How to Build a Startup When Everything is Against You | Andrey Doronichev (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 Andrey Doronichev, Founder and CEO at OPTIC, an AI-powered drug discovery platform for rapid molecule screening and testing. OPTIC is building a complete agentic AI platform for biopharma—a system that not only generates outputs but also plans, reasons, and even writes its own code to pursue drug development goals. A veteran of the tech industry, Andrey previously served as Head of Mobile at YouTube, Director of Product at Stadia, and Director of Product for Google AR/VR. He's also a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded multiple ventures across sectors, from virtual reality to community building. With a track record of leading groundbreaking products at the intersection of technology and user experience, Andrey now applies his experience to revolutionizing biotech with AI, making this a conversation you won't want to miss. Over the next four episodes, Andrey shares how his path took him from post-Soviet Russia to the forefront of AI drug discovery, driven by a love of technology, a bias for action, and a desire to build what matters. He reflects on key moments along the way, from launching a mobile startup in Moscow to scaling YouTube for billions of users, and how those experiences shaped his approach to leadership and innovation. Andrey also talks about the realities of startup life, how his team made a bold pivot into biotech, what it takes to build a platform from scratch, and why conviction and clarity matter most when you're building at the edge. Today, we'll hear about Andrey's childhood in the Soviet Union, the upheaval that followed its collapse, and how growing up amid chaos and scarcity shaped his tolerance for uncertainty and change. He shares stories of waiting in bread lines at 5 AM, secretly watching smuggled American movies, and discovering computers and programming as both a lifeline and a way out. We also look at how those early experiences sparked his drive to build, revealed a natural talent for math and coding, and led him to choose software over science as his starting point. Without further ado, let's dive into part one of our conversation with Andrey Doronichev.

Jon Chee - 00:03:00: Andrey, so good to see you again. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:03:03: Hi, Jon. Thanks for having me.

Jon Chee - 00:03:05: I've been really looking forward to this conversation, and I'm glad we finally were able to triangulate the overlap on the calendar. I know you're a busy guy. But as we're doing our homework, we're really looking forward to diving into the earliest days of your adolescence and journey because we think a lot of those formative years kind of shape one's leadership style and business philosophy that they carry with them to the current day. So if you could take us all the way back, what was young Andrey like? Tell us about that.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:03:33: That's where my imposter syndrome kicks in because I have a very different story from many successful life scientists out there. I am not a life scientist myself. I did not go to a fancy American school. I'm an immigrant, and I actually grew up in the Soviet Union. Well, at least part of my childhood was spent there. It was a weird time and a weird place to grow up in. So I was actually a part of a really smart, science-oriented family—you know, physics and computer science. My parents worked in research organizations, working on modeling rocket engines and solving all sorts of complicated tasks. And back then, computers were just at the very beginning of the new era of computational everything. And so they were working at the forefront of, back then, Soviet computer science. So that certainly influenced a lot of who I am and what I work on. But also just the environment where I grew up, I think, really screwed my brain in a certain way.

Jon Chee - 00:04:41: Yeah. As it does.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:04:43: Because not so many people have a birthplace in their passport that doesn't exist anymore. So, literally, I have USSR as my place of birth, and it's a country that does not exist. And, you know, maybe it's actually good that it doesn't.

Jon Chee - 00:04:58: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:04:59: But it is a really special thing to go through something as massive of a change as a country disappearing underneath your feet and the world as you know it changing dramatically. And that happened to me when I was nine. You know? You live in a certain world, good or bad. It was set up in certain ways, and it was like this for your parents and their parents. And then suddenly, everything you knew about the world is found to be wrong, or it doesn't exist anymore, and there's a completely new world coming in, and you have to adapt. And my parents were kind of quite successful people, right? Software engineer. My mom's a software engineer leading a team at a research university, having access to computers and bringing all those punch cards home and working on them in the evening. And suddenly, due to hyperinflation, her salary equals, like, $20 a month. Wow. And suddenly, our family is really struggling, and we're not in some kind of successful—I don't wanna use the word elite—but some sort of intellectual circle. We're suddenly like a family struggling to buy food. And I remember times when they would wake me up at 5 AM, and I'm, like, six. And we would go in the blistering cold to this corner store to queue up for bread and butter—literally bread and butter. And they give us this piece of paper with a number of your queue number, and we're, like, 2,000-something. So it's 5 AM. The shop will open at nine, and we have to stay out there. Because if you leave the queue, you lose your place, and you wait for, like, four hours outside in winter in Moscow to buy some butter, literally. So those kinds of things, it's a massive change. Right?

Jon Chee - 00:06:49: Yeah. Massive.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:06:50: And I think people who choose entrepreneurship as their profession, as their way of life, they're all a little bit crazy. Right? Like, why would you pick this path? This is a path of uncertainty. And I feel like this early exposure to dramatic changes is something that either breaks you and you really, really avoid dealing with uncertainty, or you actually create some sort of immunity, and you're okay with living in a world where everything can change or everything can end any moment, or you might be completely wrong. Like, all your beliefs might be found completely wrong overnight. I feel like I got a vaccine early on. And so, this dramatic change where you go from, "Oh, we're a well-set-up intellectual family with parents at these really good jobs and doing some really smart things, and I will go to school, and I will go to a university, and I will be a scientist." And suddenly, we're struggling to survive. We need to learn how to grow our own potatoes, quite literally.

Jon Chee - 00:07:49: Wow.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:07:51: And we never had any exposure to farming or whatnot. And that was my first early-on exposure to biology. It was like, okay. We need to figure out how to grow crops because, in winter, we need to eat something. And we all go to this plot of land that my parents got from the government for that reason to grow potatoes so that we can feed ourselves. Right? And we learn how to do this.

Jon Chee - 00:08:19: It was quite a crazy change.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:08:20: So that's one thing. And that's the exposure to change and, I think if I were to boil it down to one word, chaos. The chaos of the fall of the Soviet Union and the early days of Russia impacted me a lot as a kid. Dictatorship, right? It was an autocracy or whatever, but it wasn't a free country. It was an extremely harsh place with the government trying to control everything in all sorts of screwed-up ways. And more specifically, what hit me as a kid was that they were controlling access to information, and I just couldn't stand that. I couldn't understand why I can and cannot read some books and not others. My parents were always in the circles of Intelligentsia who were getting some illegal stuff that for some reason was illegal, like Pasternak. You know? Doctor Zhivago was illegal. Right? All sorts of stuff like that. It's like they would get access to those books or those, later on, films on VHS videotapes. And just owning those things could get our family in trouble and could get us arrested. And I remember that episode as a kid where I was seven. I loved American movies that were smuggled into the Soviet Union, and we had a Rambo tape with Rambo II and III. And, apparently, it was considered some sort of extremist material by the Soviet government. And I didn't know this, of course. I was a seven-year-old kid. Right? So I invited a couple of buddies from my school, and we were watching Rambo. And then my mom walks in, and I see on her face that she's about to faint. Like, she's becoming super pale, super scared. She stops the tape. "What have you done? Your friends will tell their parents. They will call the KGB on us or the police on us. I'm going to jail for this."

Jon Chee - 00:10:18: Wow. And, you know, observing this...

Andrey Doronichev - 00:10:21: You could imagine, like, Rambo. Okay, that's a probably not an age-appropriate movie, but not the one you should go to jail for.

Jon Chee - 00:10:29: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:10:30: And to me, that was a really scary, traumatic moment where I learned that just accessing information, just watching or reading something, can be as dangerous as losing your parent, and they could go to jail for it. Right? So I think that was another thing that really, in a certain way, messed with my head. And so as I was reflecting on things that seriously impacted the way I built my career and where I went, those two things—the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around you that challenges all the beliefs and breaks all the things you are used to, and two, is that idea that information is not free. Access to information is restricted and actually scary and risky. Those two things, you know, impacted my choices later on in my career.

Jon Chee - 00:11:18: I can imagine it had a massive impact. And I think what really stood out to me, and something I think about, is when you feel this kind of tectonic shift underneath you when you go from just—there's these externalities that are beyond your control, and then you have a new hand of cards that look completely different. And something about the startup journey or just entrepreneurship, that experience fuels resilience. Because you're like, "I had to learn agriculture to put food on the table."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:11:50: That's right.

Jon Chee - 00:11:51: I literally went back to the actual bare necessities of survival. What a startup challenge. What is a startup challenge? I'm trying to put food on the table for the family. Right?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:12:04: That's right.

Jon Chee - 00:12:04: You understand what true hardship is, so it kind of contextualizes—not to diminish startup challenges because startup challenges can be incredibly stressful. There's a lot on the line. But if you're like, "I've gone through and survived something as traumatic as this chaotic kind of uncertainty," you're like, "We can get through this." Whatever this is that you're in front of you, we can get through this.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:12:28: Yeah. You know, this is what was going through my head just recently. I'm sure some of the listeners experienced that too because it was a shared trauma of many startups just a couple of years ago when Silicon Valley Bank went down. Right? And that was the moment where I relived some of those memories from my childhood where, you know, we just raised a round. We have $10,000,000 on our account in a very, very, very respected Silicon Valley bank. And then the next morning, I cannot sign in, and I learned that the bank is under. And that it is likely that our account is insured for $250k, and the rest of $9,750,000 are gone. Insane. Alright? And that feeling, I was calling so many friends and VCs, and, you know, most of them had their money there. And the reactions were very different. So, in a way, I felt like I had this resilience built in me where I was like, "Okay. So, how much runway do we have with the rest of the cash? How much of my team can I afford to pay? What do we do? What is the next step for today, for next week, and for this next month to survive?" Right? So that way of thinking really, really is something that you acquire through those sorts of life hardships, and I'm grateful for that.

Jon Chee - 00:13:51: For sure. And it's not to say, "I want to relive that again."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:13:57: No. Not recommended.

Jon Chee - 00:13:59: Thank you very much. Great experience.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:14:00: Do not recommend anyone to go through this.

Jon Chee - 00:14:02: That's exactly it. "Please, I don't want to, but I'm glad that I had that experience. I can kind of carry it forward and, you know, handle it better if it were to come up." God, please, let's not have another one of those moments. So I totally get it because I think, you know, from the early days of Excedr, we had to be incredibly scrappy because we're not venture-backed. So in the earliest days, you had to bring in paying customers. And when you have just one customer in the very beginning, it's hard to pay a lot of bills. So you kinda have to figure it out. Right? And those early years, again, don't wanna go back there, but are formative. I was like, "Okay. This was, like, shoestring. Can I live on this shoestring?" And I was like, "I proved to myself, yes. I can survive on a shoestring. I can do it."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:14:58: It's liberating in a way, right? Knowing that is liberating.

Jon Chee - 00:15:01: It makes you really question, like, what do you actually need as a person?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:15:05: That's right.

Jon Chee - 00:15:05: Like, what do you actually need? And then from there, the frame of mind is, "It's only up from here."

Andrey Doronichev - 00:15:11: "It's only up." That's a good...

Jon Chee - 00:15:13: That is liberating in a way.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:15:14: And I have a huge respect for entrepreneurs who bootstrap their companies. This was my first experience. And as we get to it, I'll tell you the story of how we started the first company. But, yeah, it was also zero investments, just like we put our salaries on the table for a month. And we're like, "Okay. If this is enough to start a company, we're good. If not, well, we go find another job."

Jon Chee - 00:15:36: Yeah. Exactly. That's like most businesses. Honestly, it's like being in the Bay Area, you're kind of in this distortion field where it almost makes you think that a company can only be formed or financed a certain way. But, like, most businesses in the world are exactly that. You just have to bring in the dough so you can pay your bills.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:15:58: Exactly. But this is where bootstrapping a business in the bio field, in life sciences, is dramatically more respectable than me doing the same thing in software. Because one thing I learned from my transition from pure tech to life science tech bio is how much more capital-intensive this business is and how different the power dynamic is between entrepreneur and investor. And given that, first of all, what Excedr is doing is a great model, I believe, for the ecosystem in general, so thank you for that. But, also, frankly, I didn't know that you guys bootstrapped, and it is incredibly cool.

Jon Chee - 00:16:43: Thank you. I thought this was a venture-backable business in the early days, by the way.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:16:48: They're not...

Jon Chee - 00:16:49: At Berkeley, I went through the early days when Berkeley was just starting to embrace entrepreneurship. Before then, it was incredibly like, "Keep startups away from us. We're pure academics." But then I was going through it, and I was learning about it, and I was like, "I think this could be a venture-backable business." And then they're like, "You mean you have to put a crap ton of money into the business continuously?" No. For me to bring on a software company, I learned a lot. So it's not because I—it's more like I just didn't realize and was unable to do it. So I was like, "I guess I just have to do it this way." That was the reality.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:17:33: Well, ignorance is bliss when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Jon Chee - 00:17:34: In a way.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:17:36: This is the same for me, doing what I'm doing right now. As many entrepreneurs will say, "You know, if I knew how hard it was, I wouldn't have started." Right? So in many cases, it's actually just good to make a leap of faith and start something and then find out that, oh, actually, there is no investment behind it or...

Jon Chee - 00:17:55: Oh, actually, it's super hard. Yeah. Exactly. No one would do anything. We would just—no company would get started. So now, you've undergone this tectonic shift. As you're growing up, obviously, your parents came from academia. What was the academic system like in a post-Soviet world? Was this a thing where the schools that you would have gone to were no longer there? What was your kind of education journey, or how did that shift?

Andrey Doronichev - 00:18:22: Yeah. So this is another important thing that I think makes me different and, in a way, fuels my imposter syndrome, is that in the nineties in Russia, suddenly, the prestige of academia went dramatically down. And, basically, those were poor people suddenly. Right? Just like my parents. The cool guys were those who were selling stuff, you know, starting a retail business. Suddenly, everything went upside down. People who were considered elites in the previous way society was set up suddenly became the poorest and the least respected people. And suddenly, frankly, the scum, right? In many cases, the mafia, bandits. Right? Everyone knows about these crazy times in the nineties in Russia where the angriest, the most violent, the most illegal people, not respecting the law, suddenly became the most powerful and the richest and got the highest status in the society. It was a weird time for a teenager to look at the world because, you know, basically, you're trying to understand where you stand, how you wanna be. And I had those two things struggling within me where I realized two things. One, I don't want to be poor. I cannot be like this struggling academia professor or whatever who is just doing things for ideological reasons. And I'm not that person. I'm sorry. I need the comforts of life, and I need to feel successful. At the same time, I realized that I cannot be successful in the way success is defined in the country where I'm currently living. So it's like, in order to be successful, you have to break the law. You have to be violent or whatever. You have to be corrupt. I cannot do that either. So for me, it was a really hard struggle, especially as a teenager, where I'm like, "I'm not sure what to do." And that's when the Internet saved the day. It suddenly gave a third path for me and then people like me. I'm sure there are more stories. I've heard similar kinds of stories from people of my age who ended up in tech and ended up successful in tech. Because I got lucky in a way. Right? Like, I got exposure to computers at the age of six or seven when my mom would take me to work, and I would sit in front of the terminal screen of one of those older computers, mainframe terminals. And I remember inventing a game where, in a text editor, I would just move the cursor, and I would put random symbols, and I would try to hop over them with the cursor. Obviously, that was a weird game.

Jon Chee - 00:20:52: Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:20:53: I was fascinated by those monitors and computers. And by the age of seven, I actually, again, was lucky enough to get one of those early home computers with a cassette tape for a storage medium. It wasn't a ZX Spectrum, as you know, for many people. It was a more niche computer called an Enterprise 128 for 128 kilobytes of RAM. And it had BASIC built-in, and you could write a program and run it, and then you could save it on a tape, on a regular audio recording tape. And so that was the first exposure to programming for me because my mom taught me how to write BASIC. And because it didn't have any games, she would buy me smuggled magazines with lines of code written in it where if you could retype this code into your computer, it might actually run. So my first game was actually a snake that I typed up—a couple thousand, I don't remember how many lines of code, but a lot of lines of code for a kid to type. And then as I typed it up, weeks later, it actually ran, and I could play a real game on my computer. And that felt really great because I created it, and it was alive. And so that first exposure early on to computers and programming was, of course, a blessing. Because by the age of 15, as I started high school, I was really good with computers compared to the vast majority of people around me—good enough to actually make money. So my first job was going into random people's homes or offices and setting up their Windows PCs and setting up their drivers and, you know, just making their computer stuff work. And I could charge $50 per customer as a 14-year-old kid. That was my first gig like this. And just for comparison, every teacher in my school who was teaching, like, nine to six, and really smart and really dedicated people were making a $200 a month salary. Right? So I was making $50 for several hours of computer setup work. And that gave me this new path, which is you don't have to be a struggling academic and work on stuff you love but be really unsuccessful. You don't have to be an asshole working on some horrible stuff that you hate but making a lot of money. There's this path in the middle where you could be working with computers, and you're paid a lot, and there's a lot of opportunity there. And that really set me up on this path. And so that's why, for high school, I actually picked one of the very few extremely computer science-focused special schools, and it was called a lyceum. It was basically like a charter school, I guess, in our terms, which was set up in a certain way. It had a very special curriculum, way more equipment, a computer class, and they were super serious about math and computer science. And so for me, that was the first and, in fact, probably the most important step in my education was that school because it suddenly put me in a group of like-minded kids rather than, you know, your average slice of Muscovite kids at the time who were all as confused as I explained. Like, you know, "What should we do? Should we be gangsters?" Or "How do we live our life?" into this very isolated group. The next time I felt this way was when I joined Google in 2007. It's an isolated group of extremely smart kids who were fascinated by computers, and we all fed each other's curiosity. And we basically normalized this idea that it's okay to be a nerd. You have your own tribe of nerds.

Jon Chee - 00:24:38: Yeah. Absolutely. It actually can be cool being a nerd.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:24:42: So that was a big shift for me. And so at the end of the school, as I was graduating, just to give you an idea, my end-of-high-school project was a 3D rendering software that I wrote by hand, from scratch. Right? Before Windows, it was running on DOS. So which means I had to write drivers for the mouse and everything. But there was actually rendering stuff, shading things.

Jon Chee - 00:25:09: Whoa. That's crazy.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:25:11: Yeah. One of the teachers was, for some reason, teaching linear algebra to eighth graders. And so in the ninth grade, I participated in some science conference for talented kids where everyone was, like, at the age of 17 or 18 presenting some posters. And my poster was about some weird multiplication of matrices. But, you know, it was something silly and trivial for someone who is at a college level. But for a ninth grader, that was really weird that I would even present that. But for me, that meant that by the time I was in eleventh grade, I actually could write a shader.

Jon Chee - 00:25:50: And I could write the 3D rendering software because... Algebra is pretty important for that and now for AI.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:25:56: Right? So that was great.

Jon Chee - 00:26:02: Oh my god. That's so intense because I have friends who did math and computer science at Berkeley, and we're like, "Damn, linear algebra is hard." This is in college.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:26:14: Well, if you think it's hard... you know, for me, that was the fork in the road because simultaneously, I was pretty good at math, but simultaneously, I found that I was pretty good at chemistry. And I was sent by the school to one of those city Olympiads, competing in chemistry. But that is when it hit me, and I think it connects back to this idea that I got exposed to the complexity of chaos and change and uncertainty early on. Back then, I didn't embrace it, and I was afraid of it. And I just realized that, you know, math is where everything becomes simple. At the end, it might be very complex, but once you understand it, it boils down to an equation. And it's just that. Maybe a very long equation, but it's just that. And it's static, and it's safe, and it will not change, and it's certain. So it's kind of deterministic. It's fantastic. When you deal with even chemistry—well, chemistry is better, but when it comes to biology, it's a whole next level.

Jon Chee - 00:27:11: Right. Yeah.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:27:13: But once you get to those subjects where in a textbook, instead of equations, you have pictures drawn with some stuff flying around, that is when uncertainty and chaos hits you really, really hard. Because, no, you cannot do a strict mathematical proof of the way the cell works. No. Even for chemical reactions, you're never truly certain that the reaction that you write down in your textbook will work like that in an actual lab. And so as I was competing for those Olympiads, I realized that I just have a fundamental fear of going beyond equations. So the moment there is no equation, I feel really lost and scared, and I don't wanna do this. And so from that moment on, my choice was like, "Okay. I'm not dealing with physics, unlike my parents. I'm not dealing with chemistry or biology. I'm gonna go straight into the very clear, very safe space of ones and zeros where I can debug every line. No matter how complex, I can deal with this. I can predict it. It's very, very safe."

Jon Chee - 00:28:19: Yep. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, honestly, I've never heard it put that way, but it makes a lot of sense. And you're absolutely right. When you try to apply that to biology, every day, you're just smacked in the face. You're just like, "It worked yesterday, but now it's not working today. I did the exact same thing. What the heck is going on?"

Andrey Doronichev - 00:28:41: So now that I talk to bench scientists, wet lab people, and actually spend some time myself in a wet lab to try to synthesize things or run an assay, I have tremendous respect and admiration for the resilience of people running actual experiments. Right? Because waiting for sometimes for a year for a protein to maybe crystallize just to find out its 3D structure—this is not something I could imagine doing myself, ever.

Jon Chee - 00:29:09: It sounds torturous.

Andrey Doronichev - 00:29:10: Yeah, it really takes some guts, really. But, yeah, I didn't have those guts, and so I bailed. So you mentioned linear algebra was hard. No. It wasn't, compared to biology. It wasn't hard at all. You just needed to spend a lot of time understanding the first principles. But once you do, then it suddenly all makes sense.

Jon Chee - 00:29:30: Yeah. Totally.

Outro - 00:29:34: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups Podcast featuring Andrey Doronichev, Founder and CEO at OPTIC. Join us next time for part two of our four-part series where we'll hear how Andrey built one of Russia's first mobile content platforms, turning a wild idea into a profitable startup and discovering what success looks like when you bet on your own vision. He'll also share why he walked away from it all, how a cold email to Google opened new doors, and how those steps set him on a path that eventually led to YouTube. If you're enjoying the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. 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 the path 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 its sponsors. No reference to any product, service, or company in the podcast is an endorsement by Excedr or its guests.