The Biotech Startups Podcast

→ WHAT IT COVERS Richard Yu, cofounder and CEO of Abalone Bio, traces his path from physics undergraduate at UC Berkeley in 1989 through structural biology at Yale and systems biology at the Molecular Sciences Institute, revealing how immigrant upbringing, interdisciplinary training, and serial exposure to entrepreneurial culture shaped his approach to biotech founding.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sujal Patel, co-founder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology, explains why proteomics remains scientifically underserved despite 95% of FDA-approved drugs targeting proteins, how Nautilus built four distinct technical pillars over nine years and ~$500M to analyze billions of protein molecules simultaneously, and what commercialization looks like starting in neurology.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sujal Patel recounts the high-stakes acquisition of Isilon by EMC, detailing months of OEM pretense negotiations, a Saturday phone negotiation that landed at $33.85 per share, post-acquisition leadership decisions that preserved $25 billion in lifetime revenue, and the founding of Nautilus Biotechnology with co-founder Parag Malik in 2016.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sujal Patel recounts founding Isilon Systems in 2001 during the dot-com collapse, raising an $8.4M Series A as Seattle's only such deal that year, navigating enterprise storage sales against 200 competitors, taking the company public, firing a CEO and CFO mid-crisis, and rebuilding toward EMC acquisition. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Founder naivety as asset:** Entrepreneurs who fully understand every risk before starting rarely launch.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sujal Patel, cofounder of Nautilus Biotechnology and former CEO of Isilon Systems (acquired by EMC for $2.6B in 2010), traces how an immigrant upbringing in New Jersey, self-taught programming on a Franklin ACE 1000, and open-source FreeBSD contributions built the foundation for serial entrepreneurship across tech and biotech. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Open-source as career infrastructure:** Contributing to FreeBSD as an unpaid extracurricular activity at University of Maryland...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Roy Maute, CEO of Feast Therapeutics, details cofounding the 34-person clinical-stage immunotherapy company in 2021 with Irving Weissman and Amira Barkal, pursuing CD24 as a macrophage checkpoint target, navigating post-COVID biotech funding cycles, and advancing PHST001 through monotherapy dose escalation trials. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Fundraising timing:** When raising a Series A at the tail end of a boom cycle, pitch a conservative, focused capital ask tied to specific...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Roy Maute traces his path from co-founding Ab Initio Biotherapeutics — a 10-person yeast-display drug discovery startup with a Pfizer collaboration — through its acquisition by Ligand Pharmaceuticals, then joining 47 Inc before its $4.9 billion Gilead acquisition, extracting management and collaboration lessons across each transition.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Roy Maute, postdoctoral researcher turned biotech founder, details his PhD training under Ricardo Dalla Favera at Columbia studying B-cell lymphoma genetics, his postdoc in Irving Weissman's Stanford lab exploring CD47 macrophage immunotherapy, and how deliberately choosing demanding environments over comfortable ones accelerated his scientific and entrepreneurial development.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Roy Maute, CEO and cofounder of Feast Therapeutics, traces his path from a creative, DIY-focused Dallas upbringing through UC Berkeley and Columbia University, revealing how non-scientific roots, serendipitous lab connections, and a sink-or-swim academic culture shaped his identity as a biotech founder. → KEY INSIGHTS - **DIY Mindset as Founder Training:** Growing up renovating dilapidated historic houses instilled a core operating principle: gather the information, get the...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Caleb Appleton, partner at Bison Ventures, a frontier tech fund deploying ~$5M average check sizes from pre-seed through Series B, outlines his framework for evaluating tech-bio companies, explains why revenue-generating biotech models outperform pure drug discovery plays, and describes how data platforms creating 10x deeper or cheaper datasets should decide between selling technology versus building drugs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Caleb Appleton recounts his transition from venture investor at Innovation Endeavors to operator at TuneIn in 2020, where he managed a $50M revenue turnaround after pandemic-canceled sports leagues decimated the subscription business, then returned to venture at Bison Ventures in May 2023. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Unstructured venture roles accelerate growth:** Joining a fund mid-spin-out, with no established playbook, forced Caleb to simultaneously source deals, run diligence,...