Maneesh Jain - Mirvie - Part 1

Intro - 00:00:00: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. Join us as we speak with first-time founders, experienced scientists, serial entrepreneurs, and Biotech investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a Biotech startup. Gain actionable insight into navigating the life sciences industry in each episode as we explore the business of science from pre-seed to IPO with your host, Jon Chee. 

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Jon - 00:01:10: My guest today is Maneesh Jain, CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a life science company that predicts pregnancy complications before they happen by revealing the underlying biology of pregnancy health. Mirvie is dedicated to shaping the future of pregnancy health through simple personalized blood tests. Prior to Mirvie, Maneesh has been a founder, CEO, or executive in five successful startups, which include ParAllele BioScience, Auriphex Bioscience, Ion Torrent, Butterfly Network, and Cirina, all of which successfully exited or commercialized to the likes of Affymetrix, Illumina, Life Technologies, the FDA, and GRAIL respectively. Before his time as an entrepreneur, Maneesh was a scientist working at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. Over the next three episodes, we cover a wide range of topics, including his early desire to leverage technology to make a societal impact, his forays into entrepreneurship and how the maternal health crisis led to Mirvie’s creation. Today, we’ll chat about the early years, covering Maneesh’s inherent curiosity as a child and where his entrepreneurial drive came from. We’ll also chat about his time at Stanford, his transition from physics to the life sciences and how it led to the founding of ParAllele BioScience. Without further ado, let’s dive into episode five of The Biotech Startups Podcast. Maneesh, so good to see you again. Thanks again for taking the time to be on the podcast.

Maneesh - 00:02:25: My pleasure. Thank you, Jon.  

Jon - 00:02:26: So as we were doing some research in our homework and as a team trying to come up with where a good place to start would be, we're thinking about turning the hands of time back and really just thinking about your early days and what drew you to science and what drew you to entrepreneurship and what was your upbringing like and influenced your style when it comes to company building.

Maneesh - 00:02:45: That's a great question. I think it's good to look back to see what has influenced your present day. For science, I just was fundamentally curious. I think from my youngest days, I was just really curious about how things worked, the way they did, and whether we could actually understand that. Was it random? Was there a pattern? And so finding those patterns and the understanding of how the world worked was always sort of innate. I just grew up that way, I think, since I was born. And so that was the beginning of the love for science. There's always a joke around my family that whenever we had a service person come in, like air conditioning is broken and somebody came in to fix that, I'd be just being very annoying peering over their shoulder trying to check out exactly what was going on when I was out of my library. I just really try to understand how things worked.

Jon - 00:03:26 Yeah, that's amazing. And I'd imagine your parents are like, “Maneesh, stop”. They actually have to fix this thing. We need you to stop. When you were growing up, was your family very embracing of your love of science? Or was there a direction that they want you to go? Or was it kind of an environment where you can pursue your own interests?

Maneesh - 00:03:43: Yeah. So my dad was actually the first in this family to go to college. And so I think he knew firsthand the value of education and just learning. They weren't scientists, my parents, but I think that sort of thirst for knowledge or like learning about the world and being ever curious, I think that was kind of instilled pretty early on. And I think also with that came, I guess, some expectations. Knowing, my dad is always famous for saying, “reach for the stars and think big and try to do something ambitious”. And so that was, I think, ingrained. But alongside that, I think some of the qualities like humility was pretty important in my family growing up that even though you can achieve things, there are others who can achieve maybe bigger things. And you just have to have humility for the world that it is and how big it is and all the possibilities. I think another value there growing up was perseverance. That is not going to be an easy journey. When you're trying to do something ambitious, then by definition, there are going to be failures along the way. And you have to kind of set your mind and work through those and sort of expect that things would not be smooth. So that's something else to think that I learned pretty early on growing up. And so then all of that really just led to a love of science, but then really translated to entrepreneurship, because as I grew older, I was like, “oh, this is great on how things work and I can start to understand that better”. But now how can I use that to improve people's lives or make a societal impact? So the entrepreneurship piece really started to come in, I think, at a subliminal level by knowing that I wanted to learn a lot about science, but then I wanted to apply it for the greater good or produce some kind of impact in people's lives using that. So that was, I think, some of the key pieces growing up.

Jon - 00:05:17: Those key pieces sound like a recipe for success. You're kind of North Star of humility. I think it rings true for me, too. I would like to think I was pretty good at playing lacrosse when I was younger. And then when I got into like collegiate lacrosse, I was like, “oh, this is what really good is”. I came in, I was just like, “yeah, I got it figured out”. And I was like, “oh, my goodness, this is a different level”. And I think it was hard for me to grapple with at first. But I think as an entrepreneur, that's so critical is having that humility to understand that there are people who are very good at what you're doing and great at other things. And I've always thought, you know, as long as you can bring people who are better than you in your corner, it's a win-win for everybody. As you're younger and you're starting to pursue your passion for science, I know you ended up at Caltech. Caltech being a storied institution, but what drew you personally to Caltech and what was that experience like at Caltech as an undergrad.  

Maneesh - 00:06:09: Yeah, so I grew up in different parts of Asia. And so I think just when I got in the opportunity to come and do science at a high level was really exciting. Similar to the experience with lacrosse. When I got there, I thought I was hot shot whatnot. And then it was like, “oh my God, everybody here is really good”. I'm still on the average at best. And so I think that sense, which comes with just having a bigger pond, right? And I think it's a great learning experience to put yourself in a position where you're in the bigger pond. And first it's intimidating, because you're like, “wow, everybody here is so good at this craft and really smart”. But then on the flip side, then you sort of start to up your game, right? And you kind of start to see what you can do and how you can learn from others and get better. So I think it was a great mix for that to realize that, “oh yeah, this is a much bigger environment and it's the best and brightest”. And how do you compete at that level? And how do you kind of find your strengths and work with others to make yourself better?

Jon - 00:07:02: Absolutely. And while you're at Caltech, did you have a undergraduate lab experience or was that something that came later for you?

Maneesh - 00:07:10: Yeah, actually it was pretty formative. The summer after my freshman year, they had this program called SURF. It's not surfing on the beach, although that would be fun, but it was Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. And that was really kind of saying, “hey, pick a topic that you're excited about and then you can do a research program on it. So I got pretty interested in lasers quite early on. And I was like, oh, this is cool. You know, all these colorful focus beams of light and what happens and there's a lot of physics behind it, of course, but those were the early days of CD players. You know, if you remember those. So this was a project I'm kind of trying to do some image processing with CD players and lasers. And I thought this was going to be a super fun project. So spend the summer doing that was my first exposure kind of taking things you learn in books to actually building stuff at their hands and seeing how it works. And of course, you know, the first few weeks was super frustrating. I didn't know what I was doing. Everything was falling apart, but gradually after a few weeks I caught on. And then at the end we had this functioning prototype. And so that was pretty exciting to kind of take your book knowledge and translate it to a real thing in the world that you can do something with. So yeah, great formative experience early on.

Jon - 00:08:12: Yeah, that was my same lab experience too. After like this foundational principles of biochemistry, I'm like, “oh, simple, very simple”. This is how the reaction will unfold. You go under the hood, start pipetting, data comes back. You're just like, “that was not what was explained in the book”. So where do I go from here? And so as you did your first lab experience, was there any mentors or professors that took you under their wing or perhaps left a lasting impression on you at Caltech.

Maneesh - 00:08:38: You know, that's one thing I've learned in my career that it's amazing when somebody bets on you just based on not what you know, but what you could become. And I think that's the best form of mentorship for somebody to see potential in you like that. So it wasn't my summer research professor, but it was another one, one of the classes that took my junior year, Professor Yariv, who was pretty famous in this field. And of course he had all these famous grad students and all kinds of amazing research that he had done. So I took this class and then I was like, well, “can I do research in your lab?” And I fully expected to be like, “well, what's your background?” Like that can't be serious. But I think it was the first example of somebody betting on me in the way of being on my parents, really just kind of seeing the potential. And that was pretty formative. And that left an impression on me over the years and certainly something that I try to do when I can now.

Jon - 00:09:21: Yeah, absolutely. And I think back on the same PIs that took a chance on me. I think that's something that's special about the startup and entrepreneurial community is this kind of culture. And then science too, it was like giving back mentorship. It's almost like apprenticeship that I think is hard to find elsewhere. And so as you were wrapping up your time at Caltech, what drew you to the idea of grad school and what piqued your inspiration to go to Stanford to focus on applied physics?

Maneesh - 00:09:45: I knew that I wanted to do something which was a bit more applied than just theoretical. So even though I was fascinated by the theories and kind of the broader picture in the field like physics, I knew that I wanted to do something more applied. And that was still, I think, from freshman year, gravitated to laser physics. So that's what I ended up doing at Stanford for grad school because I felt that was a field which intellectually I was curious about. And I think practically was closer to making a difference in people's lives potentially, although I didn't know much, but it felt like it was more applied and potentially useful. So that's sort of bent of trying to bring knowledge and use it for the greater good. I tried to carry that one step forward going to grad school. 

Jon - 00:10:22: Absolutely. And what was your grad school lab experience like? And what was the difference between your Caltech lab experience and then your Stanford lab experience if there was a difference at all.

Maneesh - 00:10:31: I think it was just that you owned the project fully and you were responsible from soup to nuts, whether it worked or didn't work, and you had to make it work and get some innovative results that were first of their kind to be able to graduate. And it's different versus then here's a project and do these pieces and you'll do fine if you can get to this place. It's much more open-ended. And so I think one of the skills in grad school that I learned were really, how do you take a big problem that feels very open-ended and start to break it into doable components? And how do you characterize the problem into pieces? And each of the pieces feels more tractable or solvable, or at least if you do these first two pieces, then the third one will be doable and the fourth. So I think taking problems which feel like big, hairy problems and breaking them down into components and then starting to tackle them in a systematic way, but also perseverance, knowing that it's not going to be a week or a month. Sometimes it might be a couple of years till you can crack a puzzle, but really sticking with it through that time was a pretty important experience.

Jon - 00:11:31: Absolutely. I think there's tons of parallels to entrepreneurship too. You mentioned the hairy goal. When you set that big, hairy, audacious goal, It looks terrifying. You're just like, “how am I going to do this?” And I find that incredibly valuable. We call it an exceeder, it's like chunking, like chunking the project into its constituent parts. In addition to making it more like actually manageable from a cerebral perspective, it also makes it like emotionally more manageable. Because like, I think if the goal is too daunting, you kind of get paralysis. You're just like, “I don't even want to start”. Like, “this is too much”. It almost seems impossible. And so at Stanford, in a similar vein to at Caltech, were there any mentors or professors that took you under their wing or left a lasting impression on you?

Maneesh - 00:12:14: My grad thesis advisor was pretty instrumental. But one of the things I realized when I was halfway through was like, know, this is kind of the epiphany. I was like, “oh my gosh, I'm in the wrong decade. What's going on here?” So when I look at the history of the work in a field like laser physics, it was all done in the 60s. And so a lot of the work that had been done in other arenas was translated over. And there was this magic decade where they invented the whole field. So we were doing exciting stuff, but it was incremental. And so one of the biggest takeaways I actually had from grad school is like, “wow, I need to be in a field which is going to have its magic decade coming up, not the magic decade has passed a few decades ago”. And it's not necessarily a decade, but I think a lot of fields you find that there's this period of 10 to 20 years where the field just explodes and just all the fundamentals and discoveries are made. And so then halfway through, I went to this talk on the Human Genome Project, which was just in the earliest stages. And I was just fascinated. I said, “wow, this is going to change the field of biology and going into the 21st century is going to become a quantitative science. It's going to be like physics or chemistry or these other kinds of physical sciences. The life sciences are going to become the same way. And then once it's quantitative, it's going to advance really fast”. So that was just kind of one of my aha moments, which at first wasn't the greatest feeling because it was like, well, all the stuff I've been doing. But then I was pretty determined. I said, “this is definitely how the future is going. I just feel I see it. And all this time, I feel I've been in the wrong decade. Now I can't write decade”. And so that was really the biggest outcome is I sort of used that to transition to life sciences. And that was a big leap, again, going into the big unknown. I think the last time I took a biology class was high school. And so it was a pretty big leap, but I somehow got convinced that it's the right thing to do as the next step for myself.  

Jon - 00:13:59: Yeah. And so it was a talk that you said that you went to. Did you just like serendipitously like, this looks interesting and just walk in, or was there someone like, “hey, like Maneesh, I recommend that you go check this out”. 

Maneesh - 00:14:09: I know halfway into grad school, I was like, what I'm doing is exciting and intellectually really challenging. And I can see the path to getting it done. But the impact is going to have to be incremental because all the stuff was done in the sixties. One good thing with Stanford is you can just go to so many departments. You can just go to the talks or planning lectures and different. So I kind of for a while just started to once a week, just go to a talk in every different department and just kind of learn about what was going on. And so it was through the course of that, that I came across this talk in the genome project. And that just really grabbed me. Part of it is a search process, knowing that I wanted to do something which was up and coming versus had been done largely in the past. And so kind of a discovery process just happened to be on this talk. And that was the beginning.

Jon - 00:14:49: That's amazing to be honest. I mean, especially during the human genome project, like in his infancy and like nascent stages, like, I mean, epic, I could imagine there's like a very big inflection point that you're like unlocked a bunch of opportunity. And so I'm going to imagine that's kind of what led to your experience at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and how you got involved. How did you find that opportunity and how did you get involved?

Maneesh - 00:15:09: They had been one other person, I think, in physics had gone over to the genome center. They had a faculty member, Ron Davis, who had done a lot of really exciting stuff in recombinant DNA in the 70s, very famous. So I just happened one day after work, I just walked over and just had a chat with him. And I was like, “hey, love to know what's going on here”. And you just got to talking about things and he's like, “yeah, you should definitely come work here”. I'm like, “that's fantastic”. You know, thanks for the opportunity. But let me just be clear. I know nothing about biology, no biochemistry, just so many misunderstandings. I don't know this field, right?” He said, “actually, that's perfect. The fact that you're a clean slate is awesome because this field is getting reinvented and we need the new ways of thinking and foundational ways of thinking”. So I said, “okay, great. I'm in”. I mean, that's enough for me, like to have an opportunity. So jumped in there, went to the genome center, spent the first two years learning a lot about biology and biochemistry. I had a lot to catch up. Stuff had happened since high school. And one of the great things about that that I learned also is you learn a lot from, obviously, from books and experts, but you also learn from people practicing, you know, biochemists and molecular biologists who were around the lab, competition biologists. So just being immersed in an environment where you had different skill sets, but you could work together to try to solve this problem, which we often find in life sciences, right? It's pretty unique. Like the breadth of skill sets we need is everything from computational to the lab and product marketing. It's such a broad breadth of skills that you need to solve life-size problems compared to, you know, if you're building an app, that needs some skills too, but it's a relatively narrower set of skills than what you do in life sciences. So I think it was really a good experience from just learning how the different things work together, how different people work together, and over the strengths of different backgrounds and how you could leverage those. So pretty exciting experience. And also what was exciting about that is I found a direct link to what I'd been wanting to do, which is translate some of this knowledge to products that could actually help people's lives. And so out of the Genome Center at Stanford, there had been several spin-offs in the past. And so, you know, those guys would come in and talk about the companies they had started and like how their experiences were. So that was a great learning experience. So I think that was a process, first couple of years of switching to life sciences and feeling like, “oh my gosh, am I going to ever know this field?” But I came up to speed, thanks to the help of many people there. And then after that, we started to work on projects and started to say, “well, we're doing these different projects, which of these can actually be worthy of a startup?” And so sort of the second two or three years there was really focused on saying, which of these technologies could really be distinctive enough and impactful enough that it's worth starting a company.

Jon - 00:17:41: Very cool. Was that what led to parallel bioscience?

Maneesh – 00:17:44 Yes.

Jon – 00:17:45: And one question, so I know a lot of our listeners are just contemplating starting a company and they may be in grad school. What was your experience with that actual spin-out process? Like, did you have to go through tech transfer? Was there a lot of red tape that you had to work through? Or was Stanford, it's like, it's pretty simple. We can spin out a company, no problem. I know every experience is a little bit different there.

Maneesh - 00:18:06: There is relatively less red tape, but I'd say in terms of the process, it's pretty much individual driven. So I think a couple of lessons, you do want some co-founders, ideally one at least. Apparently, we had quite a few co-founders, it turned out, but you really want at least one other co-founder. And part of that is just being able to not just divide responsibilities, but also bounce ideas off each other and trust in each other. So I think that piece is quite important for companies. I think the other part is really go as far as you can in academia. As far as academia is concerned, the IP is typically at the university, which you would license as a company and typically lead to a publication. And that's also valuable for the university. So you are actually contributing usefully to the university. But if the technology has big error bars, by which I mean, the key performance pieces that you need to know that it's viable and feasible, you don't want huge error bars in there. Because when you start a company and you take somebody's money, even if it's seed money or venture money, the clock starts. There's definitely a clock that starts and that clock doesn’t like two big error bars on it. 

Jon - 00:19:06: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly it. I've heard similar to those error bars. Sometimes the spin out takes place. You spin your wheels and then you figure out a little bit too late that the error bars are too big. And it's just like, I wish that I had known this before. But I also think you're absolutely right. What you pointed out about the clock ticking is important for these soon to be entrepreneurs to know. Because it almost feels like the fundraise is the battle. You're not done. Financing is secured. But that's just the start. Your journey hasn't even started yet. You haven't gone through it. And I think it's important for everyone to know. It's like that right when you get it, it's when the hard work begins. As much as fundraising is quite hard work as well. So with your co-founders for parallel bioscience, were these the folks that you worked with at the Genome Center as well?

Maneesh - 00:19:48: Yeah. So what ended up happening is I ended working with a few different groups on a few different projects. So we built, I think, the second microarray scanner. So the first one had been invented by Pat Brown at Stanford in the Biochem Department. So I had the skills to kind of build those devices. So we built the microarray scanner at the Genome Center. And so we started to do gene expression studies. So the first time you could do hundreds of genes and then potentially the whole transcriptome that you start to put down oligos to do genotyping on chips. And so now again, instead of using TaqMan to do the genotype of one or two things or a few things at the same time, you could do hundreds and thousands at the same time. And so I started this idea of being able to scale these technologies eventually to get to a genome-wide scale became pretty interesting. So there was different teams I worked with. And then eventually we got convinced that this idea we had on doing high throughput genotyping was going to be pretty powerful. And so this was really mining the best of microarrays and the best of molecular assays to do genotyping at a large scale. So instead of doing one or two at a time, you could do thousands to 10,000s at a time. And so that felt good on a few aspects. We were very naive. It was our first company. But what we knew is that the technology had legs, that if it worked, it would scale and wouldn't stop scaling till quite a bit. That we could leverage some existing platforms like microarrays as a readout. So we didn't have to build everything from scratch by ourselves. We just had to have a great assay. And then just from our work that was going on at that point in human disease, people were trying to do these things where they could link certain areas of the genome to certain diseases. But then you needed to now find which particular alleles or genotypes would be responsible. So there was a lot of excitement in the field to do that. So it was a big unmet need. So at a minimum level, which I'd recommend to any founder is like, make sure you see a big unmet need. And it doesn't have to be that you nailed the perfect application, but there has to be a couple of applications where there's unmet need. And then make sure your technology feels like it's a significant enough step that it has legs and it can scale over time. And then the exact application and the exact product in respect, there's time for that. But I think you want to make sure that technology has legs. And if you are going to hit any big roadblocks, that you do that before taking money. So the clock starts, the clock starts.  

Jon - 00:21:56: Yeah. And you also said something really fascinating to me about building on and that's something too, that I think is a very interesting and I think valuable insight is that you're de-risking a little bit. You're not rebuilding the platform from scratch. Shout out Pat Brown for sending the platform there. And that I would imagine makes it much more easy. You don't have to recreate the wheel from a science standpoint and also fundraising standpoint, it probably builds a little bit more conviction and de-risks it from whether it's a seed or a series eight all the letters is incredibly invaluable too. And for ParAllele BioScience, was this venture, venture backed or was it bootstrapped or how did you go about financing this spin out?

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Maneesh - 00:22:33: Yeah, a little bit of both. So we had a retreat in Lake Tahoe and went on this hike and that's where we kind of had the germ of the idea of doing this stuff. So we were pretty excited. We couldn't actually raise venture money till 2001 because it was the dot-com bust. That was a tough environment. So our first encounter with the tough environment to raise money. So it took us a while. We actually, I think, closed our series A in late 2001, but we started the company in 1999 and we initially did a little bit of work at the genome center, which was published IP was Stanford IP. And then we used just a little bit of individual money that we had to get the company spun out on a very shoestring budget and just try to make sure we cross this milestone of showing the basic scalability. So I think one of our ambitions were we could genotype up to 10,000 in a single assay. But I think when we were starting out, we could barely do a couple of genotypes, right? But what we knew is if you can make a couple of work, then they would scale. And so I think there was some milestone when we took venture monies. We had to demonstrate at least 100, I think 50 or 100 in parallel. We could do that. And then the six-month milestone for the company was to demonstrate a thousand and then went from there. So what we did do, I think there were many areas we made mistakes and we were nice, but what we did do very well is we laid out this tech roadmap and we had a pretty good sense of how much work it would take to get to the next level. And at least for the first year or two, we had some predictability. And ultimately, I think that's what helped us raise money because while we were having discussions throughout 2001, I think a lot of potential investors saw that we were actually executing through the roadmap and working as a team. And that's really compelling, right? I think that's sort of a group of individuals that can work the complementary skills and advanced goals in unison. That's very attractive and actually, it's not always easy to find. And I think it's more the key ingredients.

Jon - 00:24:12: Yeah, absolutely. And I always, when I'm talking to colleagues or folks who are, you know, early days as a startup, the roadmap and the projections that you're describing, like when you provide it to a potential VC partner, if they say no, they now have that roadmap. Nothing is stopping you from going back to them and saying, hey, “it's been six months and look, we hit the next step, the six month milestone”. You're like, “oh, they're doing exactly what they said they would do”. And that opens up a bunch of doors, even though it might have been initially a no, let's talk later about it. That kind of operational discipline, a little bit of foresight goes a long way. After your time at ParAllele BioScience, there was a merger with Affymetrix. What led up to that? What was your experience going through your first company and a merger?

Maneesh - 00:24:53: Yeah. So in some ways, it was a pretty natural fit because I think from day one, the microarrays we'd been using to read out our assays had been made by Affymetrix. We used other approaches too like Agilent, so we wanted to make sure there were at least a couple of platforms that we had viability on, but it was a pretty natural fit with what Affymetrix could do and very scalable. So I think there was that piece that was always a natural fit. And I think it really came down to after our Series B, I think realizing, are we going to raise a lot of money and commercialize this ourselves, build our own sales team, or should we just partner? And we had initially a commercial relationship, I think it was non-exclusive with Affymetrix to distribute our product. And that had been going pretty well. So I think that kind of led to and to together and realizing, “hey, we could come in and have this whole massive sales team”, which back then, early 2000s was the heyday for Affymetrix. It was an amazing company with amazing growth. The pre-Illumina story, of course, which we'll talk about in a minute, but that was an exciting environment. Their head of sales, who actually became a mentor over time, Gregg Fergus, he's a fantastic guy. And we just kind of knew that they were going to be a great commercial partner for us.  

Jon - 00:25:52: When the team, the merger, when there's alignment like that, there's nothing better. And then you had a pre-existing working relationship, which is fantastic. So you know what it's going to be like after the merger. And post-merger, I know you were leading global marketing for Affymetrix. You were running your own first spin out. And now you're at a very large organization doing global marketing. How was that transition for you? And what was that experience like?

Maneesh - 00:26:13: It was just a fantastic learning experience overall, because it started with really just doing marketing and product marketing for all the parallel products. And then it was kind of all DNA products. And then I think then we started to do segments, academic and pharma. And then I was doing global marketing on the pharma segment, which was a pretty interesting area. A lot of people often ask the value of an MBA. And there's definitely value. For Affymetrix, it was the best of times and worst of times, right? Because it was the first time they had this really strong challenger in Illumina. And they had a thesis that Affymetrix really believed that by scaling microarrays to larger and larger arrays, you could put all the information of the genome on there. And you never needed to do DNA sequencing. And it turned out in retrospect that it wasn't the right bet. But it's very hard to say that in the moment. That was their thesis. And so they actually had the chance to buy Illumina really early on, which few people know that. And they could have easily bought the company, but here's the course of history. But passed up on that. And while they did the right thing by bringing in parallel for targeted genotyping, they did have this very strong culture of invented within Affymetrix. And that always meant because I think they had so much success with the whole transcriptome on a chip, they definitely wanted to do the whole genome on chip as well when it came to DNA. So that bias was to do whole genome versus targeted. And we all know the challenges with that, right? I think whole genome gives you a lot of information, but it doesn't give you all this the precise information you need to make specific decisions, especially as you move to clinical applications. So I think that was interesting to see that internally. But I think most of all, it just taught me a lot about what is really product differentiation and how does competition work? And what are technology life cycles? Like, you know, technology, which can seem breakthrough five years later, can be on the brink of obsolete, right? It's just, this is how fast technology can move. So that was a very interesting learning experience. In fact, it was the reason I actually first decided to go into industry from the Genome Center, because we did this project on doing high throughput sequencing, building this device, which had 384 lanes. So remember, we do billions now, right, routinely. But back in the day, people thought it was pretty crazy to do 384. Why would you want to do more than a handful? Because you don't have that much sequencing to do. So it's a waste of time. And the world changes dramatically. What I saw there is we were far ahead as this academic project. But the moment the Human Genome Project got funded and announced, and there was this big race between ABI and Solera, they just took off. Like in a year, it was night and day, they had developed all this stuff that put hundreds of people on it. And so I was just so impressed with how fast industry can move when there is a big unmet need, and there's competition. And some of those lessons which brought me to industry, I think, really got refined and honed at Affymetrix to think about product, true differentiation, how do technology life cycles work, how do market cycles work. So really a great experience for all that. And Affymetrix definitely lived through that whole cycle.

Jon - 00:29:03: I'm jealous, honestly, I saw it as a bystander and a customer. I was like seeing kind of things unfold. And as I'm hearing this story, what I'm thinking about is like the innovator's dilemma, or a little bit of counter positioning, Affymetrix had this developed platform in IP, and there's Illumina coming with this disruptive technology, which kind of goes counter to everything that you've built thus far. And that's always a really hard position to be in. We're like, well, we've put all this time and money and resources and blood, sweat and tears into this. We're just like going to pull ahead. But then there's something you don't know either, like could have gone a different way. But in retrospect, obviously, you can kind of connect the dots. I was like reading Clay Christensen's book on it, hearing that just now is like, oh, this is in practice what's happening. And I'm very jealous of that experience, to be frank.

Outro - 00:29:52: That's all for today's episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our insightful conversation with Maneesh Jain. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to having you join us again for part two of our conversation with Maneesh, where we talk about his experience founding Auriphex Bioscience, scaling go-to-market at Ion Torrent, and working with the FDA while at Butterfly Network. The Biotech Startups podcast is brought to you by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Make sure to search for Biotech Startups podcast in Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. To learn more about our leasing program, visit our website www.excedr.com We provide research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support path to exceptional outcomes. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening.