Rafael Rosengarten - Part 1: From Salt Marsh Scientist to Biotech Entrepreneur

Intro - 00:00:01: Welcome to The Biotech Startups Podcast by Excedr. 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, Jon Chee.

Jon - 00:00:23: My guest today is Rafael Rosengarten, CEO and co-founder of Genialis, the RNA biomarker company. Genialis is reimagining biomarkers for every target, drug, and patient using a combination of precision oncology, RNA, and AI. Before founding Genialis, Rafael spent nearly 20 years in biomedical research, publishing extensively on evolution, immunology, bioengineering, and genetics. He is also a board member and co-founder of the Alliance for AI in Healthcare, a global nonprofit championing the responsible integration of AI in medicine. Beyond his industry achievements, Rafael has an extensive academic background. He graduated from Dartmouth and earned his doctorate from Yale as an NSF graduate research fellow. His postdoctoral training in synthetic biology was conducted under Jay Keasling at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he co-invented the J5 DNA assembly tool, now commercialized by TeselaGen Biotechnology. Rafael then furthered his expertise through a National Library of Medicine fellowship in biomedical informatics at Baylor college of Medicine. Over the next four episodes, we'll follow Rafael's journey from growing up in rural South Carolina to co-founding Genialis. From his love of science and nature to pivotal roles in synthetic biology and machine learning, Rafael shares lessons in resilience, culture, and making an impact in healthcare. Today, we'll explore Rafael's upbringing, the intellectual influences that shaped him, and the early experiences that sparked his love of science. From snorkeling in salt marshes to studying at Dartmouth, Rafael's story highlights the importance of curiosity and embracing life's twists and turns. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast. Rafael, thanks for coming on the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. 

Rafael - 00:01:57: Thanks for having me, Jon. It's a pleasure.

Jon - 00:01:59: Before every conversation, we like to start the journey in its earliest days. I think a lot of one's upbringing, we can see through lines through one's career and academic and scientific journey. So for the audience out there, could we go all the way back to your upbringing? What was your upbringing like? How did it influence your business philosophy? And how did you get into science?

Rafael - 00:02:24: Yeah, I grew up in a salt marsh in South Carolina. So I grew up way out in the boonies in rural South Carolina, about halfway between Charleston and Myrtle Beach on the coast. My parents had been intellectual hippie activists in the 70s and left the Northeast. They met in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They left the Northeast looking for essentially a fight, looking for a place they could continue to make a difference, right? The Vietnam War had ended and they found this little pocket of the world where the civil rights movement hadn't changed things enough. And so they went to kind of build schools and build community in the deep South. And so I was born there and I was raised there, a product of public schools in McClellanville, South Carolina. I ended up going to high school in Charleston. So needless to say, it was maybe a different upbringing than some of your guests. It was full of books. It was full of boats and fishing and raising a lot of the stuff that we ate. I like to joke, I call my parents' house Swiss Family Rosengarten. And they still live in this house that they raised me in out in the marsh. So my love for science just kind of came about because we lived out in nature, right? Like it was, we just had. You know, an unfettered access to beautiful woods and marshes. And that's where we ran around and played all the time. My scientific mentor, though, from a very young age was my uncle. This is my mother's brother-in-law was a French cell biologist. And, you know, he had a PhD in whatever it was in a postdoc in biochemistry from Berkeley and was running a research lab on the Côte d’Azur on the French Riviera. And we went over there when I was seven and spent the summer, and he taught me how to snorkel from the jetties off of his laboratory. And we went back when I was 10. And he was kind of a biologist of the old school of what I actually think is not a breed of scientist that exists anymore, where you could study natural history and choose your model organism based on kind of amazing just-so stories. So, you know, he was a fertilization expert. And the key model systems to study fertilization were things like sea urchins, because they have giant clear egg cells. The oocytes are great for live microscopy of what happens when sperm enters egg. You can also get lots of sperm in egg. Again, just off the docks of your marine laboratory and run these experiments. So he ran this lab and taught me to snorkel. And I knew that that's just kind of what I wanted to do. So I fell in love with science and the process from a very young age. And throughout school, elementary school, middle school, high school, was very strong in various kinds of science and math. But it wasn't obvious what version of that I would choose until much, much later. 

Jon - 00:05:01: Very cool. And I would imagine as like a young adolescent, like. When you can combine science and snorkeling.

Rafael - 00:05:10: Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I was completely enamored by the underwater world. Now, the part of your question was, how did that influence my life as a business person or entrepreneur? This is kind of the funny bit, though. I mean, my parents were academics, but kind of like, you know, throwback, I want to say communist, but like socialist hippie types with no business sense whatsoever. Like money was a dirty word in the house. And so I had no business mentorship as a young person. In fact, I would say that until I kind of got through college and got over some of my early idealism, I also sort of espoused this notion of, well, I'm going to do science for the purity of science, right? Like that was my entire motivation. As we'll probably get to some later parts of the story of how I came about joining and founding Genialis, I consider myself a rather accidental entrepreneur. Like I didn't set out to be a business person for sure.

Jon - 00:06:01: I was going to say that was the same experience for me growing up in Berkeley. It was like before Burning Man was cool. Like a lot of like my childhood friends, like family every year would go to Burning Man. And it was like a whole thing. And I think for me to. The kind of original idea was to do science purely for science.

Rafael - 00:06:22: Mm-hmm. 

Jon - 00:06:23: And I don't know, like I think exactly around like the university, you know, Berkeley is a big place and it also has a business school and whatnot. So it kind of like be an exposure. But absolutely, I can empathize with that upbringing, especially coming from the Bay Area where that and, you know, obviously Berkeley with its history and everything. So it sounds like you had this kind of like initial spark for science when you were starting to consider going to undergraduate and university. What was going through your mind at that point in time? Where were you looking? Kind of take us back to that mindset.

Rafael - 00:06:55: Yeah, so I grew up in coastal South Carolina, this predominantly African-American school district. I went to a magnet high school in Charleston, so I had a little bit more exposure and a rather good high school education. I wanted to learn how to ski. That was my number one criteria. And I figured, well, I could go north or I could go west. And I had family in the Northeast and it felt far away, but not too far away. So I looked at Dartmouth and Amherst and Williams and I went and checked out all three and I applied early to Dartmouth. It owns its own ski mountain.

Jon - 00:07:26: Oh, I didn't even know that.

Rafael - 00:07:27: Yeah. And it was honestly, it wasn't quite that simple, but it was mostly that simple. I had grown up in the marsh and I wanted to spend time in the mountains. And that was about the whole calculus. It also happened to have a very strong science departments. At the time, I thought I wanted to be a chemist. There were some great chemistry professors that I thought I'd work with there. As it turns out, I took exactly one chemistry class and then changed focus. But what actually sold me on Dartmouth more than the other two schools, which would have been fine, I'm sure, but made me sure of my decision. I went on, what do they call it, as a pre-frosh trip or whatever, right? Before you get in, when you're checking it out, I went and spent a couple of nights on campus. And I went to a slideshow put on by a few of the undergrads who had organized a summer trip for themselves, driving cross-country and rock climbing out West. Now, at the time, I had never rock climbed before. I went on to have that as a really major hobby of mine through my 30s, but I didn't get into it until much later. I didn't even climb at Dartmouth. But these kids, they were 19, 20 years old, and they had planned and executed this entire rock climbing road trip. It was like Jack Kerouac, but instead of on the road, on the rocks. And I was so taken by... Sort of the can-do attitude by the growth mindset, by the fearlessness of these kids to go out and do something like that. And I was like, you know, these are the kinds of people I want to surround myself with. And, you know, again, I didn't start climbing until I was in my late 20s or mid-20s at any rate. But that was a really seminal experience just seeing like, hey, if you're kind of fearless, if you believe you can do something, you know, the whole world's out there for you. 

Jon - 00:09:08: Right. That's really cool. The overlap is kind of crazy because I still rock climb. Nowadays, it's like indoor.

Rafael - 00:09:14: Sure. Yeah, you're busy.

Jon - 00:09:15: Yeah, I guess. Like I was like, I remember going outdoors and just getting absolutely shredded. And I'm like, I don't know if I can like do massive pitches, but definitely like, I'm like, okay, I can't let this kind of atrophy. Like, you know, I got to keep this going. So definitely now I'm like, indoor climbing, you know, maybe I'm a poser or not, but whatever. 

Rafael - 00:09:35: Listen, if you're having fun and getting exercise, it's all the better, so.

Jon - 00:09:38: Exactly. Exactly. That's awesome to hear too. And I guess like, you're talking about how your family, your parents were academics in a different way. And what did you say it was your uncle who?

Rafael - 00:09:49: Yeah, my uncle is a cell biologist. My parents were both historians, so.

Jon - 00:09:52: Did they ever kind of like? Nudge you to follow a specific academic pursuit. 

Rafael - 00:09:58: Yeah. Never, they were just super supportive. And, you know, again, it was a very literate household, right? They both had good educations, but also very low pressure. There were kind of no rules, no regulations. They had pretty flexible careers. So it's like, I don't remember having bedtimes. I don't remember having punishments or consequences. The fact that my brother and I both turned out as fairly like disciplined law abiding individuals just goes to show there's any number of ways to raise kids. But no, there was never any academic pressure of that kind. And we just, you know, both my brother and I were motivated to do well. And we were curious. And it was this love of just absolute love of the natural world, like just wanting to ask questions and figure out how I could go about finding the answers to those questions that drove me into science. 

Jon - 00:10:41: And I think something about that, that is, I think, one, it makes sense that you're an entrepreneur. And it's just like that kind of like curiosity, as I'm like seeing kind of like common denominators with other entrepreneurs, it's like that like curiosity. And it tends to be when you're kind of just like able to explore, it kind of like fosters that seems to be a trait that I see recurring, that's for sure. And now you're at Dartmouth, and you mentioned, took a chemistry class. You're like, nope, this is not for me. When was it that you decided to actually declare your major in undergraduate?

Rafael - 00:11:15: Yeah, so we weren't required to. In fact, we weren't even expected to until our second year. So I think the idea was try a bunch of stuff your first year. Some of the things I tried, I walked on to the JV soccer team. So, you know, sat the bench the whole season, but I had a blast. And I got to train with the varsity. And some of those guys went on to the MLS. That was fantastic. And not me, like I'm sitting far left bench on the JV team. I got to at least work out and share a locker room with some guys who are a lot better than me. And, you know, I pledged a fraternity, which was a questionable decision, but ended up being great. And I made some of the best friends of my life through fraternity. My company, Genialis, my corporate lawyer is actually the president of fraternity. He works at a big firm in Boston. Yeah, so, you know, a lot of us are actually doing interesting things in the world of entrepreneurship now. But this is just a long way to say that academics were not my top priority. They probably weren't my third or even fifth priority my freshman year in college. And chemistry was hard and math was hard. And it's not to say that evolutionary biology, which is where I landed, wasn't hard, but it was a different kind of hard. It spoke to that natural historian in me. The labs were, rather than being in a smelly dark room, you know. It was walk around the forests of New Hampshire and learn the taxonomy of the organisms or figure out how you can do physiological ecology experiments or community ecology experiments. But it suited my kind of mindset. And I would say I was one of the things that I described myself as a dilettante. And it kind of struck me as, again, this old school science that my uncle had. Demonstrated to me was really exciting. But one of the other things I picked up in college was... Well, I had always loved cooking. I learned to love to cook from my dad, actually. Just growing up with him, pulling on his apron strings, we'd go fishing, and then he'd teach me how to cook what we caught, that sort of thing. My uncle, the cell biologist, also was a good cook and used to throw these big dinner parties for all the scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratories out in Woods Hole. And I'd get to see that. But I started cooking seriously, like catering in student groups, catering freelance just to have beer money. And then the summer of my junior year of college, I actually came up to Oakland and worked for a family friend who was the chef owner of the Beowulf, which was a historic restaurant. It opened the same year as Chez Panisse, was often uttered in the same breath as Chez Panisse. He was, if I'm not mistaken and getting this wrong, he was the godfather of Alice Waters' daughter, Fanny Waters.

Jon - 00:13:41: Oh, wow.

Rafael - 00:13:42: So, you know, very of that style, right? So very high end, quintessential Bay Area cuisine. And I spent the summer breaking down artichokes and learning how to butcher ducks and that sort of stuff in the back of the restaurant and actually thought this is what I'm going to do with my life. So I was studying evolutionary biology, ecology as a way of like being out in nature. But I had found this other passion, which was cooking. But what the major had going for it and the reason I kind of like leaned into it, it had a senior study abroad in Costa Rica and Jamaica. And so I got to spend, I went to Dartmouth to learn how to ski and I spent two of my four winters abroad once I learned how harsh the winter was. And my senior winter, I got to spend overseas in Costa Rica doing tropical ecology and then in Jamaica doing coral reef ecology. And that part, those three weeks at Discovery Bay, it was like, backed again, back to the memories of as a 7-year old learning, how to snorkel. Like, this underwater stuff is cool. Like, I really wanted to understand how reef communities formed and especially the little critters. I'm no, I'm not scuba diver, when you go out on a scuba trip, everyone else is looking for the sharks and the groupers and the big fish. And I've got my nose against the reef looking at the smallest little invertebrates. So that experience was like, gosh, well, I thought I was going to be a this and then I was going to be that. No, no. Marine biology. That's that's the ticket. Right. So. That's kind of how I wound up my college career is falling back in love with marine biology.

Jon - 00:15:07: That's so rad. And I was thinking about my lab experience, which was like the polar opposite. It was dingy, smelly, barely any light. We were in a basement lab and there was like it was in Tolman Hall at Berkeley, which is no longer there because it wasn't earthquake safe. I was in there when it wasn't earthquake safe.

 Rafael - 00:15:30: Yeah.

Jon - 00:15:30: And there was literally a window that was like that big. And there was just a little bit of light just beaming in. And you're just like... Oh, my God. But I'm so I'm very jealous is I guess what I'm saying here.

Rafael - 00:15:42: I mean, I've done my time in those labs, too. I did. You know, I worked for some chemists in college. And but, you know, I I definitely went for the quality of life over the, you know, the maybe some of the scientific rigor at times.

Jon - 00:15:55: Yeah, totally. At Dartmouth, were there any, I guess, professors or mentors that kind of influenced you or took you under their wing? Or was this a lot of kind of independent study on your end?

Rafael - 00:16:06: Yeah, there were definitely a lot of professors who were very generous with their time. But I think that, again, I was a little too all over the place to have anyone be a proper mentor because I never stuck with the one thing long enough. So I remember certain professors, Mark McPeak, I had for community ecology. And by then, that was my senior year. I was taking things a lot more seriously, thinking about do I want to go to grad school? He taught me that mathematics, actually rigorous mathematics, has a very real role to play in evolutionary ecology. In fact, a lot of it is. Because so much of it is based on theory. So I really came to appreciate that. David Peart and his wife, Carol Folt, I worked in her lab for a while. But again, I was I was really all over the place. At Dartmouth, the people who I think left a bigger impression were my classmates. You know, I mentioned the guys who had done that climbing trip. I had another college classmate who was a couple of years ahead of me. And but as soon as he left college, he went and started writing guidebooks to national parks. I own a complete collection. He still does them. In fact, a couple of weeks from now. By the time this airs, this will be old news. But next weekend, my family's flying out to Zion National Park for the holidays. And we're taking his guidebook with us. Right. So what does that have to do anything? I just again, it's this this sort of can do attitude of forge your own path kind of attitude that I really admired among my classmates and saw that kind of over and over again. 

Jon - 00:17:25: That's awesome. And at this period in time, is this when you went over to the Pacific Northwest or Friday Harbor?

Rafael - 00:17:33: No, that comes later, actually. That comes a good bit later. So the short version is I graduated from Dartmouth, was not a good enough student in my mind to go right to grad school. My grades weren't great, probably wouldn't have done well on the test scores, GREs or whatever. I wouldn't have done well on those. I needed some time in a lab. I went home to South Carolina. I worked in a bakery for the summer. And I became a pie dough expert at Kudzu Bakery in Georgetown, South Carolina. Phenomenal bakery. They have a few franchises around coastal South Carolina today. So, you know, I kept scratching that itch. Then I moved up to Connecticut where my college sweetheart had a hedge fund job, and I got a job at Yale. And so I found one of the few professors, maybe not in the world, but in the United States, who was doing real molecular genetics on marine, clonal marine invertebrates. So I figured out, all right. I want to keep studying marine beasties, but I didn't love the just kind of ecology, hand-wavy theory stuff. I wanted to do actual molecular biology. I wanted to learn why. Why does this stuff work, right? This guy, his name was Leo Buss, was a pioneer in this field. He also came from a, I want to scuba dive for a living, how do I scuba dive for a living sort of mentality. But a really, really brilliant thinker. He had won a MacArthur Genius Award at a very young age for some theory. And had a lab with an actual forward genetics program breeding Hydractinia, these clonal hydroids. And so I went and was his lab tech for two years. And did that during the week. And then on weekends, drove home to suburban Connecticut and worked at a fancy French restaurant Friday and Saturday nights. Right, so like Google. How do I keep doing all the things, right? My contribution to science at the time is I figured out how to grow in the lab an organism called Trichoplax adhaerens. Was the only, at the time, the only named species of Phylum Placozoa, which is the morphologically simplest animal known to science. And, you know, we would have to... Collect them and and i think they had gotten funding to get the genome sequence so this is like 2001 2002 right the human genome was was in draft form but they had a lot of sequencing capacity they had stood up for the human genome so you could apply to say hey we have another critter we should sequence and at this time if you sequence the genome of something it got on the cover of nature of science like by default like every new genome was a cover and so they had gotten funding through a consortium through JGI the joint genome institute Department of Energy out in california to sequence the genome of this thing and so i figured out how to grow it in the lab and grew enough of it to send tissue out to JGI to get it sequenced Meanwhile, I was cooking at night or on the weekends and trying to figure out what to do. I decided to give the cooking thing a real try. So I quit the lab job, went down to New York City, and I printed out 20 resumes. Now, keep in mind, at this point, I only had two real cooking experiences on my resume. I had cooked in California that one summer a couple years before, and I had baked for a summer in South Carolina right after college. And everything else was me inflating my on-campus catering experience to sound more impressive than it really was. And I started down in Tribeca. This was January 2003 or something like that. And I started in Tribeca and walked all the way up to Daniel on 66th Street. So I started at Bouloud, ended up at Daniel. And for anyone who's my age in their 40s and follows hot cuisine in Manhattan, you realize those are the bookends of two of the great restaurants in the city. And I dropped off 20 or 30 resumes that day. I got three callbacks. I did tryouts and I got a job at Picholine, which is no longer open, but at the time was in that same echelon. Michelin hadn't come to New York yet, so we used Zagat ratings. And these were all like Zagat 28s and 29s. Michelin then came to New York and later gave Picholine a single star. But I can say that I cooked at a Michelin star restaurant. So I worked there for a while, just as a cook, just like cooking stuff. I wasn't the chef. I was just... You know, a line cook, making food, putting it on plates. But it was the funnest time of my life being, you know, 20, young in your 20s in New York City in the early aughts. This was when like food TV was becoming popular. So like chefs were treated like celebrities, even if you were just wearing a dirty apron. And I did that for a while and had the time of my life until I realized like I have no friends who aren't in the restaurant. I have no hobbies anymore. This is all I do. And I was pretty good at it. And I probably could have kept doing it, but I missed the dilettantism. And so a friend of mine from our lab at Yale said, hey, I got a Smithsonian fellowship to go down to this island off the coast of Belize, and I need a field assistant. The only requirements you have to be able to drive a boat, you have to know how to raise Trichoplax. I was like, I grew up driving boats, and I'm the only person in the world who knows how to raise Trichoplax. So I quit the restaurant thing, went back to science, did field work with her for the summer, just a couple weeks in the summer, and then ended up in grad school at Yale back in the same lab group, roughly the same lab group I'd worked in.

Jon - 00:22:31: That's so crazy.

Rafael - 00:22:33: Yeah, not a straight line. It was very much a ping pong back and forth between these two worlds. But I felt like that was when I went to grad school, I was like, all right, I'm now walking through a door that I'm not going to walk back through. Like, if I ever want to be a cook again, it's going to be at the end of my career. It's like making up a choice. 

Jon - 00:22:50: That's very cool. And I think it's interesting because a lot of my friends growing up and all my childhood friends are in hospitality and food. A lot of them cooked at Shea. At Shea?

Rafael - 00:23:00: Mm-hmm. Right.

Jon - 00:23:01: And I guess maybe you have a rare experience of cooking on the West Coast and on the East Coast, which for those out there who may not be aware, very different styles of kitchen. Can you talk about that, like being cooking in the Bay Area and then cooking in New York? And what's the difference?

Rafael - 00:23:18: Yeah. And, you know, you'll have to correct me if this still exists, because, you know, I'm dating myself. This was literally 20 years ago, right? Almost 25 years ago. My experience on the West Coast was very much influenced by the Alice Waters School and the Jeremiah Towers and what became known as Cal Med Cuisine, which is a celebration of all the things that are grown locally and kind of raised to perfection. So it wouldn't be unusual to get a salad that was very much just the vegetables, clean, cut, prepared on your plate with a light something. It's like, look how amazing this lettuce is, right? Flash forward only two years, and I'm in New York, and this is when molecular gastronomy is starting to come in from Spain, the El Bolí era. And it's like, look, we've deconstructed lettuce, and now you have little droplets of chlorophyll on your plate. It's the exact opposite way of thinking. One of them is a celebration of food in kind of its holiest, purest form. The other is a celebration of food in terms of what we can do with it to kind of change our perceptions. And, I mean, that's a very, very brief and maybe overly simplified difference, but I think that probably still holds to a large extent. Right? It's kind of the whole foods versus the deconstructed movement. Both posts contain multitudes and I don't want to sell anyone short. And I'm sure you can get great molecular gastronomy on the West Coast and amazing farm to table on the East Coast. Certainly you have chefs like Dan Barber in New York who've taken farm to table to absurd ends building his restaurant in his farm, right? And so forth. But that was my experience. And I'll say in my home kitchen, just like your favorite music today is still probably what you grew up on in high school, like that Beowulf experience, you know, learning how to do really whole food preparations and celebrating the splendor of the natural product is still my preference, right? That's still kind of how I like to cook and eat.

Jon - 00:25:04: Yep. I think it's still very similar to that style in terms of Coastal cuisine and coastal styles. And I was trying to think about it, like, why is that the case? And I guess I was like, in the Bay Area, you're kind of blessed with like, we're super lucky to have that level of produce. But it's like harder to come by in the Northeast. So you kind of have to like really refine the technique to make your ingredient just like taste amazing. And I've always thought about like, if you just like marry those two where you have like the pantry of like the West Coast, kind of like San Joaquin Valley, and then the technique of like the Northeast, you just like, just like get incredible combinations.

Rafael - 00:25:43: And then, you know, you have chefs like Thomas Keller, who set up outposts on both coasts and really showed what that looks like, right?

Jon - 00:25:49: Yeah.

Rafael - 00:25:49: But no, it was a super fun education. And you know, people point immediately to like, oh, well, you know, cooking is such a science, like that makes sense that the science could... And I buy that to a very large extent. I think that what appeals to me about working at the lab bench, because I was always a lab scientist, and in the kitchen, there are a lot of overlaps, especially in my utter disregard for recipes and my desire to just kind of, you know, throw DNA in a tube and see what happens. But I also like to keep those two things separate. I decided not to try to marry the pursuits, but I may ping pong back and forth. Now, you had asked me about the Friday Harbor experience. And I want to circle back to that, because this is actually where the story was headed. So in 2004, I entered Yale's biomedical program. And now I actually come in through the biomedical program, not through evolution and ecology, for various reasons, part of which is my old boss in evolutionary biology had a health issue and was not taking students. So I joined his collaborator's lab at the molecular development department. But the other thing is, I wanted to learn harder science, like I wanted to get more mechanistic, right? I knew that. But I also couldn't shake the marine biology stuff, right? So I got this fellowship at Friday Harbor to go do an invertebrate embryology class for the six weeks. It's basically like, it's like the movie with Bandcamp. Once at Bandcamp, it really is. We are such geeks. We are such, you know, biology geeks and microscopy geeks, and just loving it and completely unashamed about it. And it was such a wonderful group of students, many of whom went on to have good faculty positions and successful academic careers. But we just spent the summer staring down the barrels of a microscope watching broke back to my uncle, sea urchins develop and drawing, pencil and paper, drawing what we saw down the microscope. And again, this is kind of this lost art of if you draw something, you have to pay attention to it. You have to make choices about what's important. And, you know, if you take a high resolution microscopy image, you're going to get all the details. But it's a different exercise. It's a different exercise to learn. So that was an amazing summer. But shortly after I had gotten accepted to that program and gotten a fellowship to pay for it. I got a job offer out of the blue in my inbox one morning from the captain of a large private motor yacht that was owned by the family of a college friend of mine, inviting me to come cook aboard the motor yacht for the summer season in the Mediterranean. And so I was faced with this door A, door B of do I go out to Friday Harbor and do my science geek camp, my embryology, or do I break my promise to myself and my advisor and everyone else and take a summer out of science right after I got started and go cook again? And I was just thinking about it. It's like, if I go on a yacht in the Mediterranean to cook for the summer, I am never coming back, am I? Yeah. You know, when I was applying to grad schools, I got into University of Hawaii and I love the program and I love the faculty I was going to go work with there. But it was the same thing. His lab looked at Waikiki. I was never going to actually finish my PhD, If I went to study there. So I it was the hardest career decision I've ever made was not starting this company. It was turning down a job offer to quit grad school and go cook again on a boat. But I didn't. I did Friday Harbor was an amazing experience. I got to eat a lot of oysters. And, and then I carried it, you know, went back to my lab at Yale and four or five years later, we ended up with a PhD.

Jon - 00:28:59: Thanks for joining us on this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Rafael Rosengarten. Be sure to tune in for part two as Rafael takes us through his time at Yale and postdoctoral work at the Joint BioEnergy Institute. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review and share it with your friends. See you next time. The Biotech Startups Podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for The Biotech Startups Podcast wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening. The Biotech Startups Podcast provides general insights into the life science sector through the experiences of its guests. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from the podcast is at the user's own risk. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not the views of Excedr or sponsors. No reference to any product, service or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.