Dana Foss and Ross Wilson are the cofounders of Editpep, a biotech startup focused on developing CRISPR-based therapeutics. They are using a proprietary peptide-based delivery platform that enables targeted delivery to specific cell types, particularly for hard-to-reach areas like the brain. While Dana Foss is the CEO, Ross Wilson is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and also the Director of Therapeutic Delivery at the Innovative Genomics Institute at the Universi...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 59
Chandana Haque is the Executive Director of Altitude Lab, a healthcare startup accelerator building a community of diverse entrepreneurs in Utah. Altitude Lab was cofounded in 2020 by Chandana and Chris Gibson, the co-founder & CEO of Recursion in Salt Lake City. They recently announced the launch of a pre-seed venture fund aimed at supporting early-stage biotech startups impacted by recent federal funding policy shifts. This pre-seed venture fund is dedicated to funding the highest impact i...
Mar 11, 2025•52 min•Ep. 58
Monica Rosoff, the founder and CEO of LBBAL™ Alianza. Prior to launching Alianza, Monica was a partnering executive with roles of increasing seniority at Genentech, Gilead, Kite and Exelixis. Over the course of over two decades, she had the opportunity to lead and participate in a wide diversity of deals, negotiations, diligence exercises, alliances, technology transfers, M&A integrations, dispute resolution negotiations, amendments and terminations–at all stages of the drug development and ...
Dec 10, 2024•51 min•Ep. 57
Zack Shildhorn is an investing Partner at venture firm Lux Capital. He played multiple key roles that helped the firm scale from less than $100M to more than $4B in assets under management. After witnessing thousands of pitches, he saw that even the most disruptive startups often struggled to develop effective narratives. Having worked closely with leading technology companies as an investor and Board member, he brings a unique ability to connect with key stakeholders and distill complex ideas i...
Sep 10, 2024•54 min•Ep. 56
Corey Goodman, Ph.D., is the managing partner of venBio, a venture capital firm he cofounded in 2011. venBio already has 7 FDA approved drugs on the market, saving and improving lives. Corey spent 25 years as Professor of Biology at Stanford University and Evan Rauch Chair of Neurobiology at U.C. Berkeley, where he was a HHMI Investigator, Head of the Neurobiology Division, and co-founder and Director of the Wills Neuroscience Institute. Corey co-founded seven biotechnology companies, and led on...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 55
Abhishek Tripathi, is the Director of Mission operations of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Abhi is also the Chair of the Air and Space track startups at Skydeck, which is UC Berkeley's startup accelerator program. For over two decades, Abhi has been at the forefront of human and robotic space exploration. At SpaceX, he spearheaded the certification of both the cargo and crew Dragon programs, a pivotal achievement in commercial spaceflight. His expertise ...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 54
Richard Lyons, Ph.D., is the Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer, at the University of California, Berkeley. Rich is an economist and the former dean of the business school. Rich will become the next chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. We talk about a wide variety of topics around the Evolution of innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem at Berkeley. We covered topics like paradigm shifts, cultural transformations, overcoming inertia; ...
Apr 30, 2024•58 min•Ep. 53
Shahram Seyedin-Noor is the founder and managing partner at Civilization Ventures. Shahram received a JD from Harvard and worked at Wilson Solsinis and Cooley before going into investment banking at firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. He then entered the startup world co-founding several startups. He eventually ended up Angel investing and in 2017, launched Civilization Ventures, focused on supporting cutting-edge innovations in health tech and biology. Shahram has over a dozen exits u...
Apr 09, 2024•55 min•Ep. 52
Leo Polovets is the Co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures. Leo focuses on enterprise software and technical products at Susa. About two years ago, He also started Humba Ventures, a fund that invests in deep tech and critical national sectors like energy and defense at Humba. Leo led Susa's investments in Mashgin, People Data Labs, Scalyr, and Treasury Prime. Having been a software engineer for 10+ years, Leo approaches challenges with an engineering mindset and supports portfolio compa...
Feb 27, 2024•53 min•Ep. 51
Caroline Winnett is the Executive Director of Berkeley Skydeck, a startup accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley. Skydeck started as a mentoring space in 2012 and soon translated into one of the leading startup accelerators in the world. SkyDeck was Formed as a partnership between UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. While it offers all the benefits of a traditional accelerator, what makes Skydeck sp...
Feb 13, 2024•52 min•Ep. 50
Paul Grand is the founder and CEO; Ayelet Marom is the Program Director for BioTools Innovator, which focuses specifically on biotools; and Jim West is the Associate Director, BioTools Innovator, who was previously the Co-Founder and CEO of, Clara Biotech, which was founded in 2018 and was acquired by Innovaprep in the summer of 2023. Jim was the first founder to go through the biotools program. In this episode of lab to startup, we first discuss some of the challenges that affect medtech and bi...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Kenichi Nogami is the co-founder and CEO of Metcela, a clinical-stage biotechnology startup pioneering the research and development of fibroblast and stem cell-based therapy for chronic heart diseases that currently have limited therapeutic options. We talk about the current treatments for heart failure and how the fibroblast technology could help this space. We explore the founding story; setting smaller milestones and fundraising to meet those goals; the role of recruiting firms in hiring in j...
Jan 02, 2024•58 min•Ep. 48
Caleb Bell III, Ph.D., is a venture partner at Corundum Systems Biology and also the President of Corundum convergence institute. We talk about the founding story of Bell biosystems; how they were able to work at various labs around the country with very little money; building teams, culture; raising money, interacting with investors, leadership transitions; and also how the company filed for bankruptcy, although after he left the startup;. Kalub agreed to dip into his experiences both as a foun...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 47
Chaeyoung Shin was the Co-founder and CEO of NAMUH, a startup focused on developing yeast fermentation technologies to produce human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). HMOs are crucial, fiber-equivalent macronutrients that are currently lacking in most formulas. Integrating them in sufficient amounts could significantly close the nutritional disparity between human milk and formula. We talk about the story behind the origin of NAMUH; transformation of Chaeyoung from a freshly minted Ph.D. to a CEO; l...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 46
Jenn Gustetic is the Director of Early Stage Innovations and Partnerships at NASA. In this episode of Lab to startup, we will learn about various funding mechanisms that NASA provides to support innovation, primarily to support NASA space missions. We talk about the funding process through contracts; differences between grants and contracts; NASA’s involvement once they fund to support researchers and startups; funding dual use technologies; surprising speed of their funding process; partnership...
Aug 01, 2023•49 min•Ep. 45
Ryan Caldbeck, is the COO of Dune, a powerful analytics platform for blockchain research. It can be used to query, extract, and visualize vast amounts of data on the Ethereum blockchain. Ryan was previously the founder, and CEO of CircleUp, a technology platform focused on finding and evaluating private companies. He is also an angel investor in several high-growth technology companies. In this episode of lab to startup, we talk about the role of independent directors at startups; how to find th...
Jul 04, 2023•50 min•Ep. 44
Vickie Kloeris is a food scientist with an out of this world career. She worked at NASA in space food systems for 34 years. She served as the NASA manager of the Shuttle first and then the International Space Station food systems. She and her teams worked through the complex challenges of creating tasty, nutritious, long-lasting, easy-to-prepare meals that support the dietary and psychological needs of astronauts living on the space station. Vickie has worked with 100s of astronauts to plan thei...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 43
Jay Keasling, the CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). He is also a Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and also the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.. He’s also a Senior Faculty Scientist @ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also holds other prestigious positions around the world. We talk about Jay’s initial foray into startups; working with grad students and postdocs; challenges translating lab research to ...
Jun 06, 2023•57 min•Ep. 42
Donna Rainone and Mike Rainone are the founders of PCDworks. PCDworks is a technology development company that helped develop hardware for over 50 big companies in the oil and gas, transportation, healthcare and several other industries; and now helping startups with a new incubator model. We first talk about lessons learned from building innovative hardware products for big companies; how they use principles of epistemology while developing new products; how they borrow lessons from their train...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 41
Jo Varshney, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life, a startup developing disease-specific simulation software designed to replace animal drug testing by using artificial intelligence. We talk about translational gap in drug discovery, the technology VeriSIM is developing, especially their virtual mouse models; some of the mathematical models being used in the process of drug discovery, challenges building partnerships with big pharma; How FDA is evolving their thought process about accep...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 40
Manny Stockman is a Partner at Osage University Partners. OUP exclusively invests in startups spun out of university research. We talk about the investment thesis of Osage University Partners; technology readiness challenges; lessons learned from investing in early stage technologies at universities; challenges with the current market research used to evaluate product market fit; and spend some time talking about equity splits involving non-operating faculty members that co-founded startups. Sho...
Mar 21, 2023•56 min•Ep. 39
Debkishora Mitra and John Waldeisen are the co-founders of Lucira Health. Lucira Health, which was originally founded as Diassess, is the first company to get an FDA approval for at-home PCR based test for COVID. We talk about the story of Lucira from its founding stage to raising; the technological and market based pivots; raising over $250M (including an IPO); COVID; leadership transition; regulatory affairs; ups and downs of the journey; FDA approval of at-home flu and covid test and the unfo...
Mar 07, 2023•2 hr 7 min•Ep. 38
Nick Dorsey and Amanda Gold are partners at Cravath, Swaine and Moore, LLP. Cravath has been known as one of the premier law firms in the US for more than two centuries. We talk about a wide variety of topics involving legal aspects for startups from incorporation to exit- incorporation, picking a law firm, equity split, vesting, hiring first employees or consultants, creating the right incentive structures using equity, valuation, negotiating with investors, dilution of equity and safeguarding ...
Feb 21, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 37
Richard Wang, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of Cuberg, a startup building the world’s first aviation-certified lithium metal battery pack. Robert is also the CEO at Northvolt America, which acquired Cuberg in 2021. We talk about the current challenges around battery innovation and solutions that are being worked on followed by Richard’s journey from being a PhD student at Stanford where he also picked up his startup education; the technology behind the lithium metal battery they developed; lesso...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 36
Vince Romanin, Ph.D., is the co-founder and CEO of Gradient. They are developing a new heat pump technology to address the impact that air conditioners impose on our climate. We talk about the problem with the current HVAC systems and air conditioners, the energy consumption and pollution they cause, history of heat pumps, and then learn about the new heat pump technology that gradient has developed to address some of those challenges. We then get into the details about the founding story; lesso...
Jan 03, 2023•59 min•Ep. 35
Wesley Jackson, Ph..D., is the co-founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Valitor. Wes was the founding CEO and led the startup through its Series B financing where they raised over$30M to date. Valitor is a biotech startup that uses a novel protein-biopolymer conjugation technology that was licensed from the University of California, Berkeley. Professors Kevin Healy and Dave Schaffer were the inventors of the technology and ended up co-founding the startup. We talk about Wesley’s dec...
Dec 13, 2022•58 min•Ep. 34
Freeman A. Hrabowski, III is the President Emeritus of UMBC (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County) who served as president from 1992 to 2022. His research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance.. He was named in 2012 by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. In 2022, Dr. Hrabowski was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In Addit...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 33
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a pioneer of software-defined networking, and a co-founder of Nicira Networks. We cover the lessons learnt from Martin's journey as an academic entrepreneur founding Nicira and factors that aspiring entrepreneurs planning to translate their research to products should consider. - Story of an accidental Ph.D., turned into an accidental but very successful entrepreneur - Shares how working with others during grad school helped his e...
Nov 15, 2022•50 min
Anjali Ramaswami, Tobias Schmid and Miroslov Gasparek, are leaders at Nucleate Bio, a nonprofit educational organization that empowers the next generation of bio-entrepreneurs to launch successful life sciences ventures. Their program connects early-career scientists with business students and provides a structured educational framework with one-on-one mentorship that leverages their world-class network & resources. In this episode of lab to startup, we talk about the pain points this group ...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 32
Matt Price is the co-founder and President of Activate , a program teaching scientists how to bring their research to market. He was previously the Managing Director of Cyclotron Road, and comes with experiences in the Renewable Energy space , Materials Science, and Venture Capital industry. In this episode of lab to startup, we talk about the Activate fellowship program, its origins, especially how they navigated carving out a niche but much needed space for supporting scientists to build start...
Oct 16, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 116
