🧬 If You Knew What Could Go Wrong, You’d Never Start - The Founder’s Leap | Sujal Patel (Part 2/4)

This episode is brought to you by Xcedar. Xcedar provides life science startups with equipment leases on founder friendly terms to accelerate r and d and commercialization. Lease the equipment you need with Xcedar. Extend your runway, hit your milestones, raise your next round at a favorable valuation, and achieve a blockbuster exit while minimizing dilution. Additionally, as a podcast listener, you can redeem exclusive discounts with a growing list of biotech vendors and get $500 off your first equipment lease by using promo code t b s p on exceda.com/partners. Welcome to the biotech startups podcast by Xida. Join us as we speak with first time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup from pre seed to IPO with your host, John Chi. In our last episode, Sujo shared stories from New Jersey, how his brother's computer sparked his coding journey and demanding his boss's job at RealNetworks at age 22. If you missed it, check out part one. In part two, Sujot talks about recognizing that enterprise customers were spending millions on storage systems that couldn't handle media files, why Rob Glass's response pushed him to leave, and how Paul Meiksel pointed to scissors on his desk and called them the scissors of opportunity. He shares why launching Isilon in late two made 50 VC introductions in two weeks, and made 50 VC introductions in two weeks, and raising 8,400,000 as Seattle's only series a that year. He also recounts landing Kodak by delivering version three software in thirty days instead of sixty, hiring a CEO who took the company public but made critical mistakes, and why firing the CEO and CFO of a public company fell to him just as Lima Monday hit. So I'm at RealNetworks. I have this entrepreneurial spike and entrepreneurial spikes are great at RealNetworks. We went from audio to video, to building a broadcast network to going and expanding into other types of consumer experience. Like, we we did a lot of stuff in four and a half years. And so being entrepreneurial at that company is great. So I hired people as well who were kind of entrepreneurial. So the people around me were entrepreneurial. So as we started to grow that business, it went from audio to video to broadcast networks. One of the things that started to happen was that enterprises started to pay attention and want to build big networks to put audio and video out on the Internet. And one of the things that we observed as I started to grow my career there, I started to interface with customers a lot more, work with our sales teams. I I would watch million dollars of my software go out And customers, I'm like, wow, we sold a million dollars of software. That's amazing. And then the customer would turn around and they would buy four or five million dollars of storage. And the stuff barely worked for these …