From Expat Kid to Founder: Science, Curiosity & the Long Road to Conviction | Alex Telford (1/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: 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. Our guest today is Alex Telford, cofounder and CEO of Convoke, a South San Francisco-based company building the AI-native operating system for biopharma, a unified platform that codifies decision logic, connects internal and external data, and generates critical deliverables across the entire drug development life cycle. Before founding Convoke in 2024, Alex spent nearly a decade in life sciences strategy consulting, rising to associate principal while advising biopharma companies on development strategy, regulatory planning, and competitive intelligence, and writing prolifically along the way about where the industry was going wrong and what it would take to fix it. At Convoke, Alex is building purpose-built software that replaces the fragmented, document-heavy workflows slowing down drug development with an AI-powered system that lets teams move faster and make better decisions with the knowledge they already have.

With $8,600,000 in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins and Dimension Capital and a founding thesis that the biggest bottleneck in drug development isn't science, but the operating infrastructure around it, Alex's journey from expat kid reading New Scientist in Switzerland to biochemist at Bristol to consultant-turned-founder demonstrates what it looks like when someone spends years diagnosing an industry's deepest inefficiencies then decides to be the one to fix them, making this a conversation you won't want to miss. Over the next four episodes, Alex shares how growing up across Europe shaped his instinct to follow curiosity over convention. He traces his path from an accidental choice of biochemistry at Bristol through a synthetic biology master's at UCL that overpromised and underdelivered to a consulting career that began mid-acquisition at Lucerne through seven years of consequential biopharma strategy work, then a cold turkey departure, a period of building and writing in public, and the cofounder connection and seed funding that coalesced around a single conviction: that drug development's biggest bottleneck has never been the science.

Today, we'll hear about Alex's upbringing, raised across Switzerland, Germany, and Spain as his father's career at Dow Chemical moved the family through Europe, and how growing up in international school expat communities where friendships appeared and vanished with each relocation gave him a comfort with impermanence that would later translate into a willingness to leave stability behind and build something new. We'll hear about how a childhood subscription to New Scientist and National Geographic planted a deep curiosity about biology and chemistry and how a few well-timed high school teachers guided him towards biochemistry at Bristol where he picked his schools on entirely personal and geographic grounds, got into Oxford and chose Bristol anyway. Lastly, we'll hear about how an email blast from UCL pulled Alex into a synthetic biology master's that proved more overhyped than transformative, introducing him to the gap between big ideas and practical implementation in biology systems, and why that disillusionment sent him looking for a way to stay close to the science without staying at the bench. Without further-ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Alex Telford.

Jon Chee - 00:04:30: Alex, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Alex Telford - 00:04:32: Yeah. Good to be here.

Jon Chee - 00:04:34: I know we've been kind of had this on the calendar for a really long time. Really been looking forward to it, and it's finally great to get you in the booth. But yeah. So, you know, in traditional podcast fashion for us, we always like to turn back the hands of time and get back to all the way to the beginning so we can learn about what makes you tick, what kind of inspired you to pursue business and science. So take us all the way back. What was baby Alex like?

Alex Telford - 00:04:53: I always had an interest in science. So I remember that I would, you know, subscribe to, like, New Scientist magazine or get my parents to subscribe to New Scientist. So I would always read that religiously whenever it came out and subscribe to National Geographic. So maybe that's, like, my earliest memory of how I got interested in science is just having all these different science magazines and reading them every week or every other week when I got them and just being interested in big questions about the world and how does the world work and what's the nature of reality and those sorts of things.

So naturally I always assumed that I was going to go into science. And I think I liked biology, and I liked chemistry, and I liked physics and all the big questions. And I didn't have an inclination one way or the other necessarily until maybe middle school where I really started to get more interested in biology and chemistry and the questions of what is life and how does life work as they seem like the deepest ones and maybe the most intellectually satisfying ones to me at least. And I had a few good teachers in high school in biology and then chemistry. Or, I mean, really one or two in particular that made me go down that path. So I think I could have been a physicist or been a chemist or some other branch of science, but I suppose there was just a few questions that particularly interested me and a few teachers that I particularly liked that ended up guiding me down one path. And when I went to university, I ended up picking biochemistry because I couldn't decide between chemistry and biology. And at the time, it was like biochemistry is kind of both, so let's do that.

Jon Chee - 00:06:28: Just smash it together.

Alex Telford - 00:06:30: Yeah. Yeah. And in the UK, you have to pick. Right? So you can't do everything like you can in the US and decide later. You have to pick when you apply.

Jon Chee - 00:06:37: Were your parents both scientists?

Alex Telford - 00:06:39: No. My dad was—he was an executive at chemical company, Dow Chemical. And he did chemical engineering, but I wouldn't describe him as a scientist or being particularly science-minded in any way. And my mom, I mean, she did, like, social policy. So she was interested in humanities and, like, questions of social justice and stuff and not in science at all. No one of my family was an academic or a scientist. I had no reason to be particularly interested in it from an upbringing perspective. It was just something that, I guess, I naturally gravitated towards, and my parents said, "Oh, well, you like this, so we'll get you all these books and things," and I'd do my own reading.

Jon Chee - 00:07:13: Did you grow up in the UK, like, all the way through, like, high school and through university, or were you moving around?

Alex Telford - 00:07:19: We moved around. I mostly—so moved from the UK when I was quite young and then to Switzerland and then to Germany and then back to Switzerland, then spent some time in the UK around university and after university, and then a bit of time in Spain as well.

Jon Chee - 00:07:33: Wow. Was it a work related thing where, like, what kind of was the catalyst for being so mobile?

Alex Telford - 00:07:38: The headquarters of Dow—the European headquarters were in Switzerland, and my dad was working in the UK office. He got an opportunity to move to Switzerland. That's what relocated the family. I had no say in the matter. I was a baby.

Jon Chee - 00:07:50: Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Telford - 00:07:51: Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:07:53: Yeah. And I'm sure as a kid that, like, how was that? For context, I haven't left the Bay Area, like, ever. I was born in Berkeley, went through the Unified School District all the way through university, and then I moved to San Francisco because I'm so adventurous. How was your experience growing up having to learn different cultures? I'm sure friend groups and interests all kind of were very different, I'm imagining, in each place you live.

Alex Telford - 00:08:20: I mean, it's hard to know the counterfactual because I don't know what it's like to live in one place where you're rooted and you have an identity tied to your location in, like, a patriotic kind of way or even just feeling that you have a lot of heritage in one place. I've always lived in, I suppose, an expat community. So I went to international school. And every few years I would move or my friends would move away. So you're very used to being in a place for a short amount of time and then establishing some friendships with those friends just disappearing one day or one year because the parents move, and it's like, "Oh, your best friend is gone now. You have to make new friends."

So that's just been the default state that I grew up in, and it's just—that's normal to me. So I suppose you're not grounded to a place in the way that you might be if I had grown up in some particular village in the UK or Switzerland and stayed there my whole life. But on the other side, I have friends all over the world, and I'm comfortable moving to a new place and reestablishing a friend group. And it's hard to know what it would've been like otherwise. I don't know. That's just my life.

Jon Chee - 00:09:22: Yeah. For sure. And, like, I'm always curious because I just do wonder, like, damn, should I get out of the Bay Area and see the world a little bit more?

Alex Telford - 00:09:30: I was like, before we hit record...

Jon Chee - 00:09:31: I was just like, yeah, trying to make it a point to go to Japan every year. And before we record, you mentioned that you just come back from a trip for work, and I'm just, like, jealous.

Alex Telford - 00:09:41: For what it's worth, I have traveled around a lot, lived in a bunch of countries, and I've chosen to live in the Bay Area now. So it is definitely up there. It's hard to beat in many respects.

Jon Chee - 00:09:51: That's what I'm saying. Like, when all the doom and gloom was going on, I was like, what are you guys talking about? The Bay Area is rad.

Alex Telford - 00:09:58: Yeah. It's pretty good. I mean, obviously, it has its flaws like any place, but overall, it's pretty great. You know, great climate, great geography, great people.

Jon Chee - 00:10:06: And great food. It's like hard to beat.

Alex Telford - 00:10:08: Pretty good food. Yeah.

Jon Chee - 00:10:08: Yep. And so it sounds like in high school, you had a vast amount of interest in the sciences. And then talk about a little bit about choosing university. Did you have your eyes just set on one school? Did you spray and pray? Kind of what were you thinking?

Alex Telford - 00:10:25: I don't really think much about it. I was very lazy when it came to that kind of thing. I hadn't been growing up in the UK, so I wasn't very familiar with the UK system. And I did the International Baccalaureate program, which is probably not very familiar to a US audience, but it's this European high school diploma program where you do a bunch of different study subjects. And I did it because it seemed interesting to cover this wide range of subjects, but it wasn't very well recognized abroad and in the UK. So when I came to picking universities, I didn't really know anything about the system. I didn't know how to apply particularly.

My parents kind of knew, but they were the first in the family to go to university—or like one of the first in the family to go to university. And they weren't like deeply knowledgeable about the academic system in a sense of what universities might be good or not good; it was very high level. And the counselors that we had access to in my school in Switzerland had very little idea about how the UK system works and which universities would be good for someone who liked biology and chemistry. So I just basically picked on these completely arbitrary factors where you can apply to five universities in the UK. And I was like, I know I wanna go to the UK because that's originally where I'm from, but I wanna spend some more time there. So it seems like, you know, that was my driving reason to go to the UK over, like, America. I suppose America is very expensive. I don't like staying in Switzerland.

So I applied to five universities and, like, one of them was—applied to Oxford. Sorry. You can only apply to one because we had a family friend who was in a particular college there. And in Oxford, you applied to colleges. And I had no idea about the different colleges. I just said, "Okay. Well, I know someone at this college, so I'll apply to this particular college." And I won't pick which college to go to. And between Oxford and Cambridge, it's completely arbitrary. It's just like, "I know someone at Oxford, so I applied to Oxford." And then I applied to Bristol because my mom had a family friend in Bristol and they had a decent program. And then I applied to York because my grandmother lived in York. And then I applied to Bath because Bath is pretty and near Bristol. And then Durham because my other grandma was in Durham. So it's just completely random. And I didn't wanna apply to the London University because I didn't like the idea of living in London at the time. So that was literally my criteria. It's like, where do I know someone, and are they reasonably good universities? So Bristol was my second choice, so I ended up getting into that one. I did get into Oxford. I still went to Bristol.

Jon Chee - 00:12:40: Cool. I love that. Yeah. For me, my picking was also kind of a matter of convenience. I was just like, "Well, I can just apply to the UC system and just one application." I just checked the box. I was like, "I'll go ahead and check the boxes," because I'm not trying to do all those other applications.

Alex Telford - 00:12:57: Yeah. And I'm generally not a big optimizer for many things. I'm kinda like a satisficer in a lot of respects. And for school, I was just like, "Okay, well, I assume all these universities are roughly the same," which, you know, maybe that was the wrong decision. I don't know. But that was like myself at the time. All these things are roughly the same. You're probably gonna do fine if you go to any decently good university. So I'm not gonna expend much effort to optimize my academics so I find the perfect university match for me or whatever, which maybe I should have done. Yeah. Generally, I'm kinda lazy about academics and academic box-ticking and just box-ticking in general.

Jon Chee - 00:13:34: Yeah. I feel like sometimes with entrepreneurs, it's just like when it comes to these systems, you'll kinda see that same approach. So when you got to university, obviously, you mentioned you focus on biochemistry. Did you have a wet lab experience? Like, was there anyone that in particular took you under their wing when you got there?

Alex Telford - 00:13:53: So they do have labs at university. From the first year, you do chemistry labs and then you do life science labs. So the chemistry lab will be synthesis or something or trying to figure out the melting point of a chemical. And the life science labs would be plating and growing bacteria and maybe doing PCR or something. So I had no experience going in. I had no real lab exposure. Like, yeah, you'd done some stuff in high school, some basic chemistry experiments like titration or whatever, but I had no deep lab experience. I wouldn't say someone took me under the wing. It was only really in the third year where you do an actual project. And I worked in this lab where we were trying to kind of understand—or that the lab was trying to understand—the structure and function of proteins in the membranes of red blood cells.

And I just basically did Western blots all day for three months. It was kind of fun, I guess, when, you know, it takes multiple days to do a blot. And at the end, you don't really know if it worked until the end because you have to go through all these stupid approaches. At the end, it's like you get some results. And if you have a nice Western blot, then it's great. You feel great. But if it fails, it's like, well, I don't really know where—it's hard to debug it. You don't know where it failed in the process. You don't quite know what you did wrong. Sometimes it fails for arbitrary reasons. There's a satisfaction of generating data, I think. But overall, the process felt a bit slow and not that interesting and not that applied. So I didn't love my lab experience, but I didn't hate it either. It was just fine. I got pretty good at Western blot, though. So it was some satisfaction in the mastery of it. But, yeah, I mean, I would just say overall, it was fine. I didn't really have a great experience or a terrible experience either way.

Jon Chee - 00:15:28: Yeah. No. I mean, the undergraduate lab experience is, for me, it was just mostly pipetting. And I'm just like, cell line culture—basically, just managing the cell lines.

Alex Telford - 00:15:37: Yeah. It's just pipetting into these gels and then running out the gels and then you're exposing them. And you just do that again and again. And you're just generating data for the PhD students and the PIs, and it's fine. I mean, I think I'm generally the kind of person who's broadly interested in many things. Like, when I do like to go deep, I'll go deep for a few weeks, then I wanna do something else. And the idea of spending thirty years understanding the function of one of, like, the band 3 protein or whatever it was in red blood cells is not that interesting to me.

Jon Chee - 00:16:08: Yeah. But I guess, like, how did that translate to you wanting to pursue your master's? Like, isn't that a deeper exploration?

Alex Telford - 00:16:16: Well, I like science fiction. And the reason why I picked that master's I did—which was synthetic biology at UCL—was again, a very arbitrary logic where it's like, "I like science fiction. Synthetic biology is cool. I like the idea of being able to make cells or biological robots or something. Isn't it cool if you could apply this technology to engineer useful things in the world?" And then I got this email from UCL, like, "Hey. We have this synthetic Bio master's. You should apply." I was like, "Oh, yeah. Well, maybe I should apply."

Jon Chee - 00:16:45: Oh, it was just like an email blast.

Alex Telford - 00:16:47: Yeah. Even just an email blast, it was just like, "Yeah. Come check us out." I was looking for something to do after, and I wasn't enamored by any of the immediate options I found in front of me. So it's just like, "Hey. Well, this seems cool."

Jon Chee - 00:17:01: It's usually the other way around. Right? It's usually you're sending the cold email, but then it was UCL—they're now, like, hitting you up.

Alex Telford - 00:17:09: They just probably sent it to everyone and the decent university who was doing a good biochem or something. I did a synthetic biology elective in university, and I ended up really liking it because, you know, I like big ideas. And the synthetic biology has a lot of big ideas, like artificial cells and artificial robots. And can you reengineer the chemical supply chain so they use microbial fermentation rather than chemical synthesis? It's all very exciting stuff. So that's what made me, I guess, excited to do a master's in it.

Jon Chee - 00:17:38: Did it live up to everything that you granted to be when you got there?

Alex Telford - 00:17:43: I didn't like it. I didn't like it very much, actually. Oh, no. I think synthetic biology is very much overpromise and underdeliver as a field. Maybe now there's some interesting stuff happening.

Jon Chee - 00:17:54: I am curious. Unpack that.

Alex Telford - 00:17:56: Well, you know, you get it and there's all these cool ideas about stuff you could potentially do in the future. But actually, the real implementations of it are things like these genetic logic circuits where you can get a microbe to express one protein under some circumstances that'll then flip and express another one. So it's just like a toggle switch. So you have a lot of these arbitrary constructs where you can toggle or switch expression of different proteins. And maybe in the future, that's useful. You know, I can make biosensors or something like that. But the practical limitations are huge.

These circuits will not be long-lasting. They'll mutate. They don't last too many divisions. They're not robust to environmental or genetic fluctuations. So it's not like a real engineered system. The living systems are ultimately difficult to control, and they have some reversion to optimized states. So it's hard to actually engineer them because they're always trying to fight against you in some way. There's always this entropy. So it ended up just being a toy. So you're just making toys. And I was more interested in—like, what can you make in the real world that is useful to people and not, can I make these cute toys? So that's what ultimately, I guess, soured me a little bit on it.

And then, you know, you have the classic grad school experience of a lab where the PI is always writing grants, and the PhDs are kind of depressed. It just wasn't—you know, if you grew up reading sci-fi and you grew up reading these accounts of, "Oh, what was it like to work in the LMB in the fifties?" or something, you're like, "Oh, wow. It sounds so cool and stimulating." But then you get there and it's like, "Oh, you're doing PCRs for the next thirty days, and you're just pipetting things." And, "Oh, it doesn't work. And by the way, if it did work, it wouldn't even be that useful. Like, maybe you get some paper that no one reads," you know. So, yeah, like, what's the point of this?

Jon Chee - 00:19:43: Yeah. And I can empathize with that frustration because when you talk about debugging this thing, you're just like, there are so many things that could have gone wrong up to this point.

Alex Telford - 00:19:52: Yeah. We don't understand biology. Right? It's so complex that it's not engineerable, really, in any useful way. I mean, I guess you can say, okay, CAR-T cells or whatever are synthetic biology. And that's probably—I buy that statement, but most of the really cool ideas just aren't actually practical in any way.

Outro - 00:20:11: That's all for this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Alex Telford. Join us next time for part two where Alex recounts discovering consulting almost by accident through a family friend, landing at a boutique firm in Lucerne only to find himself in the middle of an acquisition two weeks in, and how that small Swiss satellite office operating with unusual autonomy inside a larger company gave him seven years of substantive biopharma strategy work and the early conviction that what clients actually need isn't more information, but a clear opinion they can react to.

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