Ninety percent of people don't know if they have a genetic merit that increases the risk for these conditions. I mean, it's pretty insane. This guy is Kian Sadeghi. He's a Penn dropout who built a biotech company that can predict the diseases you might die from, and how to prevent them from happening. Last month, I had him at our studio and asked him to share with me his story and the secret to how it all works. So my cousin actually went to bed one night and didn't wake up the next day.
At the time, you know, I asked my parents, how does this happen? How has this happened? They kept saying, "No, bad genetics, bad genetics." Why did you decide to drop out? You're in your bedroom. You're one person. You wake up one day. You go from literally having nothing. No money. No resources. Do you have to go to college? At that point, we became one of the most well-backed genetics companies ever. Why should somebody like myself even care about getting my whole genome sequenced?
Do you care about being healthy and living forever? I try to. Okay. So then whole genome is for you. There's actually several applications of whole genome sequencing. One of the first is Kian, who are you? And why should the person that's listening to this podcast listen to you? That's a great question. First off, thank you so much for having me.
So around maybe four and a half years ago at this point, I dropped out of Penn, and I went all in on building what I thought of as the kind of application layer for DNA or software for your DNA. We are undergoing one of the most extraordinary decreases in costs, one of the greatest technological changes ever. That is the decrease in cost of whole genome sequencing or reading the entirety of your DNA. That used to cost $1 billion; today with Nucleus, you can get that for just $3.99.
So I think from my perspective, we are really bringing to everyone the frontier of genomic science, which is gonna radically change society. I wanna get back into your backstory to understand more about you and why you're on the journey that you are today. What event took place when you were younger that pushed you to dedicate your life towards longevity? I'm a first-generation American. Both my parents are Persian.
They actually escaped Iran during the September revolution, came to America, specifically Brooklyn where I still am. And, unfortunately, I think the story of Nucleus begins with a personal tragedy. So my cousin actually went to bed one night and didn't wake up the next day. She died in her sleep. At the time, you know, I asked my parents, how does this happen? How does this happen? They kept saying no, bad genetics, bad genetics. Didn't understand what that meant.
Eventually, though, I started studying genetics, and what I realized is that disease isn't really an inherent property of human beings but can be viewed more as a problem to be solved. And if you'd actually correct for the error in someone's DNA, you could, you know, well, cure a disease. So I joined one of the first do-it-yourself gene-editing laboratories in the country, where we engineered yeast to make limonene. We added bacteria to make them resistant to antibiotics.
And I kind of started thinking, like, what if you combine the kind of depth and beauty of biology with the iterability of programming? And that led me to going to Penn, where I studied computational biology for around a year and a half. And I was in BIO 221, which is a nice class. And I remember the chairman of the biology department brought up this beautiful chart, the one I alluded to earlier in our conversation, and it showed the cost of actually sequencing all of someone's DNA.
So not a small fraction. So most of the genetic tests you've heard of, like 23andMe, for example, they look at less than 0.1% of your DNA. Right? Because at the time in 2006, when a company like 23andMe got started, the cost of sequencing all 100% was maybe $10 million a sample. Okay? I remember a couple of years ago, when I was looking at this chart, the cost had gone down from $10 million per sample to, at that point, a couple thousand.
And I remember thinking, like, well, what's gonna happen when that cost goes from a thousand to basically negligible. And with that, that was kind of the inception of Nucleus, thinking about the gap between almost what exists today and what's gonna exist tomorrow. And building what you want to exist in the future. That's kind of the creation of Nucleus. Why should somebody like myself even care about getting my whole genome sequenced? Like, what's the key value that you're providing?
Do you care about being healthy and living forever? I try to. Okay. So then whole genome is for you. I think there's actually several applications of whole genome sequencing. One of the first is, like, the name of my cousin, right, shared long QT or doctors suspected she had long QT. Long QT is something where if you know your genetic risk, you take something called a beta blocker and reduces your risk of suddenly dying by 10x.
So, obviously, that's, I mean, that literally saves your life, a giant test. Then there are cases where, things like breast cancer or even Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, where you can take specific preventative action today to mitigate your risk for breast cancer, for example, if you always have a BRCA1 or BRCA2, more aggressive earlier screening, even Alzheimer's, like, a neurogenetic disease.
There are actual lifestyle changes you can make to reduce your risk of that condition. Colorectal cancer is a great example, where it's extremely preventable, right, if you have greater genetic risk, but most people don't know.
There's a crazy statistic that around, I think, 90% of people with what's called a pathogenic variant for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and familial hypercholesterolemia, which is like high cholesterol, right, old diseases, by the way, that are preventable and actionable. Ninety percent of people don't know they have a genetic variant that increases the risk for these conditions. So that means it's pretty insane if you think about it.
That's one other application yet another is obviously family planning. Right? You want to have healthy children. Hundreds of millions of Americans do not know if they're a carrier for a specific, rare disease that they could potentially, if their partners also care, pass on to their children. That's an obvious application of whole genome sequencing that anyone who wants to have kids ought to get their genome sequenced.
Another application is pharmacogenomics, which is how your DNA affects your metabolism of different drugs. And so today, if you look at these different applications, a lot of people don't know they actually all exist in the genome. It's kind of decentralized. There are different tests with different applications. Nucleus kind of combines 70,000 genetic tests, 70,000 genetic tests into just one. That's the power of whole genome sequencing. You engineered yeast a long time ago Yeah.
To make them resistant to antibiotics. What did you learn about human biology at that time? I think one of the most interesting things is that you can almost hack biology. Like, you know, people always think about hacking in the computer context, but you can also hack biology, and that there's a code of life, and the code of life is DNA.
And there are just sometimes these random errors that can have kind of disastrous consequences, but through human beings' ingenuity, we have found a way to correct these errors. And I think that idea that biology is malleable, I think that's really stuck with me since then, and I think it will stick with me forever. And you went to Penn, For a bit. For a bit. You decided to drop out.
Why did you decide to drop out and what are the people around you who are close to you, your family, friends, think about that. I think for me, I was following my bliss. There's a source of Campbell quote about having your inner being and inner plane sort of match the physical plane, and that's bliss. And me going after to build Nucleus, to sort of do the kind of mad scientist throwing in, going to the woods and to start, you know, researching, that was my calling.
When you have a calling like that, you ought to have the courage to go to, like, like, you know, literally let go of what's, you know, behind what you know. I found some I think I thought school too could be like kind of stifling. I thought it to be sort of this place where there was a habit amongst very smart and capable people to almost settle in almost like a it was like almost like a factory. Yeah. Right? It was like a factory.
You come in, you know, they calm you down, you know, you you know, they tried to kind of stifle your individual creativity or individual genius because everyone has it, and then they found you off to McKinsey. And, you know, that didn't feel right to me. So I think that's why I left. And, you know, obviously, my parents weren't happy with it.
I mean, they're immigrants from Iran. They very much believe in education as do I, but I think we had different models of kind of what life could look like and what life could be. I mean, it was very hard though, admittedly. It's very hard that year. I said in a previous podcast with, you know, the founder of Morning Brew, I said that, I was motivated by both love and fear, love of the craft of kind of building your understanding up to a scientific frontier and productizing that.
But also a fear, right, a fear of failing, a fear of, you know, disappointing basically everyone I knew. Also, this kind of constant stress from, you know, parents and society more broadly with, like, you're kind of wasting your time. You're a waste of space almost. So there was that love and that fear in that balance, but that balance also propelled me forward to have almost a maniacal focus on building. You mentioned it was a very hard year.
What was going on behind the scenes or internally in your head that you were thinking about in trying to get done? So one of the first things I did was I figured that I should read a research paper at the frontier of genomics and then build my understanding up to that paper. Right? It's almost like, this is where I want to end up. I don't understand these things. Now let me go start researching those things.
So there's a lot of statistical genetics, computational genomics, a lot of independent learning, a lot of notebooks. I mean, there's a picture on Twitter of, like, I think eighteen subject notebooks with material. And so what you have to do when doing independent work, deep independent research is you both have to make the curriculum and then operate within the curriculum.
And that's the only thing a lot of people don't fully understand, which is if you go to school, for example, at school, you know, the first day, what do they do? They hand your syllabus. You know, they say, okay. This is what we're gonna do. This is kind of the plan. This is what we're gonna study. And you're almost operating under someone else's kind of model of the subject. The difficult thing about independent research is actually not necessarily doing it.
It's what to do and in what progression. That's actually the hard thing to figure out. So you had to both because you also don't know the subject well enough to know what the steps should be. So there's so many difficulties with that. So you kind of have to both be the designer of your system and then operate within your system.
And I think something I realized during this year was that sort of all the kind of and it's funny because I think about this a lot more with startups, but all these sort of thinking that I had been operating in my entire life dissipated, was gone.
When you wake up every day in your bedroom by yourself, you know, part of any school, you know, kind of stop talking to your friends and, you know, you're just literally just you kind of looking at yourself, you know, in the mirror every day, you build your own world kind of. And you started from ground zero with all your assumptions of how the day should go and what you should study. And there's a certain sort of agency with that.
There's a sense of empowerment with that, but there's also this feeling of letting go. So these are some of the things that was kind of going through my mind. You dropped out of college and you go to raise $1 million for this biotech company that's gonna change the world. Yes. What was the feedback that you were getting from investors? Because you'd probably be one of the very few biotech founders that have no Ph.D., have no not even a college degree. What was going on at that time?
I We've raised a pre-seed round in kind of March 2021 at that point. I texted Cole this angel investor. He's Corey Levy from Z Fellows. Highly recommend, by the way, if any, you know, founders starting off the journey. Definitely apply to Z Fellows. It's a fantastic program. The community is so great. And I texted Corey and, you know, he basically ignored the text. Yeah. There's just two phones at the time. Probably still does.
I had two phones, and, you know, he didn't check the other phone for weeks. Eventually, we got on the phone. And then, you know, I probably gave the most, like, aggressive, garbled pitch. You know, nuclear says, whoa. It's like, oh my God. What did he just say? Like, why, you know, what the hell if I had the worst pitch ever given? And then I remember him being like, oh, you know, you should talk to this, you know, other person's kind of, you know, a friend of mine. I said, okay.
His name was Ed Lando at Pareto. I'm stuck on the phone with Ed and Corey. I think, you know, maybe a week later. And then, maybe 24 hours after that, they, you know, said we want to invest, you know, $200,000. There's a video on this Nest camera that we have in my home of it's raining. There's no one home that day for whatever reason, which is actually pretty weird. But I literally grabbed, you know, screaming in the rain because of such a kind of such a release. Right?
That was how the journey started from fundraising. At that point, brought in a couple of people, and then went to raise a seed round several months later that fall. The seed round was extremely difficult. I think Silicon Valley tends to have a systematic sort of underappreciation for not software plays. I mean, people tend to invest in things that you know, they at least have some sense of. Right? Biotech is kinda spooky. Right?
Nucleus kind of sits in the intersection of things that not many people are kind of versed in. Right? If you made your money in B2B SaaS, you're not necessarily gonna go after, you know, the next genomics company. Right? It's not exactly how it works. So effectively, every single investor actually said no until Founders Fund, right, which is, of course, what Founders Fund's also known for, which is coming in when everyone else is kinda bearish, they're bullish.
And so that was the kind of initial seed round of funding. And then several months later, Alexis Ohanian came in and put in another, you know, $12 million or so. At that point, we became one of the most well-backed next companies ever. And so what might have seemed like an overnight kind of, quote, quote, success story was years in the making. It really was. Anyway, there was intense, intense, fervor, pathological motivation that wound up happening.
And that's actually a good lesson for, I think, a lot of especially young founders. I think the worst thing that could happen for young founders is you wake up one day. I'm gonna do this thing. Then the next day you raise, you know, a lot of money. It's bad. You need to build the intellectual foundation. You need to build up the intellectual alpha that when you get the capital, there's almost this, like, exponentiating effect.
We're combining the capital with what you know, you become unstoppable. For the investors that didn't back you or Yeah. said no. Why did they say no and why are they wrong? I don't really think about them, honestly. But, why did they say no? I mean, they make up all sorts of frankly nonsense. Yeah. I'll say this. I do think that a lot of investors did not understand the decreasing costs of whole genome sequencing. They don't understand that.
They don't understand that there's been a platform shift in genomics. And I think founders don't actually know that. They had that intuition. They've been, you know, they they've they've actually been investing at that frontier. And so I gave them the prepared mind to invest in Nucleus. I think a lot of investors did not had not done their diligence. They had not they had not done their homework.
When you talked about one of the greatest technological decreases in cost ever, you would think an investor would know that, but they didn't. And the returns will reflect that. How old are you today? 24. What advantage does being a 24-year-old founder give you? I think a couple of things. One is naiveté or strength. Especially in this business. Not knowing how hard it's going to be enables you to have the wonderful, delicious, delusion to begin.
The second thing is it's a fresh perspective on technology, society, kind of, clinical, considerations, a a Fresh perspective that isn't necessarily bound by a sort of orthodoxy. And so you end up doing what I think is just most intuitive, which ends up being kind of what's best for the customer or what you think is best. And what you think is best, honestly, you're not burdened by any sort of ideological dead weight. Right?
When you're in an industry for so long, and you've seen so many different kinds of technical advancements, you're almost held back by the experience just as much as you're held forward. Right? If you think about 23, for example, their technology is, you know, twenty years old. Crazy to think about it. They're still actually selling this to people. Right? Talk about how it's almost like the burden of experience to an extent. Right? It's the classic innovator's dilemma problem.
It's always the Google and OpenAI as well. Right? You don't wanna kill the golden goose. Also, I would say that a lot of people with a lot of experience, obviously, they're critical. I mean, we have, you know, plenty of scientists on nuclearists that we work with to develop and craft our product. That goes without saying, but you need to have a spirit that is defined by the capitalist markets, not by academia. Academia tends to be somewhat more conservative.
I think Silicon Valley and startups tend to be more kind of liberal, more aggressive. We wanna bring the frontier of genomic insights into the hands of the people. Investigation isn't necessarily enterprising. They're somewhat different. I think to build a great company, you need to be both investigative and enterprising. Right?
You need to be able to harness the wonders and the beauty of academia, which so much of Nucleus is based on and we deeply appreciate, with the kind of, you know, optimism and energy of a Silicon Valley startup. You know, you always want to find paradoxes, I think, in life, and I think that's one of those paradoxes that makes a company like Nucleus so beautiful. We've talked a lot about genomics and genome sequencing, but I want to make sure ourselves and the audience are all on the same page.
What does that mean in simple terms? What is genome sequencing? Everyone starts off with DNA. So DNA, you can think of it as the language of life. There's around 6,000,000,000 DNA letters that make up your genome. Your genome just means all your DNA. Old genetic tests would basically look at a small fraction of these letters. Think about a book. With a book that's a thousand pages, they maybe looked at, you know, 10 pages. Nucleus looks at all 1,000, all your DNA.
So much of genetic research and consumer genetics was based off this older technology. This, you know, system, this technology looked at a small chapter. And I think what's so powerful today is now that we can get this entire read, we have basically, as I mentioned earlier, kind of combining all these genetic tests that are on the market into just one. And so that's kind of the inception of, you know, Nucleus. You mentioned 23andMe.
There are a lot of listeners who might be listening to this and sound like, oh, that sounds pretty familiar. Why are you not 23andMe? What makes you guys different? Yeah. It's a good question. So 23andMe is based off this older technology that looks at less than 0.1 percent of someone's DNA. So because they look at less than 0.1 percent of someone's DNA, they miss tens of thousands of critical DNA differences that shape your disease risk as well as your traits.
They also can't give comprehensive family planning to people, amongst other things. So that's principally why. Furthermore, we actually integrate a lot more non-genetic information to our analyses. Things like cholesterol, A1C levels, etc., to build models that can more accurately gauge someone's overall risk. So we don't just stop at the genetics, specifically the entirety of someone's genome. We also incorporate in non-genetic information as well. So I get the value of whole genome sequencing.
Yes. But in one of your interviews, you mentioned that it's an inevitability that every single person has their entire genome on their iPhone. Yeah. Data and access to information are getting so democratized that we often might have too much information flowing into our brains every day. How far away are we from seeing this a reality? And why does it matter that we have this easy access to that type of data? I don't think we have enough health data, frankly.
I think health care is way too qualitative. It's almost ancient in the way that it operates. I mean, what you really need to build is a real-time consumer-centric quantified health platform that tracks the entirety of someone's health data on it. Right? So, hey, Kian, it's a 24-year-old male living in Brooklyn. Wow. Your super high LDL levels in the last blood test.
That's actually no surprise because you're in the 98th percentile for familial hypercholesterolemia, you know, your genetic risk for high cholesterol. We found people with similar genetics, sex, and age as you saw, you know, 10% reduction to LDL levels when they did this specific workout that's tracked by your Apple Watch. All of a sudden, you're kinda closing the loop. You're integrating different kinds of molecular diagnostics with your personal hardware device into one platform.
That's the future. And that is much more of a data-driven future that's contextualized for the patient. So I agree with you that, like, whole genome sequencing, a ton of data. You don't wanna just data dump people. Right? Instead, you wanna kinda very thoughtfully communicate the results to customers. And I think this is what's so beautiful, which is in the genomics era, where people have, you know, the whole genome on the smartphone, it's not just about the DNA.
It's about the integration of the DNA with the rest of what someone does. A lot of people take blood tests. Maybe they do, you know, body scans. Maybe they take supplements, right? To not have your whole genome as part of that kind of broader picture, you're missing such a critical kind of foundational element of your health. You also asked for kind of predictions on when it's gonna happen. I think, you know, it's 2024.
I think by 2030, there's no reason why we can't have hundreds of millions of people sequenced. There's no reason why. You've raised tens of millions of dollars from some of the most well-known investors in the world. How have you gone about, I guess, mainly getting customers for Nucleus and spreading the word about what you're building and building trust with consumers at an early level?
One of the reasons why I founded Nucleus was I wanted better for the industry, not just in the kind of technical and scientific sense, but also in the sense of kind of data agency and trust. Right? I felt like the first-generation genetic testing companies struggled with building that trust and, you know, frankly, did not give people enough agency over their DNA. So Nucleus does things fundamentally differently. First off is we sequence all samples in the United States on U.S. machines, period.
By default, we do not share any genetic or protected health information with any third party. People can download their DNA, their raw DNA file at any time. It's yours. We also are HIPAA compliant. We're CLIA certified. We're CAP accredited. We follow all the kind of regulations that exist today for lab-developed tests. In other words, I'm trying to say, we want to bring a kind of clinical quality and data agency to the customer.
To answer kind of one of your other questions on, like, how are we getting customers? One of the things that always works best with any consumer products is word-of-mouth. I think we always strive to build a product that you want to tell your friends about. I mean, you kind of lose this when you're talking about your results. I'm sure almost instinctively that you got your results. You want to tell your family, want to tell your friends. Right?
I know today, yeah, I got my results, and I was in the 99th percentile for schizophrenia. I was like, wow. I mean, that's crazy. I would never suspect that. And still, like, even if you're 90th percentile for your genetic risk, your overall risk is still really low. So I'm okay, you know, God willing.
But that is something that I'm going to tell people forever in the sense of, like, you want to tell your friends, want to tell your family, but also if you're having kids, I mean, obviously, if you get tested and you're a carrier, certainly, your significant other should get tested. Right? And I think that kind of organic growth is one thing to be really focused on. There's no better marketing than word-of-mouth. That makes us think people love.
What I've found from interviewing 100 entrepreneurs is that the larger your ambition, the more strenuous and painful the journey is. What are some of the most painful, toughest challenges that you've had to go through so far while building the company? I mean, there's, like, the old cliché where it's like, what's the one thing you didn't realize in starting a startup initially? And it's always like, oh, well, this is so hard. It's like those classic answers. It's like, this is so hard.
So much harder than I, you know, so much harder than I thought. How is it hard? I think it's hard in a lot of ways. I think it's I think it's hard. So if you think about a company, I mean, think I mean, imagine this. Right? You're in your bedroom, you're one person. You wake up one day. You go from literally having nothing. I mean, no money, no resources, no one even believes in you except for, you know, yourself, basically. Do you have $3 million?
I guess you had $200K first and then $3 million, but the point is there's a there's a jump. There's a woah, and the jump requires, you know, adaptation, immediate adaptation. You have to adapt very quickly. Right? It's a it's a different kind of thing. Once money enters, like, the lifeblood of a company goes from kind of an investigative, kind of almost research project to an enterprise. That's a big jump. Right?
And spend a year to kind of really do, you know, very intense 10-hour-plus-a-day, deep work to then needing to hire people, to recruit, you know, to build a product, to go raise money, you know, to think about the regulations and the regulatory strategy, right, that's a jump that requires intense adapting, and you have to adapt very quickly.
And that happens at every juncture, right, you know, when we moved from, you know, one person, two people, three people to even more, and then even more, even more, then, also, there's, like, a whole managing component. Then all of a sudden, you have, you know, different departments. You have communications. You have operations. You have clinical genetics. You have science. You have products. You know, you have marketing. And then you have to know how to kinda fit all these pieces together.
It's emotionally draining because you just give, I mean, not that it's emotionally draining. That's not why it can be physically draining. Because you can be so tired. Right? You work such long hours. You give something everything that you can possibly give it. Literally, everything that a human being can give, you give it. You don't get a lot of sleep, but you also love it. So in that way, it's not emotionally draining. It's actually, you know, kind of deeply emotionally fulfilling too.
So I think kind of the need that it can be, you know, physically tiring. It can be a lot to just process. Like, there's so many different pieces of information and part of the job with entrepreneurs to balance and to know kind of what to actually focus on, like, you know, the whole, like, keep the main thing the main thing. Yep. So it's an eclectic mix of things, but it's also kind of bare in a way because you give everything you have to it. Right?
Like, you're putting all your chips on the table, and there's a vulnerability to that, I think, that honestly makes it hard, but makes it very intense. Before we went live, you were talking to me about all the things that you and the team are working on, and there's a whole list of seven to 10 things that you're running through in your head right now. How do you figure out what are the most important things to focus on? I think it's all about the customer. I think it's all about the customer.
And when the customer is the consumer, or the customer sometimes for us can also be another kind of clinic or, you know, we also do certain B2B deals as well. It's always thinking about how can we provide value to the customer and starting with the customer and then kind of building to the product. So a lot of the work that we do is about kind of satisfying both those customers, and they're a little bit different. And so there is a balance for me.
I try to, you know, keep the organization kind of focused on one of them as I kind of do certain B2B sales, but I definitely think it always has to go back to the customer. You can't get kind of lost in the sauce, so to speak. What does the customer want? What does the customer want? What's, like, what's the first thing I asked you when I saw you? And I'm like, how are your results? Right? That's all data collection for me. Data collection for me. How can I make this product better?
How can I make it more? How can I make it more social, right, to where people wanna share the results? It's easier to share your results, right, because the product is actually pretty inexpensive for marketing. Right? Nothing's better than kind of someone, you know, I talk about word-of-mouth. How do you kind of productize word-of-mouth? Right? So there's all these different considerations. What next genomic analysis should I prioritize? Right?
We're pushing out traits, for example, in a couple of weeks. That's very exciting. I would be pushing out, you know, pharmacogenomics and, you know, even some other really cool features. How do I kind of balance that? What's the priority? What do I wanna accomplish? What does the customer want? Right? The the these are the what what what do I have the scientific resources for today? Right? What what are the regulations? Right? I think there's that considerations.
So there's such an eclectic mix of different, kind of pros, projects, tasks, considerations, especially in this business. Breakthroughs like this can raise questions. Sure. Is it trustworthy? Yeah. How do you address those? Well, I would say that, you know, we're a CLIA-certified CAP-accredited test, which basically means that we have shown our analytical validity. There's no kind of higher certifications for a lab test today in the United States. So we're very proud of that.
We're very proud of the calls that we make and the kind of clinical quality that we provide our customers. Privacy is also another big thing that can get frequently discussed. And especially when it pertains to personal data and personal health data, too. I was reading recently that 23andMe had a hack where, like, seven million people had their DNA exposed through the leak. How do you deal with stuff like that and how do you address those concerns? First off, you have 2FA enabled.
I mean, 23andMe didn't even have 2FA enabled, which is a big problem, which is actually what, you know, caused that hack where people would basically recycle logins and then people would log in using their account. I think it goes well beyond that, though. I think about privacy security, kind of I mentioned this earlier, you have to start from the inception of the company.
From the beginning, you have to be thinking about privacy security, which I'm very happy to say we did because we wanted to build something better for us, right, and then give that to everyone. So there's a couple of things that we do. One is we sequence, you know, in the United States, on U.S. machines always without question. Right? We don't ship the sample overseas. We don't ship the sample somewhere in the United States and then sequence it on, you know, Chinese machines. We don't do that.
Everything we do is in the United States. People control their data. By default, we don't share any genetic or protected health information with any third party besides service providers like our physician network. Right? It's that simple. We are, as I mentioned, CLIA certified, CAP accredited, the highest quality standard for a lab-developed test in the United States. We also let people download their raw data, right, so they can actually download it and do whatever they want with it.
It's your data. We separate the genetic information from the PHI, put them in different databases, and we're also constantly thinking about ways of making all our servers and all our security better and better. Right? It's not that you just stop. You don't say, okay, we're secure. We're good. Our policies are good. It's like, how do we get better? Right? How do we make sure to prevent? Right? It's just like with diseases.
We don't want to treat something after the fact; we're going to prevent it. One thing I want to mention on this, though, that I think is interesting is a lot of people associate genetics with, like, oh, Golden State Killer Or, like, the FBI. What they don't actually realize is if you look at the last, like, kind of, 15 years that 23andMe has been running, I think they've had around, like, 11 subpoenas from law enforcement, and they've complied with none of them.
Google in contrast has around, you know, 20,000 a quarter, and they comply with the vast majority of them. So I do think there's a bit of a actual kind of There's this narrative about, you know, genetics and kind of law enforcement and security, but actually it's not true. If you look at Facebook, you know, Meta, Google, Amazon, etc., that's actually where law enforcement goes to get data. It's not your genetic data. So I think that's something that I think is pretty interesting.
And so we talked a little bit earlier, but you don't have a Ph.D., but about half your team does, which About half. Yeah. Helps you see some blind spots when building out the company. What are some of those blind spots that they see that help you? I think honestly the thing with someone having a Ph.D. or not, I'm very grateful that I am technically very strong. I think the thing that they really bring is I view us as almost like intellectual sparring partners. Right?
And to have intellectual sparring partners, it's almost like the old Steve Jobs analogy where he talks about, like, putting kind of rocks together, and then, you know, the rocks they hit and they hit and hit, and they both come out kinda beautiful. That I think is really the magic of having other scientists on the team, because in any scientific discipline, anyone who does science, it's not a fixed clear cut. This is the answer. Right?
If you want to bring two scientists together, let me tell you they're going to argue about something inevitably. That's just the name of how it is. Right? So I think they really help elevate the organizational thinking. A product level to hold the weight, you know, to the actual underlying kind of algorithmic level. Yeah. And what's your long-term goal for the company? What do you eventually want to try to build this into?
someone needs to build a real-time consumer-centric quantified health platform. Right? With the entirety of someone's health data, from kind of molecular diagnostics, they'll be up to kind of different, device collected by wearables, it's interconnected. Right?
So if you think about nucleus, when we tell someone that a higher genetic risk for a disease, what next, and how do we kind of show people how their risk changes, if they get older, if they lose weight, if their cholesterol goes up, if their cholesterol goes down, right, if they start smoking or stop smoking. Right?
That, I think, is the beginning of something much more powerful, which is something that can kind of finally close the loop in health care where it's so often about treating diseases. And if there are preventive measures, the preventive measures are kind of soft. Right? It's kind of qualitative. You want to make it super rigorous, super quantified. You can really see that kind of today with the Nucleus platform.
And then in doing so, you can hopefully make preventable diseases a thing of the past and have people just live, you know, much longer. Things that simple. And before we wrap it up, we like to end each interview with a couple of closing questions. Sure. One is what's your greatest failure and what did you learn from it? I think one of the greatest failures I had was not acting decisively enough when I knew someone wasn't the right fit for the Nucleus team.
Startups are small, right, a bad apple really does ruin the bunch. And that is one of the things I regret the most. I think as a founder, the moment you have kind of an icky feeling about someone, they should be let go of. They're not the right fit for the organization. How do you know whether they should truly be let go of, or if you need to do some more training on your front to help weave them into the team?
I think it's a, like, it's never, like, it's almost like, many drips cause the cup to overflow versus, like, there's, like, a huge tsunami. I hope not, at least. I mean, that's, you know, it's probably possible, but that's not ideal. I think you, you know, you get a kind of drip. You get a feeling. You gotta feeling.
And then kind of it becomes more and more and more and more and more and more evident, right, whether it's the core quality, whether it's the interpersonal skills, whatever ends up being. So I think it's both like something that you can kinda track intellectually, but also with your intuition. Right? So it's not purely intellectual. It's not purely intuitive. It's a mix of both.
We can kind of point to very specific things that the person has done that's been lackluster, but also you kinda get an inkling. I can also note another good sign is if two people independently come to you and both say something. That's always a strong sign. Like, because 1,000, oh, that's interesting. You know, 2 independently saying the same things. We're from different departments about someone that's always a sign. So, you know, there's a mixture of things, but I think you get a feel for it.
And what scares you the most today? You know, the ball's in my hands, right, like, I sometimes I think of, like, this is, like, an NBA player and, you know, you're there to perform. But when the ball's in your hands, there's really nothing to worry about. You know? Like, I mean, like, I think fear and stress can kinda come from the unknown. It can come from when you almost feel like you don't have agency. That's where a lot of fear comes from or a lot of stress.
I feel like I have so much agency. I have so much control. Like, the ball's in my hands and the fate of Nucleus kind of rests. And that's beautiful. There's nothing to be kind of scared of there. So I don't really view it as fear. I view it as just like there's, like, energy power. You know? What's the best piece of advice you've ever received? And what's the worst piece of advice you've ever received? The best piece of advice is keep going.
You know, when you're in hell, keep walking, that advice never fails. You don't stop. You win. It's that simple. Worst piece of advice probably don't drop out of college. That's the worst. Why is it the worst? I mean, if you got the drive, if you got the energy, if you got the dream, you don't belong in college. I mean, that's just the reality, but it is also true that college has its purpose. I don't want to kind of, you know, diminish it completely. It does have its purpose. Doesn't its role.
But if you're ready, if you're ready, go. I mean, you don't need anything to hold you back. Yeah. And lastly, if I slid you over a phone and you could call your sixteen-year-old self, would you call? And if so, what would you say? Yeah. I'd call. I mean, I would call if I just say, follow up with this. Do you know what you need to do? I think people have their calling. People have their craft. People have their love. You have to tap into it, though.
You have to really you have to have the courage to follow through with it. And I think I would give my younger self reminder to kind of listen to that little stream you know, in my consciousness. How do you tap into it? Close your eyes, meditate. I mean, that's literally how you do it, but kind of more metaphysically, like, you know, like, people know. You just know that there's some things that are much deeper than just like, oh, I know this fact. It's much deeper. It's in your psyche.
It's in your soul. It's in your kind of soul architecture. Listen to that. Business line and then, you know, run as fast and as hard as you can toward it. It's not gonna be easy, though. Right? It never is. Nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. No. No. Absolutely not. Awesome. Well, I think that's a great way to end it. Kian, thanks for taking the time to join the show. We'll have a link to Nucleus in the episode description down below for anyone who wants to take a look, and thanks for joining.
Thank you so much.