Rafael Rosengarten - Part 4: Scaling a Startu & Using AI to Transform Cancer Diagnostics

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. In our last episode, we discussed Rafael Rosengarten's move to Baylor College of Medicine, his groundbreaking collaborations in synthetic biology and machine learning, and the founding of Genialis. If you missed it, be sure to go back and listen to part three. In this final chapter, Rafael reflects on the journey of scaling Genialis as a co-founder and CEO, navigating the biotech industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, and refining the company's mission and vision. He reflects on the importance of company culture, hiring for values alignment, and fostering a motivated, cohesive team. We'll also hear about the work and products at Genialis, including CrassID and the Genialis supermodel, which are changing the world of cancer diagnostics.

Jon - 00:01:15: And I guess there's so many directions I want to go. And I guess the first one is your co-founder and the founding CEO. What a just like introspective and just self-aware act to be like, I don't know where to go. And then leaning on you for like, hey, can you take us to where we need to be? Because I think a lot of the time as a founder, that can sometimes not happen. And then you hit cash zero. But when you think about the greater mission and the greater organization, that kind of self-awareness is like critical. What got you here might not get you there. And being aware of that is like, it always impresses me when someone can do that. Also, just like what you had to do for the company, incredibly painful. But that type of stuff. That you know you learn how to do the hard things just like yeah on the go you like stuck the landing right like that's usually when someone when someone has like a whatever company one company two serial entrepreneur they're like i know what i need to do because i've been there but this is like your first go like this is your first and you're just like you just jump and you have to do it and and you know time is of the essence because again you think of i always think of i use you know i game less now but when i was a gamer you think about it like your company's runway is like this health bar like whatever right and it's like slowly dwindling and we need to manage 

Rafael - 00:02:39: this thing apple or a mushroom or something

Jon - 00:02:41: yeah something on the ground yeah and you need to get that boost and like we got to figure it out we got to do something a little different here so incredibly impressed of like your ability to just like quickly just like jump straight into it but i'm not surprised because like you've jumped straight into a bunch of things and you know and figured it out And then I love how the first like shouts out to that big pivotal client. Helped you learn the ropes of what the current manifestation of what Genialis is now. Because I think about that, like, sometimes you do like founders may not understand, but like those, you need those early adopters to give you that shot. In order just like for you to figure yourself out. I always think about like your first pivotal clients as almost like they are investors. Like they're paying with their dollars. Like they're giving you capital. And especially if you're a revenue generating company, I always think about my customers as investors in us. They're expecting and hoping that I can live up to these promises of whatever this value creation. And for me, one of our early clients was Quest. And yeah, like it was that massive client for us, clearly Quest being a big, big company. And that was like a baptism of fire. Like truly, like we did like, and we basically outfitted a bunch of automation and robotics and liquid handling. And on that first, you know, probably in the first year, and you know, this was like back when we just had a handful of clients. So you can imagine there's like a, like a lot of customer concentration. We had. Basically all of their equipment break. In one go. 

Rafael - 00:04:19: Yeah.

Jon - 00:04:19: And I was like, oh, this could really destroy Excedr right now. But via that experience, I now know how to handle when equipment goes down, but. Exactly kind of what you were describing, like through that experience with that first client, you're able to sharpen your tools, sharpen your approach and sharpen the business model and eternally grateful for those first sets of clients. And for everyone out there, finding those early adopters are hard to do, but when you find them, like hold onto them dearly.

Rafael - 00:04:50: Yeah, but the other piece of that is you're also an investor in those client success and you get stupidly committed to it. We had a similar sort of thing with Angcerna. It wasn't just with them though. We actually, our senior bioinformatician identified, we'll call it a bug in the code. It actually wasn't a bug in so much as the code worked out was supposed to, but it was written incorrectly. And this was in our primary data processing. So every piece of data that came into our system went through this pipeline, meaning every piece of data in our system had been processed incorrectly. And we're talking about building devices that are intended for clinical use. You can't, like, this is not move fast and break things territory, right?

Jon - 00:05:27: Yeah, yeah.

Rafael - 00:05:28: And so, you know, we faced a trial of what do we do? And the short answer is you own it. You own your mistake. You are painfully honest with everyone. But before you, like, go around screaming with your hair on fire, you figure out how bad is the problem? How systemic is it? What is the actual? And what we did is we ended up, you know, fixing the problem, right? Rerunning a bunch of data, maybe not all of it at first. Comparing the outputs, comparing the results, and showing them slide by slide, you know, 0.998% correlation. Turns out the mistake didn't cause any real problems. But it was a mistake. And we went and we were just completely forthright about it. And it was ended up being a bit of a no harm, no foul. But you get so much more trust for owning the mistake than maybe had it never happened, right? Around, I want to say, spring of 2020, when this relationship with our kind of, we'll call them our patron client, was really heating up and becoming close. Two of our co-founders left. So the original CEO and the fourth one who I haven't talked much about, who worked on the commercial side. And these two, they were the ones who still had this dream of building kind of a big scalable SaaS company. I don't know that that was still their dream, but they were not life scientists. We were no longer doing sort of what they imagined. And I think, frankly, they felt like they didn't have as much to contribute anymore. You know, selling in life sciences often requires speaking the language of life sciences. And it wasn't native to either one of them. They were both tech guys or one of the, you know, had another background. So, you know, that was another kind of tumultuous thing. You have to explain to the team why two of the co-founders are leaving, to the investors, to the board. But it was also an opportunity for me, I think, as CEO to kind of realign the company a little more firmly around my vision. I had always had this dream of sort of the AI at the center of what we do, right? But also changing the way we interacted with the board in various ways. Trying to kind of go from that. Four guys in a garage startup to a more professional organization. But also one of the things that I leaned into is rewriting, redrafting our core values. And we had done an exercise in the early days, in the stealth days, of drafting a manifesto of company values. I remember this. We were a 16-person company, and we ended up, after a weekend retreat, having a value system with 16 values, which is insane. It's stupid. No one can remember 16 values. First of all, you can't remember that many. Another thing is just like, well, you didn't make any decisions. Everyone got their own value on the board. And that was true. Everything was by consensus. And so in a way, I wanted to centralize the authority, but in a way that respected everyone's contribution. And so we went through an exercise to distill those 16 values into four actual values, where everyone could remember them. You could relate to one more than the others, right? But we wanted to put this front and center, because at this point, I was so grateful to the people who had stuck with us the whole time, right? We were now paying competitive wages. The team had grown a little bit. We had survived this kind of long walk in the woods, as I described it. We had a real focus, a purpose. And the team composition had changed a bit. We were less of a software company, more of a life sciences discovery company. And so we really sharpened our pencils and honed in on these four values. People first. Honesty always, ownership and constructiveness. And each one has a little blurb that goes along with it. And we started putting these at the front of everything we did. And especially the people first piece. It's not that anyone's more important than the other, but we consider that our North Star. And it has a lot of different meanings. It means treating people the way you want to be treated. It also means putting yourself first in a way, sort of achieving that work-life balance that's meaningful to you, figuring out how you can be your best self in the company. And I think it was this really important exercise. And we revalidate it constantly. But also at every all-hands retreat, we have values awards where we recognize people who embody the values and try to kind of incentivize more of that. We talk a lot about how we do decision-making in a values framework, right? If there's ever a hard decision to make, well, you ask, how do the values guide you? And I think what that's done is it's allowed us to create a company culture. Where people really and truly work and live for one another. You know, I'm remote to the company. I work from home. I always have. But when I talk to people who work in the main office, I hear things like, gosh, everyone just gets up and can't wait to get into the office. People look forward to getting there. People really will go to the mat for their teammates and for the company. And some people are driven by our overall mission, by what our products do, by curing cancer, et cetera. But I think more importantly, people are driven by just the team we've built and what we've built. And so I give a lot of credit to where I think back to a lot of that is kind of going through this hardship together, then coming out on the other side and having a way of. Putting into words what it meant to be part of that team. And then going forward, as you grow the team, and we have a lot of new faces, you know, we raised a Series A and expanded headcount and everything else. You hire for values match, not for people who are like you, who look like you. In fact, quite the contrary, you want to have as many diversity of experiences as possible, right? So absolutely trying to optimize for diversity of experience. But around shared values. And if you can hire for values and diversity of experience, you're going to create an amazing team and an amazing workforce. And so it was really kind of 2020 where that approach to leadership started to kind of crystallize in my mind, but not just in my mind, in my leadership's team mind. And I don't want to take all the credit for this. I still have my co-founder and CTO, Micha. He was the one who got me on board in the first place and that climbing trip back in Austin, you know, five years earlier. And our chief operating officer and head of people, Tiasha, who is the keeper of our culture and should get a lot of credit for this. And Luca Alsatz, who's our head of discovery, our chief discovery officer. But it was a combination of kind of our inputs and thinking about how do we really, you know, we've got this moment, we know what we're doing now, how do we crystallize things so we can run fast, right? And continue to punch above our weight. And so I really think of 2020 as the year where all of that came together.

Jon - 00:11:41:

That sounds almost like perfectly timed too. Cause there was like. During 2020 is, you know, you're talking about like capital formation and startups and VCs, because I remember that time pre that. Where Startups were a thing, but not really a thing. You're either in academia or big pharma. There's like kind of a little bit in the middle. So now that you've had this realignment in values and your team kind of like are all on board now, you've raised that fresh capital. Can you talk a little bit about just like going to market with?

Rafael - 00:12:14:

Yeah. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We hadn't raised capital at that point. We were still revenue driven at that point. The other thing that happened though is I was over in Slovenia, right? Because we had a bigger headcount there. It was just cheaper for me and the Westerners to come or the Americans to come over. We're in Slovenia. We do this values exercise. We kind of put our hands in, go team. We actually open a new set of offices. One week later, COVID hits. Oh, yeah.

Jon - 00:12:38:

Yeah, yeah.

Rafael - 00:12:39:

Right. But this is critical, right? Because now everyone else is scrambling to figure out how do we maintain team cohesiveness? How do we maintain our velocity and everything in a new work mode? We had none of those problems. Partly just because we were really smart people and we're adaptable partly because we've been sort of a hybrid, you know, remote first to begin with. But also because we had just reaffirmed, like we, it was almost like we renewed our wedding vows to one another, right? We have this reaffirmation, this commitment to a kind of nucleating function that was really important. But yeah, biotech started heating up and, you know, there are a lot of reasons why lots of people have spilled a lot of ink over it. Part of it was macroeconomic. Part of it was, I think, COVID actually did engender a lot of goodwill towards biotech and the life sciences sector among the populace. So that showed up on the stock market and came all the way down. We were doing pretty well financially just through our service work and our software sales through 2020 through 2021. It was in 2021 that I decided that we had figured out enough with our work with Oncerna and our biomarker work with them, but also a bunch of other companies. By then, we had a pretty diverse client roster that we should raise money to do this for ourselves. The idea was we're going to raise a Series A. Showing investors, look, we've got the technological validation that we can build these biomarker models. We've got a market validation that there are diagnostics companies that want to take them to market as tests and pharma companies that want to use them as clinical trial tools. And there's a regulatory validation. We've shown our work to the FDA, and the FDA had some great questions, but overall thought it was cool. And we see a regulatory path, right? So it's time to raise money. And we're just going to do this for ourselves. We're going to build these models and then shop them out. And what I observed, what we needed was another market like checkpoint inhibitors. We needed a place where it's going to be a huge therapeutic area, lots of competition, and drugs that were only going to work marginally well. And so I picked KRAS. KRAS was the oldest known cancer drug target. It had been cloned at UCSF in the early 80s. 40 years we've been trying to get a drug against it. Amgen had just gotten the first approval that year for sideracid. Mirati seemed to be close behind them. But I could tell this was going to be the wild west of clinical trials, hundreds of hundreds of trials, struggling to find the right patients, the right combinations, et cetera. And so time couldn't have been worse. At the beginning of 2022, I started pitching. Just as the market was collapsing, the venture was disappearing, completely evaporating. And our clients were too, because our clients were going out of business and our clients were losing money and tightening their belts. And it was just, you know, anyone who's listening to this who lives in the biotech world probably has their own 2022 sob story. It was not a fun year for most people. It really wasn't. I got fortunate, I'm not going to say lucky, through my professional network, was introduced to a really, really thoughtful and forward-looking, venture group called Taiwania Capital. They're based in Taipei, but one of the founding partners actually lives in California and is a serial entrepreneur from MIT, a guy named Chen Wu. And his team at Taiwania Capital took an early interest in our story. They have an AI practice and a life sciences practice, so we kind of fit right in the middle. And, you know, I had lots of other VCs who were helpful, even if they didn't want to invest. But I talked to Taiwania early and they showed a persistent interest. So six months into the process, we had a handshake and eight months into the process, a term sheet. That's by August 22. But we needed a co-lead. They were only going to do half the round. And I knew that I wanted someone with pharma experiences and a strategic would be ideal. We just needed to know that sector better. We didn't really understand it well at the time. So I reached back out to Debiopharm Innovation Fund, which is the venture arm of Debiopharm in Switzerland, with whom I had had a long time sort of on-again, off-again conversation. And I thought the timing was right. The round economics looked right. And instead of just piggybacking on all the diligence that Taiwania had done, they started their own process. So August, I got a term sheet. W Farm starts their process. So I have to keep Taiwania interested and confident that this is moving in the right direction. Meanwhile, the economics of our business are just going straight down. The market's collapsing. It's just burning. Our customers are going. Our revenue, which had been up and to the right through 2021, was now doing the other thing. I mean, we were just tracking with the market. The market was going through the floor. But Debiopharm did a very thorough diligence. And these guys are really experts. If you look at their portfolio, they invest in tons of cutting-edge diagnostic-facing technology. They actually don't invest in therapeutics. That's their pharma arm. They invest in diagnostic technologies. So they had exactly the expertise we needed. They understood our space but knew what pharma needed. And we got them to conviction. By the time we signed the term sheets and got it all done in January of 2023, I had been pitching for 54 weeks. The Series A took 54 weeks from first pitch to close. But I got the round I wanted. I got the syndicate I wanted. I got a really good sort of tech bio hybrid, right? AI and life sciences. I got the strategic with the strategic insights. We got real experts joining the board. We're an international company. Like I didn't bother me at one lick that we have international investors. I mean, our seed round had been co-led by a Swiss firm. So like international by design was fine with me. Plus I get to go to Lausanne every once in a while. It's absolutely gorgeous there. That worked out really well, but it was a long and grueling process. It was made all the more weird by the fact that, and I've completely omitted this from the story, but in 2021, my wife's work moved us to Kazakhstan. Wow. So for the second half of 2021, until about 14 months ago, until fall of 2023, I was doing all of this via Zoom off VPN from Adaral, Kazakhstan, which is a little, it's like the midland Texas of Kazakhstan. So third tier oil depot city in northwest Kazakhstan. It used to be a big sturgeon city where the Ural River hits the Caspian Sea and flying a lot and working out of the Star Alliance Airlines lounge in Istanbul and stuff. And when I get on the phone with investors, I'm like, so where are you calling from tonight? If it was our first date, I would say, I'm over in Europe, which was true because we lived on the European side of the Ural River. But I didn't want to throw their pattern match off. So all of this was just super, you know. Drained and made all the more difficult by having to do everything by Zoom with the rare like fly-in appearance. And having kind of strange hours, like, you know, venture pitches at three in the morning, four in the morning, so I could think up with California.

Jon - 00:19:20: Holy moly. 

Rafael - 00:19:21: It was hard. You know, second half of 2021 through, well, pretty much the whole time we lived overseas, you know, the hours were hard. But until we closed that round in the beginning of 2023, like it was, it was a real trial. 

Jon - 00:19:34: Men. And I think, you know, the past few years have been incredibly tough for the life sciences. And it is you being driven to run through walls that you have to like, again, you could throw in that towel. Like, you know, you kind of have to have that alignment and values and that kind of renewing of vows to go through that gauntlet that you went through. And that's why culture is so important. Right.

Rafael - 00:20:00: Yeah. 

Jon - 00:20:01: Sometimes people sleep on culture as like, oh, it's just like this soft kind of fluffy type thing that doesn't. And people talk about it a lot, but it doesn't actually have material like effect. But exactly what you just described is like if the mission and the values weren't aligned, if the culture wasn't legit and you weren't getting out of bed wanting to do this, I'm going to guess that you would have thrown in the towel and wrapped it up. 

Rafael - 00:20:25: And, you know, I have I have a coach I work with and I would say she's half therapist, half coach. And I've I've had a weekly call with her now for gosh, it's going to be five years soon, like since since end of 2019, early 2020. And I actually owe her a huge debt of gratitude and a lot of thanks for whatever success we've had. One of the themes she and I have explored is for like, what is this motivation? Like, you know, what is the Energizer bunny or the Wile E. Coyote might be a better example, right? Yeah. Like you never give up no matter how many walls you run into. And some of it is just like, I don't like the idea of failing. I like the idea of showing up the doubters. You know, for my own sake, right? Like I want to be successful for my own sake. Some of it is, you know, sure. I'd love to have an exit one day, but honestly, like you don't get rich doing this. Like it's very few people get rich doing startup. I get a bigger salary somewhere else. I like our mission. I mean, what we're trying to do in the therapeutic area is important. But again, I could do that working for someone else for less work and more money. It's the team. It's my, like, I will not let these people down. We are going to be successful because I am not going to let my team down. 

Jon - 00:21:30: That really struck a chord with me too, because I think about it the same thing. Getting up and working with the Excedr team, I feel incredibly blessed and grateful at the opportunity to do it. And something to thinking about. Just like being a founder and entrepreneurs is like, once you start making those hires, like you're responsible to them and people are right. Like not only like, and also they start starting families and like you're responsible to their families too.

Rafael - 00:21:59: Oh, gosh, we have at least two married couples where both people work for the company like that. I love them all. I don't want them to leave, but that's just poor planning.

Jon - 00:22:07: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And no, but I think that's incredibly important for anyone who's like exactly what you said. Like, it's got to be more than just the money, like what we're doing it for. 

Rafael - 00:22:19: Yeah. So one more ridiculous story about the fundraise, and then I'll leave that. So we actually, we closed our Series A in kind of two pieces. There was the main piece, and then there was a last check that came in later. And the LP is writing that check required that I be on U.S.. Soil to sign for the check in the presence of a U.S.. Notary with my U.S.. Passport. So I had to fly from Kazakhstan to Boston and to take this 15-minute Zoom meeting at my lawyer's office in Boston. And literally, I flew from Kazakhstan to Boston for a 15-minute meeting. I mean, it was a multimillion-dollar check I'm signing for. We go out for a steak dinner to celebrate, go to bed, get on the planes the next day, have a huge amount of airline problems. Five flights later, I'm back in Kazakhstan going on a ski trip with my son. And when I get off the plane, I wake up, get off the plane, my slack is blown up because Silicon Valley has just melted down with $10 million of our dollars sitting there, right?

Jon - 00:23:19: Oh, my God.

Jon - 00:23:20: It was that weekend, right?

Jon - 00:23:22: Oh, my God.

Rafael - 00:23:24: And at this point, I'm like, well, if this is what kills the company, at least I've got a story. Like, I wasn't even that upset. But it did kind of ruin the ski weekend because, like, I was literally sitting on the ski lifts trying to have a weekend with my son, but having to, like, manage the board and, like, figure out what's going on and stuff. All's well that's end well. We got our money out. We had hired a really smart financial guy that previous fall, our comptroller, and he's done a great job of diversifying our holding since. But yeah, we'd raised the Series A. And so we set out to do what we said we were going to do. We're going to build this KRS classifier. We're going to show how well our engine works. We're going to show there's a market for this. And then we're going to do something special. And I don't want to short shrift the KRS classifier because we did. We launched this called Genealys KRS-ID. We announced it at AACR in 2024. Within a few months, we were in conversations with five top 20 pharma, several of whom are currently evaluating the product. We anticipate those being really wonderful relationships going forward. There is nothing else on the market that can tell you which patients are going to benefit from KRAS and which aren't across all of the histologies, all of the mutations, and actually give you the tools to tease out what patients should go into what arms with what combinations. It is a beautiful piece of machine learning and AI. There's nothing else like it. There just isn't. And we can come back to it if we want to talk more about it. Certainly, Genialis is a company. We're doing a lot of market education around that right now. So, you know, listeners can just follow the company and you'll learn a lot about KRAS ID. But even cooler was this fall at Biotech Exposal in October 2023. My CTO gave a talk, my co-founder Mika, about something we're calling the Genialis supermodel. And most of your listeners will have heard of foundation models or large language models, right? That's what ChatGPT does. You're starting to see a lot of life science companies, biotechs, or at least tech bio companies talking about foundation models, various kinds. In October, Genialis announced the first ever large molecular model that's trained on RNA-seq data. So it's a transcriptomics large molecular model. And what this gives us the power to do, and the reason we call it the Genialis supermodel, is we can derive a biomarker, a predictive biomarker, just like KRAS-ID, that has all these amazing capabilities for literally every cancer drug target, for every cancer drug in development, and for every cancer patient who needs a therapy who doesn't have one. And so this piece of AI is trained today on approaching a million RNA-seq samples, bulk and single cell, that we've aggregated through hook and crook over the 10 years of the company's existence. We've done the hard work, turned this oil into jet fuel. We've done the refining on the data, trained this foundation model. It's still in its infancy. It's only going to get better. But it gives us this power to transform this super high-dimensional data space of all of the physiology of the tumor cell and surrounding cells into a set of biologies that represent the therapeutic opportunities around treating these tumors. And our goal is to work with pharma and work with diagnostics companies to be able to make sure that every promising drug becomes a medicine. And not all of them are going to be the next blockbuster that can be served to every patient and work for every patient. In fact, most of them won't. But most of these medicines, especially once they reach later stages of clinical trials, most of these drugs show enough promise that they should be given to some patients. So we can pick those patients out. And then from the flip side, we want to get this tool eventually, after our next financing. Directly into the hands of doctors. So that doctors can also have these tools at their disposal to dramatically simplify the decision making. Instead of having to choose which of these 15 different tests to run, they only need one test. And it will tell them based on the molecular biology of their patient's tumor exactly what's going on and what the right way to treat them is. And so, you know, for me, it hasn't come full circle, but it is coming full circle, right? From what that original SBIR grant I wrote in 2015. Of this is we want to build what we didn't know the word foundation model at the time. We didn't like we didn't have large language models, but the mathematics that Marinka Zitnik had invented at the University of Ljubljana and Blaise Zupan's lab, in my mind, was absolutely a predecessor to what is now the inflection point in AI's capabilities and how it's going to bring to bear in the life sciences.

Jon - 00:28:01: Wow. That's super rad and really, really exciting. I'm getting fired up just like hearing about it. 

Rafael - 00:28:07: Me too. I've never been more excited to do this. So again, I've been at this with Genialis nine years now, and I've never had more energy to get up and go to work every day. Cause I'm so excited by what we're building.

Jon - 00:28:17: Hell yeah. Um, As you're looking, you know, one year, two years out, obviously you're going to continue developing this. Can you talk a little about what's in store for you and Genialis in a one and two year timeframe? 

Rafael - 00:28:32: Our goals are, we'll call it three pillars. There's the business, there's the technology, and then there's the company. From a business standpoint, we want to keep building great relationships with our customers and our partners, getting more involved in their programs so they can make better decisions and be more successful. We are stupidly committed to our customers' success. And so, you know, there are a bunch of pharma we're working with already and some others that I hope we get to work with in the next few years. From the technology standpoint, you know, the supermodel is only going to get smarter. Every time we turn the crank, it has a true feed forward mechanism. Right. And I don't know that I can appreciate the sort of what the limit of how smart these things are going to get. It's right. Sky really does feel like the limit. I imagine the way it's going to grow is we're going to start dealing with more data modalities. So right now, we are really focused on transcriptomics and RNA sequencing. That is the thing that... Humbly, I'd say Genialis, the best out in the world, or damn near close, the best of the world at gene expression data. But, you know, you can't get that from every patient. So if we really want to serve every patient, you know, we need to move in a couple directions. That's going to involve histology slides and probably circulating molecules, right? So move to the blood, move to the slides. But we welcome the challenge of, you know, expanding into those innovative areas. Both business and technology side will also involve getting much closer to our diagnostic partners. So most of our customers are pharma, but our partners are diagnostics companies because we want to see these algorithms. We sell algorithms, turn into tests, and we want to see those tests reach doctors. So there will be a long and hopefully fun journey learning how to make sure that we navigate both the regulatory and reimbursement landscapes with our partners to make sure that our algorithms help patients directly. And then there's the company side of things. We're going to go out and raise more money to do the things I just mentioned, to grow the business and grow the tech, to reach more markets and more people. And I can't wait to see how the team matures, the existing team, and what it looks like as we grow in our next phases. It was kind of mind-boggling. We increased headcount 50% after our Series A. And every single person we brought on was a spot-on match for the culture and the values. That's not to say they're all the same. Quite the contrary. But every single person we hired has been a huge value-add, way more than the sum of his or her parts. And I just want to keep doing that.

Jon - 00:31:04: I'm so pumped for you guys. There's like, and also just hearing from the earliest days of like, you know, the ups and the downs, because I think sometimes, you know, you're, you're really many years in now. And for anyone who's embarking on that journey, it's like, you will inevitably, inevitably run into these. You know, setbacks. And it really is. Refreshing to hear you talk about it so candidly and you've been incredibly generous with your time um because i've learned a lot and hearing this story is getting me fired up and figuring out ways how i can hopefully lead exceed or better um and kind of take some inspo from you guys because you guys are off to the races and it really sounds like a really exciting inflection point for the company um after you know for the broader life sciences has been we're getting kicked in the teeth and you know hopefully you don't have to get kicked in the tooth for 55 55 weeks may hopefully hope and maybe not have to fly from gaza to do that Um, and you know, in traditional closing fashion for the The The Biotech Startups Podcast, we have two closing questions. First is, would you like to give any shout outs to anyone who supported you along the way?

Rafael - 00:32:17: Yeah, it's going to be a long list. It's going to be like my Oscar acceptance speech, right? So in terms of my professional career, absolutely the first debt of gratitude is to my wife, who still has an amazing career. She's an absolute all-star rock star, is by far the smarter and more successful of the two of us, but has been incredibly generous partner and always valued what I did and what my contributions were. Even when I was Googling chief product officer, because I didn't know what my new job was for my $51,000 a year postdoc plus $1 salary. She's been an incredible rock and incredibly supportive. My uncle Christian, the cell biologist who taught me to snorkel from the earliest days, but also my parents for always being supportive and never putting pressure on. I had great teachers along the way. This is going to sound stupid, but I remember them all, right? Who encouraged me to do science, you know, from Ms. Bashimi in fifth grade to Murray Eicher and Bruce Newton in 10, 11, and 12th grades. You know, I'd been working in labs since I was 16. Someone gave me, you know, Bobby Thompson let me come into his lab in South Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina at 16, all the way through college. Leo and Steve in grad school. Nathan and Jay is my postdoc mentors. You know, Gaddy and Adam, my second postdoc mentors. You know, and the whole team at Genialis deserves a huge amount of credit, but the leadership team especially, you know, Tiasha, Luca, and Micha. You know, something about having moved around so much, right? Like I've lived in a ton of places. I haven't sat still. I haven't worked in an office place. I've been remote. You know, I've had the good fortune to amass a collection of friends, only a couple of them, but from each chapter of life. And, you know, the people who've stuck with me and shown interest and shown faith in what I was doing, you know, it means a lot. And I don't need to call them all out by name. But, you know, if we still trade text messages, have quarterly calls or once in a while check-ins, then they should know who they are. 

Jon - 00:34:12: Absolutely. And I mean, I think about my wife's support during the early days of Excedr. Same kind of situation. We're on that shoestring budget and you still need to make rent. So, you know, she was like, all right, I'm going to bring you under the wing for a moment and give you some, just a little bit of runway to get this, like to try this out. So incredibly grateful. I can, I empathize with that, that same.

Rafael - 00:34:35: I mean, my wife would come home from work, having been negotiating literally billion dollar deals or managing billion dollar budgets. And I would be sweating a $10,000 contract. And not once did she make me feel like what I was doing was small time. Right.

Jon - 00:34:50: That's an absolutely beautiful thing. And, you know, I think that's another thing that doesn't get spoken about enough is if you have a significant other, like the entrepreneurial journey does involve them. Like.

Rafael - 00:35:02: It's my first bit of advice to budding entrepreneurs is marry well.

Jon - 00:35:06: Yeah.

Rafael - 00:35:07: You don't have to marry someone who, you know, it doesn't have to be economical, but marry well, marry someone who's going to be supportive for you. Because, you know, as a, as an entrepreneur, you're going to spend half of your day standing on your desk, screaming about your latest little victory and the other half of your day hiding on your desk, hoping no one knows where to find you. And you want someone who's going to be there for you, whether you're, you're on top or beneath the desk. You know, I haven't mentioned my kids really at all. And, you know, I've got a 10-year-old and a 5-year-old at the time of this recording. I don't know if I have to thank them for the professional success, but they're just, you know, wonderful parts of my life. And the thing is, Genialis is my second job. My first job is my family, right? Because I work from home, because my schedule has been flexible, I've had a lot of time with the kids, especially over the years when we were traveling back and forth from Kazakhstan and so forth. And they've been great partners through all this. They've been incredibly kind and understanding when they see dad sitting at home, but I'm not available because I have to work. But also, you know, wanting to do the things that convinced me to close the laptop and, you know, skive off at 3 p.m. On a given afternoon because I want to go watch Evelyn play guitar or play piano, rather, or do BJJ. I want to go watch Javi kick a soccer ball or a skateboard at the skate park. Having a reason to leave work every day, having a really good reason to leave work every day has been a big part of the success as well.

Jon - 00:36:25: Absolutely. And shout out to your son for bearing with you on the chairlift when you had the slack blowing up.

Rafael - 00:36:32: Yeah, I owe him some more ski trips for sure.

Jon - 00:36:35: Yeah, absolutely. And the last closing question, if you could give any advice to your 21-year-old self, what would it be?

Rafael - 00:36:41: I would probably tell that person to take more risks. I know I've made this sound like I've taken a bunch of risks, but not really. I would tell that 21-year-old self to be willing to take more risks. I would maybe tell that person to also be a little more assertive, right? To have a little more confidence that, you know, you're going to go try some stuff and it's going to feel really scary, but it's probably going to work out. And it might not. And it actually doesn't matter whether it does or it doesn't. Just like really throw yourself at it. You know, I sat on the fence a lot through my 20s, trying one thing, trying the other. And it's worked out fine. But I would probably tell my 21-year-old self to take more risks and be assertive in them.

Jon - 00:37:19: And I can see my 21-year-old self needing that advice too because I definitely think I would have shortcutted a lot of... A lot of points where I was just like, kind of like lingering on things. When it just like, just like jump into it, just do it. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.

Rafael - 00:37:36: My 17 year old self, I would have told to try harder at math. 21 year old self too late for math. Just yeah. Take more risks. 

Jon - 00:37:44: Exactly. Exactly. Well, Rafael, you've been so generous with your time. This has been really, really fun. JP Morgan's coming up. If you're coming to JP Morgan, maybe we can go to shape and is and get ourselves a nice meal. But thanks again. This has been so much fun. I could keep going for hours and hours and hours.

Rafael - 00:38:02: Jon, I've had a blast. I appreciate it.

Jon - 00:38:04: Yeah. Well, thanks again. And hopefully I'll see you again soon.

Rafael - 00:38:06: I hope so.

Outro - 00:38:09: That's all for this episode of the The Biotech Startups Podcast. We hope you enjoyed our four-part series with Rafael Rosengarten. Be sure to tune into our next series featuring Jason Foster, CEO and Executive Director of Ori Biotech. Ori is revolutionising cell and gene therapy manufacturing through the development of its proprietary platform, Iroh. By automating and standardising cell and gene therapy manufacturing, Ori and Iroh offer scientists the tools they need to streamline development and support widespread patient access to life-changing treatments. Jason's experience prior to Ori includes more than 20 years of life science leadership in operations, sales, marketing, technology and investing, during which he developed deep expertise in commercial strategy and a thorough understanding of healthcare markets across the UK, US and EU. Throughout his career, he has helped build organisations that improve patient outcomes while delivering exceptional value for investors, like Indovir, where he played a pivotal role in its 2.3 billion public listing in 2014. Jason's wealth of experience offers invaluable insights for scientists, first-time founders and industry experts alike, making this series one you won't want to miss. 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, https://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.