, — dealing with disappointments, ups and downs, how to go through stuff when things are not going well, is this all screwed? but you always pull back in, you always find a way but the shorter time it takes for you to come back on track the better so how can I shorten that time it takes to jump back?

Loves learning in general so he constantly seeks feedback, there is only half of the story he can improve on his own, loves real, honest feedback

At the core of it, he loves biology, immune system is the most fascinating system he has ever encountered, it is a very intricate ecosystem and he believes that with his company he can leverage the intricacies of the immune system to treat any disease (starting with cancer) with computation and CS we can scale our ability to model the immune

Jase Gehrin

Not coming to the kickoff — getting maried

Meeting other people

Learning what I should learn as a founder

Thinking about crystalizing his idea for the company. He is pretty self-critical about his ideas so throwing away ideas is not hard for it

Seeing how other people approach it and thinking what the next iteration of the impact could be

Deep learning is

Growing as a founder — how to motivate people, how to align them to shared goals, work together

Learning how to assess his ideas — convincing himself and convincing others that this is the right thing to pursue, once I have the conviction I can go full effort and have the ecitement and motivation

Best learning to use LLMs as a sounding board

Feedback — 1:1 communication, regular scheduled fedback otherwise things just build up so you can have

Nils Burger

Office hours with Alex

Has a couple of good ideas but he hasn’t started bc he lacks the info on what are the first steps, what preliminary data do I need, how do I need to get funded, how do I handle IP?

Transition phase from getting out of his postdoc to starting his own lab, should he wait until starting his lab? Applying to start his own lab, thinking about stanford

Thinking about looking to generate preliminary data for his ideas in his lab to be ready to spin out

Growing as a founder - fast learner, but he needs the necessary tools since in the academic system, who are the right people to talk to,

How do you best learn? - when I see things first hand, talk to people and interact to people, apply them to your own questions and problems

Feedback - I’m german so I like having harsh and critical feedback, this is the purest and best form of feedback so you have all info you need to take action

Joseph Mooney

next scale is making the hydropanel that will be able to work off-grid

Looking at doing a small scale pilot for something like agriculture

Looking to see if there is any interest in upscaling the

Hydroponic would take sunlight to make water

The other approach would be to go after data center

Learning Venture deals - how do you organize yourself as you become CEO, manage time, manage people, how do you balance medium vs longterm goals? Present myself better and build up his pitching skills, getting a checklist to start, managing IP, should I be signing NDAs, what should I be patenting?

Main unknown, doubt in visa, am I securing funding strategically or am I speeding up the timelines just for the visa sake? A big objective is proving this technology works at scale and if the water that comes out of the scale up version is still clean.

He needs funding but how does he combine grants with dilutive funding?

Someone asked him how much would it take to start this company?

Including lab space, visa, and salary it would 150k-200k

Low cost mvp that could be used off the grid

Michael Nitze

People want to see more specific technoeconomic analysis and projections, wants to build that out and give numbers to quantify things VC wants to hear

On technical side, things are solid, want to get a sense of the business things, or hiring someone more business focused, “there is value in understanding the business things even if the hires make the decisions”

A lot of their efforts have been focused on the technical derisking but they might need support understanding the costs and industry expectations of a TEA and expectations of being too realistic people won’t fund you but too optimistic won’t get people excited

Kyungyong Seong

Doesn’t want to teach, doing this because it is part of his

Sulin Liu

Better AI for applications, it’s very hard to measure what AI is most useful for each different application?

Start building some demos and some methods for people — using this method

Improve communication to show the promise and benefits of his tools

Likes getting feedback in notion or bullet points so he can keep track of it

Aditya Venkatramani

Building a good friend network and having peers - want the energy of people who care about problems deeply but applied to entrepreneurship, not necessarily with the sole purpose of getting tenure and being a professor

Figuring out what ideas are good ideas that are aligned with me,

Actively figuring out what he is excited about - if i’m not excited about it then I won’t put in the work

On the other hand, how useful is this?

He has a proof of concept but there might be patent/IP conflicts with somebody else

Let’s say he figures this out, am I differentiated from others in the market? If not, what other things can do

Being a founder is like pushing ideas forward with a group of people so you lead this team forward to make things happen. Creating a vision, getting out the best of people

Potentially competitive with Digital Bio?

Jason Zhang

how to have my own company, this idea is exciting but daunting, who should I be talking to, how do I get my idea work, etc

his idea is completely new, shares the same knowledge base but the exact idea is different

He still have revisions to finish the work

two big questions to pursue this idea full time

can I express it?

does the biology work the way I’m thinking it should work in the invitro?

what are the resources that I can harness? SF and Boston have a ton of do I access the resources?

Rohan Kumar

What i took the most was Scott know the most about building a startup and he was listening and

A clear picture of concrete steps of if the research works, this is how we’ll build an mvp and knowing what customers will need to see and a clear picture of what I need to be. Once I know what to build, the only thing in between me and the startup is building that thing and making it happen

I want to be Tony stark in real life, who takes any idea and makes it happen in an extremely practical way that will actively change tons of lives.

What is the Open AI of quantum that enables something practical, even if the customer

Being a founder — i see myself being extremely intense, working all day, making decisions etc. But I think I want to grow on how to make the right decisions (there is a ton of info out there on how to build a doordash but there is no good examples i can look for analogies in deep tech, want to know what good strategy or decision making in deep tech look like?

Feedback - I like

Vikram and Bo

Interested in building broad technologies and accelerating discovery since highschool, he then became interested in protein evolution and then he realized you can only do so any things, it’s constraint by technical details so discovered that with ML and rapid progress there is so much potential to huge amount of data and use this data to train models and engineer new proteins

This became fascinating to me and could be transformative to develop therapeutics and industrial applications, excited to

Did math and bussiness in undergrad and originally did drug discovery from a computational approach and then in his phD got into ML for protein design

Scientific perspective - engineering the Protease which will show the proof of concept of our application

Commercial perspective - better understand who are our customers and what are the exact de-risking steps to reach these

We’re very close to get this to a minimum viable product

Very excited to build this team and get our team up and running

Lucien Viala

great position at tesla he actually really likes

So the goal for 5050 is to find the idea that is so interesting and important to him that he cannot say no to

Understand what the startup world is and understand if being a founder is the right path — if it isn’t the right path, then he wants to join 50Y team

Current ideas are mostly intra-preneur, things he has tested within Tesla

Anu Sinha

Getting to know folks at 50Y and how we think about startupsa

A clear sense of having a platformy bio company

Knowing the nuts and bolts, what does a compelling pitch and termsheet look like?

If something is ready to spin out now or if it needs more rears in the bench to create something truly meaningful

Sometime in the last year realized he didn’t want to be a professor since you spend most of your time applying to grants and that in entrepreneurship you could impact people much more thoroughly

Ravi Lai and Katie

The materials to send to investors

Have a concrete idea of what we want to pursue, they can start to work on ideas on Frances Lab so having a concrete vision of what to actually start making

Now, looking at where there are saturated and where is there space to be different

We have ideas so far but none of them are super flashed out

How do we the research of what people are specifically targeting

Ravi and Katie like doing things together, hiking, listening to music, etc.

We’re at a turning point when we’re really able to understand biology and engineer it, I want to live in a world where you can instantly know okay this yeast will create this compound and engineer cells with the same ease as we now assemble a plane and know that it will

Coming to the bay from the 20-29th

Chao Cao

Keen to starting a company soon, within a year

If i have a bunch of good ideas, how do I verify these ideas, how do I know there is a market

Also, take this as a forcing function to develop the idea and figure out the basic logistics of how to get started so I can continue working on it after the cohort

Matthew

Wrap up the technology he is working on and package it in a way that could be spun out into a company - 2 month timeline to wrap up the research

Background in combustion, combustion as a way of taking processes that are thermodynaically available and using them to improve processes

Part of the reason I came to Stanford is to pursue entrepreneurship, in caltech undergrad folks weren’t focused on the potential impact of the research, only on the basic science

How do you fundraise? How do you get connected to VCs? With hard tech it’s important to find a VC that has expert knowledge on the area you work with, how raising funds differs as a deeptech

Putting myself out there, learning more about the startup ecosystem, hates networking, he’d rather really connect with people, how do you go about networking in the right way?

Someone who has a lot of breadth but trying to figure out where to improve his skills, should I focus in more depth within my subject matter vs also learning coding or other things that might be useful for the product development or should I just hire other technical folks?

you need to be able to at least understand other areas of the tech

Refine his ideas — to understand

Trent Weiss

Become better at making decisions with limited information

I don’t feel their co-founder relationship is strong

It’s more an aspect of which aspects of the technology are most valuable to specific customers, which aspect of the technology to further develop

Marielle

Have been thinking and working on this for some time but at some point this idea should really happen and I want to make it happen

Use this time to really map out what I need to figure out and take the next steps to start this

Secure the IP so that I can get to a first phase of raising - currently doing 2 lines of experiments that will lead to something we can patent, validate what we already found

Business strategy is very open - core science is locked. They have a way to reboot x on the cell which means we can reuvenate the cell but how we go about building a company around it is very open

We right now are exploring cart for tumors but super open

Drive - i’m a engineer, not a scientist and saw that no one is doing this, we have solutions that will help people and if no one is doing it. Using the skillsets I have to solve real problems and seeing it work and seeing that I know I can make mitochondria engineering work is something that really excites me.

Also looking for co-founders. Traits she is looking for

Smart, work really hard, friendly, someone you can trust

She started off with a team of three and wanted to build powerhouse as an FRO to combine two mitochondria genomes, this is a 10-20 year project so pursued it as an FRO

the other 2 people wanted to be in academia and parted ways

Now she is working with other two people, they are both exceptional, she would love to see them as cofounders, but how can I convince them? She wants some back up option that would be ready to jump on the project now even if she hasn’t fundraised

Yang Zhong

Excited to learn and analyze the great founders, excited for Scott to analyze and deconstruct his pitch

Find a co-founder

He will definitely start the company but excited to learn the ropes

Passionate about water because he was a volunteer teacher in china and saw the little access to water to people in need

When he first did his research, he started to look at the market and economics and realized it is a bad market, 10% profit margin and pay back time is 10 years, trying to look at different markets that’s how he started to see his technology as a way to treat waste water and convert it into energy

Our technology at MIT might not be able to address the energy problem - can we develop a new technology? Is my expertise enough to address this problem?

Zach Rosenthal

How to set up a compelling seed round pitch, what are the important value inflection points that are important for this next phase, key elements to set up for a succesful seed round

We’re going to do both platform plays, they are complimentary - how can we discover billions and billions of compounds and hits that we’ll want to pursue further and then how can we profile these compounds in a way that no one has before. First platform is a funnel for the next platform

Heavily driven by frustration about the pace of therapeutics development, did PhD in neuroscience and there has been no progress for decades - alzheimers 10 years and nothing. We can put men in the moon but there’s nothing we can do to figure these diseases out. We need a better way to discover compounds and discover medicines, we need to have new modalities

Very used to be very resourced constraint - do as much as you can with as little resources as possible - ensure that I can effectively delegate to others, outsource tasks, inclination is to have his hands all over each projects. Which tasks are sufficient to delegate out vs what I should handle

I’m used to be resourced constraint so understanding how to be time efficient with the money, don’t spend but still being efficient. Get out of preservation mindset.

Katie

Being able to secure

Figure out who our first customer is and knowing which product

Hope that we can use the

I’m super super excited about being a founder, all the unknowns that go along with it

It would be super excited to find a version of the product that customers want

Always dabbled with entrepreneurship in some way

But i never knew if I would be lucky to work on a project that could become a company

Frances pushes people

Neal Amin

Going full time on the newco in Oct

Toured MBC biolabs recently

Early self-finanzing and can use some friends and family going

Talked to some investors, just friendly chats

Working with the other Neel, testing out co-founder dynamic

how did you meet?

both did mdphd at the same time in different universities and they met at a conference

Neel decided to go out of academia politics and went to regeneron

he’s thinking about his next steps, he has always had a lot of respect for Neel intellectually and they work together

How are you testing?

Neel’s been in paternity leave but they’ve been exploring the idea together for

How did you decide

2 years ago, he took this wall where he was not having fun anymore, really didn’t feel he wanted to go the faculty route he was going towrds

Connected to founder friends who got him ready for yeah you can do it

All of the sudden it seemed possible

Getting a clear direction for the next few years

The only thing that slows me down

Michael Hassen

Will be in Australia to renew his visa, his visa is now based on the postdoc

technoeconomics sorted

Go-no go setup if we want to start this startup

get knowledge on the finance side of things

ready to accelerate and go decarbonize the world

Postdoc in the lab for about 3 years after doing his phd in australia

Weiran Gao

Still in the lab, the work has been going okay, hoping we can move fast with the technology

Meet like-minded people and learn about building a startup

Working on how to move fast, how to commercialize

Have a prototype and proof of concept, have a sense of the market and potential customers and hopefully by the start of next year we are talking about starting the business and moving out of the lab

Her mom is an inspiration, she is a business women in China so she wants to be like her mom instead of going towards professorship so when she got into her phd she chose a project that could be translatable and the project evolved into a hot topic area and something that is a good idea, urgent and with the potential to solve ig problems we have right now. As she was going through PhD she was constantly thinking about if this is what she wants to do because she knows this is stressful and worried about what if we fail? Eventually she realized it doesn’t matter if we fail, if it works it will be great and what’s most interesting is the learning I’ll get from trying to start this, from learning about the market, and right now this is what she wants to do the most at the moment. This is her phd thesis so it’s the technology she knows the best and she doesn’t see going out and doing something else and then coming back to her advisor and saying now i want to spin this out is not something possible

None of the people of my team have experience starting my startup so she wants to learn what’s the process to start, how do I start

Started working with Trent together since May, haven’t really talked about the business together, they are working together to build a prototype and they are each working on different approaches to make the prototype work. Seems like they haven’t talked about actually being cofounders, it’s more like they are more trying to figure out the tech. I (ale)

Muntathar

Right now I’m very naive about a lot of things, so by the end of 5050 i’d want to have a clear idea of how to turn my research into an idea and how many patents/if I need patents to bring my idea

I’m not married to a particular problem, I just want to figure out what is the research application of my work that will drive bigger change or that has business potential, I want to broaden my view of the problems to tackle and ways to tackle these problems

I want to learn success stories so I can see hope and action giving good results

I want to se

I am terrified about being delisuional when I have too much hope, i value my time and my energy and other people’s times so I want to make sure we make things based on good assumptions, good data and being confident that this is worth pursuing. I don’t want to throw around big exciting words or motivational phrases without foundational knowldege of why this is something worth,

Nelson Van de Lindt

Econometrics side of economics and liked the computational side of things

Matriculating to Harvard for MBA and will join the MBA in two years

In undergrad he worked on upscale power on small nuclear reactors

then he worked on

Tailoring most of his econ background into strategic finance for nuclear

Getting the knowledge of the early stages of starting a startup

Putting together a timeline with Jacob that will concretely define when to start

worked a little bit on undergrad on a neurology startup

Zewen Zhang

Figure out the exact idea of what I want to do and build

how to navigate uncertainty

trade off between honing onto your beliefs but also choose

Marika

Being convinced to incorporate by the end of the cohort

Looking for a cofounder

Right now she has a problem and wants to figure out how to solve it and if the tech will pan out

After leaving her old company now she wants to make biomanufacturing work - competitive with other processes that currently can only work with commoditychemicals

There are fundamental flaws on how biomanufacturing is done

On the previous co she mainly focused on the tech side, now she wants to learn how to build the company and how to build a great team

The team she had for tech development was amazing so she wants to figure

Nicolas Sawaya

Raising a round and signing a customer

MVP

Gaining conviction and clarity on the best business plans — big unknowns

Big unknowns - hire a contractor, paralysis around hiring, he could do a contractor in california or first employee who could massively accelerate things or a really great cofounder

Really excited -

Jacob van De Lind

The technical basis of the idea feels technically strong and economically

All the steps of how do I take my research and start a company from it

figuring out the regulations and the public perception

Alex Powers

Definitely starting the company but I haven’t figured out what excatly I want to focus on

I could work more on a computational tools approach to drug discovery it could be more of a software platfor play vs a more hard core bio one

Hope to figure out those things by talking to people

We still can’t do anything when someone gets a disease

His. best friends parent and his uncle both had uncurable diseases so it’s obvious that I want to tackle that

RIght now finishing up publications to show proof that what he’s working on is credible

Also talking to people and customers to see what he has

During his PhD he did discover a drug to treat chronic pain

Trying to figure out if he wants to do an AIxbio platform and he can see himself as a CEO or a therapeutics company

I like chemistry, biology, CS so it’s harder for me to know which aspects I’m more excited about

Neil Tay

Jaime Roquero

GRAIL - has loss 90% of their value, people filed massive lawsuits, a founder with 10B in funding wasn’t able to bring a product out so will anyone be able to bring a product?

Working on a way to have a proof of concept to show the things he is trying to achieve makes sense at all,

If you do things with PCR

test in silico many sequences for cancer and if he derisks this, he could get people with a ton of experience to trust him

Keep doing his research effort so he needs to spend a few months to get a proof of concept that has the credibility level that would be published

In parallel He needs to get some understanding of the skills he needs to know about entrepreneurship

He’s doing all in silico, compute is cheap, with 5k he can get a prototype out by leveraging insane amounts of prototype data

extremely married to the idea that if his prototype doesn’t work there is nothing so it’s either this works or it doesn’t

Dhruva Katrekar

Belief in myself that I can do it and belief that I can do this in my own

Understanding the landscape, technoeconomic analysis, what it takes to make a product succesful

Plays tennis - looks up his opponent on the match and doesn’t think he can beat him but when playing he realizes he can

With fellowships sometimes he doesn’t even try to apply because he thinks he won’t get it - but when someone else tells him

He needs to start using wins to increase self confidence

Dan Moore

Some of the attributes we shared on day 1 it was the first time he had heard of these but he hadn’t internalized it

This is how you should think if you were to be a founder and he realized he already he already has all of these traits so he should just do it

How to build a founding team?

I don’t actually know what I need to launch

What are the other ingreadients I need to launch. What are the deliverables I need to launch? Do I need a working viable product? How do I build a technoeconomics model? I have a list of things I cannot buy but I can make but where should I start? There are many ways to generate revenue that is not actually the actual startup idea.

The cohort helps me shorten the timeline which is now in march and compress it to start the company within the cohort by knowing what to tackle and the ingredients I need for the comany

Growing into a great leader. How do I lead teams? I don’t know where I need to grow, some areas where I think I’m good

He shows up before anyone shows up at 6:30/7pm. Easiest way for him is to

Stepan and Jolyn

Holy shit amazing scenario

We’ve run our rfpc and have a sample in our hands and the customer can plug it into their process and they love it

We have 80% of what it takes to be a great founder

We found a market and understand which market to go to

We’ve seen companies that were great but didn’t really explore and interact with partners well to drive sales

Understanding the complete story, what is our model 3 that will take us to the ultmate vision

Understanding - what investors want to see, getting more familiar with investors

Karl Krauth

Went to do computer science

His mom got breast cancer, they caught it early so she got better fast,

Biology is this field that we are just starting to know enough that we are starting to know how to engineer it

He’s still in bio because he just loves it

In a standard biology lab you usually take the tools that are alrady in the lab

He gets to physically engineer new devices from scratch and once he engineers the device he needs to figure out how to best use the data to train models on

Design approach, how do we make it so anyone not familiar with microfluidics can use it

How do i show microfluidics

Figured out if he needs to spin out and when to spin out

If it turns out he can spin out by december, that would be great

It’s getting that extra push of if near term it’s the right time or if i should continue to develop this in the time

Figuring out the pricing - get to meet people in the industry and survey them

Sierra Lore

Mentorship and advice on whether or not to pursue this project

taking young organs and putting it into old animals - there are all these paths that we could use but if we figure out which of the organs/or paths has a biggest rejuvenating effect we can go fully into the startup, depending on the organ, we could either go now or in ten years\

Growth: better, faster decision making — would really like to work on implementing the type 2 doors mindset. Type a, she always likes to take the perfect decision, i generally move

How to inspire folks and having the skills to say things that sometimes are hard for people

Gina El Nesr

By the end of the cohort she will want to have found the civilization

She can design, build, rrain the model and also do experimental validation of these

Right now she is training the enzymes for a metal

Building models - found an algorigth where most sequence functions works

For a company - she wants to learn which chemical reaction would be worthwhile that will be useful to tackle many problems

Kickstarter to think about what is the application that matters the most

Runs the ML something something conference - all

A lot of the stuff we talked about w Hillary is stuff she does already, but what distinguishes the top 0.01% from 1%? What distinguishes the person who founded he company from someone who was able to run an extremely successful company

I like absorbing knowledge

Specific distinguishing factors for each founder

Chad Wilson

Defended PhD

Was flying back and forth to Maryland to test out his technology with the DoD - culminaiton of a 2 year 5M project

Deliver prototypes that the army could independently test the technology in all environments from the desert to the

Works on a very fancy purifier

Joseph has been persuading him to spin out the technology - Chad has mainly been focused on the tech

They get along very well - he has been doing the technology for about 5 years, Joseph joined the lab one year ago

Now that he has defended PhD, he is exploring pursuing it with Joseph

Now, he wants to make sure he knows what’s the practicality of spinning out the technology, he is good at knowing if the technology is worth pursuing but not really on the startup world

What you need to be a founder

There was a big DoD grant for this, wrote the proposal and got the grant, only team that got it, now he has worked on it for 5 years

His background was in healthcare, he did a biomedical device for a hardware startup when they were 12 people

Histosomics

The CEO tolkd him go get a PhD you can always come back

Chad cared about healthcare and climate so figured he go and learn something new on climate

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